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Rooibos TeaBreathe deep the chai haze—

Picasso's djinn,
a muse of eggshells and grandma's lace tablecloths,
cradles the tea kettle to her chest
and abandons Latin words and names—
flotsam and jetsam dribbling
irrelevant among the little red tea leaves;
the driftwood of genus and species bumping
against the shores of the South African scrublands.

She hovers orange and indigo,
a quavering flame of dreams
and drained tea dregs—
divination with a soft-spiced voice
at the bottom of the mug,
never quite gone—

a flock of Van Gogh crows
frozen in their hayfields.
7.34mmA simple measurement
can make a man
lose himself; a blurring, no more
than a grainy smudge

a scant 7.34mm long
this rice-grain, seven weeks old
with one hundred and twenty nine
heartbeats per minute

—all this, from a mere sesame-seed of a heart
ConfessionLips met in clumsy haiku,
against each other, pressed,
the way the earth touches the sky,
soft and whimsy as the dusk.

Tongues painted passion-
          sunset colors,
          halcyon atmosphere, infused,
-upon every awaiting space offered.

Metaphors dotted the hallows of limbs and tasted like the seasons-
          a bursting and vibrant spring,
          a hot and passionate summer,
        
Desolateif you are parched tonight,
the pale of your lips cracked
with thirst for that which
will not claim you;

if you hunger -
the deep and shallow collapsing
into slivered vibrations;

if blindness rejects you, says
no, watch now.
this is the way of it;

if you are breathing the world
into cinders, inhaling each poison
on purpose, striving
toward an apocalypse
because that is chaos
we can categorize,

then you may understand.
couldn't bluei draw a picture of
tomorrow morning:

a man in a silver box sells
75 cent coffee and bad bagels.

his shirt is the kind of blue no one ever
tried to name a crayon after.
dust-plastic blue,
tried to love you
(couldn't)
blue.

and the morning is that same color,
the color of canned lightning-bugs and
unfiltered cigarettes and desire,
because that is all you
draw with couldn't blue.

i pay him 1.25 in change and purse-lint
so that a fourth-world factory can make more
silver boxes to sell more things
more stale blueberry muffins.

and he will keep gathering change
in 75 cent purse-lint increments
in the small sinking townships of
leavetakingi.
the world is brighter where
dregs of strangers' revels remain --
i keep this half-light for my own.

ii.
i'll stay until the wind sighs a scotch-and-smoke
cliché, til the Muscadet's slipped from the lip
of my wayward
hello.(i know you're there before you do.)
iii.
your night is told in
patchouli-pulse wanders; mine,
in whorls of liqueur-breath. come
close and i'll find the warp
through the weft, the trails telling tales
in synaesthesia --
Platinum Blonde's been 'round and gone.

 iv.
(-- closer, find syllables strewn
 in an exhale's wake; stolen from my throat-
 ful of careless farewells, spin and sway
O Dan Rot.Dan Rot, a man
of considerable comic timing
who came on rackety wings around the globe
in thirty days or so,
visiting once again with a night on his heels
copping feels on innocent ladies pillowed in bathtubs,

i.

i was black like night
and i was ringed in rainfall
i was so glorious

a spiraling psyche led me to one thing
and this town never could have contained me
a spinning science to my insanity

bends in the system and curves of the power lines
a beauty to plywood and splinter breaks that cannot be defined
bends in the path, a northward slide

strand you in a parking lot
i was vicious and viscous
and i was perfect

as i die
37rumbling like common thunder
 wooden chair leg staggering
   across the jarrah verandah

accompanied by the
rosemadder photosensitivity

slowly akimbo keeping
the smell of a day off
like the visible fibres of a home

exhaling
31:12N, 121:30Emy Dear i just noticed
my balcony is shaped
like wings

and the wind is billowing
the moon up, up to-night
in her dusty purple garb

and i think
no Dear i do not want
to leave here: where men

build bridges over oceans
and live inside of mountains
like river dragons

where the sun shines
not at all at noon but gleams
like an orange at sundown

where the moon walks home
surefooted to where my neck
cannot crane
Mirror ImagesI was the first person in my family, outside of my parents, to hold my sister. I had only just turned five at the time, and did not quite understand the logistics of adoption, the figurative birth of a child into a family. All I knew was that here was this small, scrunched up little thing and that she was mine to keep. I held my arms out, and she was settled in them, her pink newborn face wrinkling as she was jostled. My sister, in her infant sleep, looked either deep in thought or constipated, her little brow furrowed, her small cherry mouth pursed in concentration. Dreams played out on the movie screen of her face, small fingers flexing and
The Thin HoursI.

