Spent spirits bend; grasping grips slip.
Bent backs bear what numb nails can never mend.
Frail fingers fail; bent bones break.
Weary wrists wrench as tired tendons twist.
Cold claws clutch sore shoulders.
Rust rasps hard; battered palms pull back.
Hammered hands hang; tired tools fall still.
Feel them in my tendons
Hear them in the quiet
See them in the wind
Smell their fragrance
A constant in my life
Like a steel manacle
Arrested and limited
I must pay the price
Sins from lives past
Karmic justice served
Grow I must or else
Be trapped hereafter
So I speak the truth
I am compassionate
Eschewing victimhood
Pleasing higher beings
Joints and tendons ache
Water works partly block
Teeth; gums you forsake
In the mix, the odd rock
Nobody prepares you
Suddenly, the decline
Friends not foes, few
You want to only recline
Like yesterday's news
You are now quite stale
Worth very few views
Repeating a woeful tale
Your pals drop dead
On goes the count
Next obit to be read?
As health events mount
My skeleton was in the shop.
Fell apart like a chewed up lollipop.
All I have are globs of brains in a bowl.
And eyeballs tearing up as the dry air takes a toll.
Without a skeleton I’m not much at all.
My tendons fell out in the bathroom stall.
I need a shoulder blade for my bag to hang onto.
But muscles without bones have nothing to do.
When I went to pick up my skeleton that day.
I figured they would want their pay.
But I left my bag with my wallet behind.
And the shop owner was not very kind…
He said to pick a bone I didn’t care for.
To pay for the skeleton repairing chore.
So I walked out with most of my bones clacking.
Still I felt some lacking.
I couldn’t speak when I answered the phone.
I guess I shouldn’t have traded my hyoid bone…
Her feet crush the coarse dirt,
settling from foot to foot in approach.
Tendons flex; bones remember weather.
Wings—thin bone, taut skin—rise,
each feather catching a gale it cannot see the end of.
The body lunges.
Wings propel upward as a single draft is caught.
Legs lock into a streamlined stance,
and the body relaxes, gliding on years to come.
The dirt seems never to have existed;
storm gales he dark sea below.
Flying spray and rising mist crust her beak with salt.
Endless currents shepherd the locked wings through thick fog.
Half in repose,
sweeping the air—never too high, never too low.
She has always been this far from land, and never.
Seasons crust her wings like old weather she can’t shed.
Then the wind snaps. A warning.
Wings unfold.
A wall of petrichor and sulfur rises ahead.
Feathers shudder.
Tendons unlock. Her body loosens.
Feet strike giving soil,
legs search for footing as friction returns.
Salt gives way to soil.
The dirt is dirt again.
An iron gaff impales my tongue,
a barbed and rusted length of steel;
where putrid, swollen lungs once hung,
the black brine rots all that is left to feel.
The tempest split my ribcage wide
to anchor horror in my gut;
I drank the writhing, bloated tide,
through each raw and gangrened cut.
This quiet earth now snaps my spine,
a suffocating, heavy vice;
it crushes down this form of mine,
a maggot-eaten sacrifice.
I spew up bile and jagged bone,
my sea legs torn, a bloodied pit;
the silence screams against the stone
where flies and festered sores now sit.
The phantom deck begins to split,
my tendons tearing to match the deep;
I rip my own wet flesh to fit
this horror that I cannot keep.
I crawl through dirt, a severed head,
a corpse that vomits back the gale;
the sea-bound rot is all that’s bred
to haunt the wreckage of the sail.
This peace is acid in my veins,
a sickening and stagnant hell;
my body yearns for wracking pains
to break this suffocating spell.
The mood ring was rung.
I held it like purple-blue.
Red-orange.
And maybe green-gray.
In between, bothness.
Like hot bone broth, like tendons.
Sliced just wrong.
The mood ring on my finger.
I peck at it all day.
I’m peeled open.
The mood ring was rung like a soundless pine needle hitting the ground.
I’m a cycle like this mood ring.
Bipolar sounds like-
Eating a mood ring sandwich.
Let me pen "verses in the ash" for you
With the embers of our passion fire
Take me to "where orchids dream..."
To where clouds wear a rainbow halo
To where the Zephyr kisses the cherry blossoms
To where fairies drink honeysuckle dew
To where weeping willows laugh
To where your love finds me lost
"Trapped in your pulse", let me tap
to a slow salsa,
rhythmic and romantic just for you
"I am the asylum of your ache"
I hold you captive with my charisma
You are the shimmer of my sunlit soul
You are Aurora's aura
in my kaleidoscopic world
With crab-like tendons
you crocheted your way into my heart
You are the song of the cuckoo afar
Who brings good news through her music
I am the bright butterfly of your benevolence
The humble hummingbird sipping our love nectar
The Angelfish gliding in your ardency
You are my magnificent Muse, moving me
with your metaphors and majesty
I am the ruby ring on your finger
Reminding you of our precious promises
~ Let our love rise immortal as Phoenix
from these "verses in the ash" ~
Three months and you're gone.
