imagine / framelss girl

imagine
frameless girl of pixie  breasts
  daisy swarmed in brushes of her own nakedness
    Barefoot seltzer   she is
always    summer
         the brush of a cloud
(Here we pray
   knees in the wet mud - volley
            deprizal of our
   volvulus             words
Struck her where a rape they say jammed
   volcanic
 his winter into
     against
                (break)
Hands that could not hold on fumbled
     the slippery heating darkness     when the greatest
 of heroes     the volt of war   pinned
girls against the Walls of Troy
     (You cannot pray for nature/ alone in the mud
    She ate the DArk Fruit
struck   babbled    her eyes could
  not maintain  the image
    and the fruit burst between her
teeth        drawing
      her lips    and
             summer’s
                whet
            limp

His middle name was

perfection he drove a
cold chariot harnessed to
thirteen yogurt specters of

placid city moving city

oiled acres of cars and
invisible exhaust breath that
no, she said pictures

and the meaning I shore

myself this cold city whose
smell is agitated circumference
and soft but her eyes still

unwind the folded beds into
kitchens, pastels our hated
deftly lust

let's talk about it

412

Dead in - summer Hurts the Sun -
by this Streaming - deaf on Grass -
Hedges - of distraught - Attention -
for the - Pressure - under Glass -

She Cuts Herself                                    Bloom           


CUTS THE STEEL SOUR FLICK   PRECISELY  OF           


   herself snapped heart-bag    breathing  rock


Shade Smuggled In Choked Red Brick


            DECISIVE SHOCK SUDDEN FLIGHT TINGLE YOUR           


   against fleshy jealousy’s resounding cannon resounding


Buildings            These Walls                        The Gaze


            RED PALPATING SUNSET BILE HORROR    WATCH IT           


   paling images a night’s held my heart spining it’s


Burns                        Like                        Powder Thirst


            THRASH LASHES SINGED   TOO YIELD  HER VOICE


   depth a drop of DNA  or gods naïve pathos to blame           

there’s something that can’t hold you together
or me: but it helps not to be read then, further
you can still watch the buildings burning down
from your window, describe the columns’ stack,
even if you don’t finish tricking yourself to sleep

Tuesday: Public Notice

Skij Yesh On will be unable to post until next week. In the meantime, please enjoy the archive as well as these festive holiday-related eggs.

The Twenty-First. Night. Monday.

Anna Akhmatova


The Twenty-First. Night. Monday.
The outline of the capital in gloom.
It was just someone with nothing to do
who invented the story of love.

And either from laziness or from boredom
Everyone believed, and that’s how they live:
Waiting for rendezvous, fearing separation
And singing songs of love.

But the secret is revealed to some,
And silence settles upon them...
I stumbled upon this by chance
And from then on have been in pain.

January, 1917, Petersburg.
[English translation from the Russian, skij's 13, 2005]

there’s something that can’t hold you together
or me: but it helps not to be read then, further
you can still watch the buildings burning down
from your window, describe the columns’ stack,
even if you don’t finish tricking yourself to sleep

cablecar at daybreak, from memory, by this light of night park / or: I’d like to put myself all under your Beautiful Organs

Listen! as the city rises
in hushes and hurls - my
heart appears, the green
tail of a swimming mess
of morning commution,
and there! by that park smell
hisses immolation egg
taking means of breaking
up the fast one too literally
Are these hurling streets,
yellow on spatter on steel,
baking midday swelt out
of partridge dew and
honey soles – pick them
out with your tongues if
you can, holding off swollen
and make something out
of that charred biscuit
than meat of its own return

a little nauseous after an hour of blog surfing

oh your words prick me so!
how unexpected, a single woman
and a freedom metaphor!
what, like a body of water?
this internet poetry!

The pen light is sufficient: for all
the day was the scenery without comment
spread without detail only such
as the colors of the sky too cold
to keep my head uncovered: so the
buildings have no touch to them, just
the doors – in heat and vague
articulation of life the Romantics
spread and feign comfort as I
am losing the calluses from my hands
like glued wax paper that knows the lines
 I become softer in spite of
thronged vitality and make monotonous
 note of insomnia, the birds, truck
two-bit thoughts, to be forgotten
promptly as paper dries - ants
  disband so quickly - to make charts
and rate like a footrace,
earn a star against these
   the books that kill us dead



don’t save this

For the Edification of Young Writers; A Free Clinic

For Daniel Yuvachev


Of course I’m not sure if I believe
in such a tale but here it goes
there once was a writer who lived by a bridge
She lived by a bridge in England-town
Wrote about cats, wrote about God
A steady six weekends a year

Then one fine England-town day
something strange happened
and only this we know
she did not write she did not write
not about cats, not about God

Five years did pass and again she sat
to write a poem for dear dear Beth
justly returned from holiday she
played a tourist       Anyhow
the writer sat  the writer thought
the writer baked strawberry muffins
and the most extraordinary of extraordinary then occurred

Nothing
She had nothing to write nothing to write
Not a single thought upon her head
Not a single thought worthy of God
Worthy of dear Beth

So warn you writers, sufferers all don’t
go like the woman in our tale
write write  burn with your God
Write write    love your kittens
love your youth

Love, or / The Morning After

shocking rag Dolls  flailing limp hearts  clutch
                     at  paper moons  my veins swollen
too thick of blood and biting nails
                            scars of red tense moans

A toy   moreorless

Poisoning grasshoppers a boy's grotesque

limb tearing feast

Master   I will not remember your
song to touch
you is god sensing motion molding my heart to
feel the trojan horse lodged
both my heart or yours -
Of the prayer that lays my body flat to the air
above forest (no snow no snowy
mountain) too much
is said of ice Master   I will promise you
 none of that when
you touch my body yourskin
is more bluish grinding than
 even the angels in your eyes.
it’s hard to believe in the darkness
of your fingers at night