Those of us here in this skeleton time,
this time of the year when the nights are thin
and dark, and dark with anxiety, peeling
as layers of an oyster shell, brittle and effaced
and somehow iridescent.
When the bell tolls out the time the sound is thin
and reaches into fractured air and softly
seeks the spaces between the atoms and
misses the vital Os and CO2s in a lasting,
failed pinball. The bell sound dies in
some space between midnight and thereafter,
and each tock tock of slipping cogs is
a repeat and not a moving on.
The air is filled with each dull sound,
each tock a repeat and a repeat again. And the
slip betwee
Morning - for Carl SandburgThe morning erupts
         on little cat feet
A flick of the tail
         a breath exhaled
              too fast at the end of a leap
and then

A paw,
    placed on lid's soft fan of lash
breath whirring, throaty, warm
         nose
            to
         nose

eyes still closed

Then          open

Thwack –
A stunning velvet attack
    innocent lids           unwarned
    warm sheets      no safe haven

The morning erupts
    on little cat feet.
hypergraphiashe writes in the empty spaces between the words
between the world,
world-weary fingers and toes and pengrips, knives
letter-opener swords, typewriter machetes

arm-wrestling with fate and the universe on a piece of paper,
computer screens painting faces with colors
stained-glass hyphenated hue-tint-shade glory
she waits.

she is patient.
she's their patient, doctors and nurses
emergency room, operating room, clinical study
stethoscope children

they wish fervently to cut her open.
her insides will be beautiful, they say,
beautiful and pink and full of words.
unwords, she says.

she writes on her skin, on napkins and paper bags
i
petrichorNiobe weeps.

gold scattered rough across
cracked earth and the last
remains of summer - they fell
like leaves in the arms of the wind.

some scents cannot be captured.
the gods bleed onto rock,
and the stone sends her prayers
in return: petrichor.

listen - the heavy thud of
rain on parched ground;
the monsoon sealing life back in;
the sky bows and kisses earth.

Niobe weeps.
The Cartographer's DaughterEvery night, he would fold her into his arms before she slept. Creases grew into her, turning brown with wear, and she loved them. When she woke up in the night, dreaming of darkness, he would take her to his desk and draw for her a map of her face, turning it into another world. Tracing the contours of her smile, he would scrawl a warning, "Here be monsters", whispering to her that she was a dragon when angry.

As she grew older, she populated his maps with creatures and peoples from the books she read, or her own creations. He taught her to draw, and to write with an old inkpen, in a cursive script her teacher could make neither head nor ta
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More from ~Quelythe

It is enough            that I sit here gently
                          rocking, every glass still
         undrunk— these quiet
                               hours, my face
              un
UntitledVanquished wastelands, xeric: yesterday's Zion.
    Soil, sunbaked, caves and crumbles. Fossilized boughs line the bank and strain deep into the river's hollow belly, feeling phantom water; they do not know the tight rations of survival to last them through such a blight, and stretch and seek with abandon. Each fruitless endeavour comes as unexpected, induces another strenuous effort.

Sunset teeters, ubiquitous.
    Like a coin balanced on the rim of the land, it toys with the temptation of the fall. From time to time it is struck by its own delirium, and licks the edge with a soot-blackened tongue-- but does not waver, does not bow its
Loss of Self-Concepta tree is a mushroom
then I

am an ant below it
dredging sand to build
a pillar of sand amongst
a valley of pillars
of sand; they stand in rows
like nameless tombstones,

to become no more
than sand.

a road is a stem then

I am an aphid walking its skin
sipping its sap and biting
its gummy flesh-- I call it
food but taste
nothing.

a tree is a tree and a road
is a road

but I dredge sand with my soles and walk
the skin of the road
to devour it.

then what
am I?
Deja VuWe take route US-1 N and take exit three, we come to the house and drop our bags off. We sleep. Morning comes, we embark again. We take route US-1 N and take exit three. We come to the house, but our bags are not there. We drop them off again, and we sleep. Morning comes. We embark again to take route US-1 N

and there is something distinctly off about the bottled water. It tastes stale. We drive past exit three and pull over at the super eight. We open our bags, and they are empty. We drop them off, and take route US-1 N and take exit three. We come to the house and drop our bags off again. We sleep, and when morning comes, we embark. We see
MatchmakingFor her the summer days are long. She is small and sweet, a cube of caramel with an aching aftertaste that lingers for ending too soon. Her arms and legs are pliable as grass, and as grass she swells like a sea with the wind saturating her hair. She is one of the movers who cannot dance, but were meant to, from a tight core low in the abdomen; and she walks the sidewalk on the diagonal, a magnet pulled to a dimly lit room with the bhh-bhh-bhh of good hip-swaying rock 'n roll.