We keep up to date
Make up time lost to closed windows,
Re-open doors and
Let the light in all
At once blinded and dazed.
Make up time lost to petty fights
Closed off minds that wander, sometimes,
towards each other-
Now unrequited.
Make up time in people
Like roots, expanding,
Respirating, out-with-the-old that never
really dies because water never really runs out, but circulates
Bones. Muscle Fibre. Tendons. Joints.
Talk to that small part of yourself that remembers a piece of her
A tiny thing that never fits quite right,
Made-up time that can teach only
In hindsight
The poison of idle hope.
Pitch colours and throttled laughter.
A pain in the back of your skull that you wish was something more.
Make up time in sensation
Relive the inanimate
The comfort of its permanence.
I hurt.
My adventures playing chase through my mind;
Of hiking, skydiving, mountain climbing,
Of hunting, wrestling, and things of that kind.
From the arctic and its frozen waste lands
To Southeast Asia, I have widely roamed,
Using snowshoes or hiking jungles gloamed.
I hurt.
My adventures remind me every day
Of what it has cost me to pursue them.
Of many broken bones along the way;
Of torn muscles and tendons, I’ve received
Broken collars and shattered shoulder bones.
Now I hurt and feel so all alone.
I hurt
I have days I mainly stay in my bed.
Age has crept upon me like a leopard.
It is the devourer I now dread.
People think I’m strong, but don’t understand.
Pain is payment for my adventures then,
And remind me of glories way back when.
Feels delight when a mouse comes out.
He knows what this squeaking sound is about.
You wouldn’t think this squishy little guy-
Would have a taste for meat in his eye.
A hunger for crunching bones.
For which he never atones.
So when this mouse burrows away.
There’s nothing to keep the caterpillar at bay.
So he sits outside the burrow.
As his teeth start to unfurl.
His antennae turn sharp as can be.
He’s quite strong you see.
But when the mouse doesn’t come out-
He starts to pout.
Because the mouse just let himself starve underground.
With nothing to eat around.
Maybe that’s better than an insect fate.
Which anyone would hate.
But caterpillars are small as can be.
Can crawl underground you see.
And hey, this burrow is quite wide!
The mouse carved it when he was plump inside.
But when the caterpillar reached the end.
There was a nothing to upend.
The mouse was nothing but bones and tendons now.
So the caterpillar almost took a bow.
But hey, who says a squishy guy like me can’t chew through bone?
Why would I complain and moan.
When my teeth get longer and stronger with hunger and pride.
Chomp through bone, let’s see what’s inside!
He allows himself to hover
over his own racing weight.
He recalls the ease
of running effortlessly…dopamine highs.
His toes are earth-pushing landmines,
his elastic ankles are circa 1980’s,
they detonate, they are the thrusters
for rocketing tendons.
His body is as light as his deepest breath,
an endless short-fused burst of energy
sustaining effortless flight.
Then, one night
restless legs push him across
a damp mattress
he is chasing his dog
across a fast-flowing river,
the dog, a running partner
that used to run beside him.
Halfway over fast-moving water
he weakens; begins to flail
as he falls into another eddy of time.
Quizzically, the dog looks back
and sits down to wait
for 30 years,
but he never does catch up.
youre a red apple
the outside i devour in large, juicy bites
as much as my teeth can fit with all corners stretched wide
youd think to do the same at the core
But cracking bitterness brings seeds
scratch small bites, an itch
Jaw working, bony indents stiched
I like the way my tendons flex
Palm spread to grasp that hard fruit off the wiry stem
The core delicate
Slurping juice of whats left
The carcass melts into a brown sugar debt
Back to the earth you go to be reborn again
Like a strawberry.
Seeds on the outside.
Tethered vines of trees.
In the grass.
I have to eat sometimes.
Just yummy stuff.
There’s no one there.
So I stir a little more.
Look outside the outside place.
And you’ll think of berries and shrubs too.
That could be endless.
Like socks, and tendons.
I have to eat them all.
Rancid and sweet.
Nothing but outer space.
Past that tree.
I have to grind it all up.
With strawberries, and blueberries.
Making some jam.
And growls.
Inedible jam.
We took the sludge we made.
Worth nothing.
Tossed it into space.
Like a strawberry.
Gets thrown away right off the vine.
They rang out clear on the spine of the night,
Smashing stained glass of basement churches
And disembowelling pots of truths.
Aiming at the tendons of hate from
Lone-eyed monsters,
The slugs, flaming and fertile,
And with sparks of racial rage,
Penetrate America's gloom
With a boom.
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