He rides the subway at night, beats rhymes into the stretched skin of the drum. He is an  eagle fledgling, long-haired and brown eyed. His pants are red and h
A Royal's ChamberI am the main emperor penguin exhibit at the Boston Aquarium.

I announce my arrival with a shrill squawk at the raucous masses of writhing simian faces (I abide their presence only because they pay for my luxurious life). At noon, a servant enters and feeds me by hand: defrosted sardines still suitably cool on my palate. I take my fill, and continue my daily survey of the grounds. My kingdom is subdued and has seen many moons of peace and good health. I sit on my throne unchallenged. This is as close to Utopia as we have ever come.

And the humans, you ask? Let them eat cake.

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September 26, 2011
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[x]

to Yellow Plum

:iconquelythe:

to Yellow Plum (in blue
china bowl):

      
     afternoon's slit of sun slips
     between thick curtains
     & woos you to ripeness.
    
     it chooses you
     not for flecks of honey-russet
     held low in your seam of shadows,
     nor your symmetry & swell;
     but because
     
     you slink in shade, sink
     behind green pear & clementine

     & cannot hide
     from each spear of light
     that ricochets
     through--

     even now
     nested warm
     against these lips

     even now:
     a tea-stain stone
     hugging close
     the trashbin floor.
:iconquelythe:
For #transliterations' Prompt No. 9: [link]

Inspired by Femme 138 by *sagittariusgallery

.

Found this idea and just went along with it... at least I'm writing. Please tell me what you think.

.

:icondalinksystem:
:bulletyellow: Check out the rest of the submissions here: [link]
:bulletyellow: A fruity poem worth reading: Swollen Cherry by =angelStained

EDIT: Oh gee, thank you so much! I was down with a fever for most of yesterday, so seeing this is more than enough consolation for this dang cold. This poem felt like a 'breakthrough' of sorts for me, so I'm really happy that it was chosen. What more can I say than: VIVE LA POESIE!

edit(2): wanted to fix the end for a while, finally decided to get it done with. I think it's better, not sure if I should've just cut out the last two strophes.
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Daily Deviation

Given 2012-01-01
to Yellow Plum by ~Quelythe ( Suggested by ~jswebb and Featured by $wreckling )
love 2 2 joy 1 1 wow 0 0 mad 0 0 sad 0 0 fear 0 0 neutral 0 0
:iconirrevocablefate:
`IrrevocableFate Feb 6, 2013   Writer
:w00t: I've featured your piece here!



:heart: Stephany
Reply
:iconquelythe:
~Quelythe Mar 5, 2013  Hobbyist Writer
Thanks so much, sorry for the belated reply :hug:
Reply
:iconirrevocablefate:
`IrrevocableFate Mar 6, 2013   Writer
You're welcome and it's fine. <3
Reply
:iconhavetales-willtell:
Mood: dA Love `HaveTales-WillTell May 14, 2012  Professional Writer
Fantastic imagery; and belated congratulations on the DD.
Reply
:iconriflight:
~RiFlight Apr 20, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
I like the alliterative style to this poem. I like to write like that myself, so you could call me biased. LOL
Reply
:icondailylitdeviations:
=DailyLitDeviations Apr 20, 2012
Your wonderful literary work has been chosen to be featured by DLD (Daily Literature Deviations) in a news article that can be found here: [link]

Be sure to check out the other artists featured and show your support by :+fav:ing the News Article.

Keep writing and keep creating.
Reply
:iconmreid973:
~mreid973 Jan 15, 2012
Deceptively simple. Wonderful. Congratulations on the DD.
Reply
:iconquelythe:
~Quelythe Jan 19, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
Thank you! :D
Reply
:iconxdeadxnxgonex:
~xDeadxNxGonex Jan 1, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
I love the imagery!
Reply
:iconquelythe:
~Quelythe Jan 2, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
Thanks! :)
Reply
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