WE WON'T ALLOW WHAT IS TAKEN TO BE SHOUTING IN OUR FORUM, SIR

THE BANALITY OF MY WORDS
BRINGS ME TO TEARS
SOMEHOW THEY REMIND ME
OF ALL YOUR STORIES


what you don't like the word banality?

one - an excerpt in insomnia

I hate my bed. I hate the pillows, already smelling of my head, I hate the sheets, more and more laced with friction, and I hate the entire horizontalness of it, as if I’m caught heaving up from my baggy lungs to the roots of my acute-and-sensitive belly-button pinpoint half-prick to my brain that is the most tense of all and which I can almost hear going tick-tock, tick-tock, and I sneeze just thinking about what I’m lying inside of, course fabrics, too much for these tiny hair follicles and the cracks in the skin. Thinking about it, the tiny hair follicles are tiny, and for that sensitive, wired right to my brain, catching every breath of movement, every twitch that I have ceased to monitor carefully – fucking alarming how seriously I take all of this, such a wide awake in the almost-morning, such a monologue, using the word ‘hate’, who do I think I am? but there’s no other way to look at it already twisting here for over an hour, and still my heart thump-thumps as if I’m not breathing, as if I had conscious lung-control, full run of the buttons, and then forgot all about it. Maybe I’m not breathing. I am aware - that I am sweating. I can’t tell which is more tense, though, my head or my neck or where they intersect, they won’t let me sink, they won’t give - at all - a plank of wood, but almost shaking (strange) – tense (strange) – for all its brilliant world-shattering work it will not rest. Ha ha ha ha.

funny, it actually does sound like a sixteen-year-old

I met a man by the bus stop
 drunk   very
who had a story to tell   for  a
   quarter
A long story   you see
 he made short
  Some detail of a house
  Yes, he thought, a girl
  All very sad, for he ended of course
drunk by a bus stop
finishing the story trying to make it comic,
 because he saw that we were young,
and it occurred to me how some people find
feet ugly and shotguns
poetic


from a 16 year-old - just look at how he swings those words around!

Thoughts on a Saint Petersburg Winter Afternoon

as it's snowing in Piter, spring in California - from the archives



this is my blood


 and it flows


like any blood


 I suppose


1999

Meme Of The Day (tuesday)!

What's Your #1 Reason For Not Committing Suicide??


[that is, besides crying away your angst in wretched poetry / endless politic-polemic-blogging]

Skij Yesh On's:
Ritter Sport Marzipan (Qualitaet im Quadrat), Irish Breakfast Tea, Trader Joe's Liquor Aisle.

6 March, 2005

Those loosening hips
Are about to burst
this messy March ‘marn

I’d take such skin
all slick’d underneath
Even a Friday night

And Saturday noon
there’s time to stop
Pick up the empty packets

Wednesday night
There’s time to hurt
even the rum won’t coax

p

on a slip of paper by my bed

I've gotten you
out of my body

It's only blood
and muscle now

you're
just a
tremor in the bones

a slip between
tongue and lip

just a thought
my skin can't locate

But you should
write back all the same

UNTLD

“there’s a something there
yes -
on this we can agree”

night one

The night is a cover,
the inside is the hot
stink of someone new
of bedsheets, objects
hidden in drawers and
smooth moistures.
tightening chests
and tingling fabric


her skin was ripe as
undercooked chicken
prickling pores stiffened
into thigh texture, sharp
short hair, friction like a
finger across fine paper
down to the tangled
spiral, skin-sliced
thinness of membranes
drawing lines like a
nail under heat

tiny breasts feel more:
legs are wired to the
breath in her ear
a glassful of cold wine

of mouthful sensation
the sea is too tight
for words, worn
into parting fingers
to trace all the way down
to tongue meets like warmth

a heart under silk
bends bones, thong muscles
and suntanned weight
thumbs the blood
past her rolled up eyes
to her bow strung packets
of nerve and tucked up flesh

her eyes were soft
as reading light but
I still hold my breath
her arms pulling now
to a slight recline
and here - I go

guarding the nerve-string
behind her knee, straps
of fabric no more, undone
like a pen cap,
rending ink all down
a giddy thumb-tip -
and a place to wipe

transcribing the static
of itch from cotton
to strap
to tongue, mouths bored
and stripped of juice
now just cell phone
resolution snapshots
in hang-over half-smiles,
- as nothing was said

‘that was fun’ -
maybe a counting
number or ten, but that,
too, can wait until morning -
night fuckers




poetry

I'm in control girl -
I choose to wait,

I could have gotten
drunk hours ago.

no I don't notice -
the days as they pass,

But I knew
you'd ask

When you wait for me

When you wait for me
like rivers crossing
is this gravity word against
word? Diction won’t save
us, water gets cold,
And you wanted to grow -
mark your tensions like
a calendar in thick red ink,
Older, the pages don’t stick
in these slender embraces,
perforation holds no mistakes,
  the wet pages
make little noise on water, and so
this is our life not together
left with the gist of bar-
stool biographies

site of the day

I found this incredible site from another blog (lost the citation) where you can make custom bumper stickers - guaranteed a few minutes of Jittery Euphoria before the Crushing Weary Blaseness of Modern Life reduces you to Nyquil and Advil again. Here are four of my attempts

The potions in my brain

The potions in my brain are
swollen, as our attention keeps us
humble, the quiet day begins without
promise, and ends with the future
adorned in the bells and sun dresses
  of this prison-
             we laugh, cautious

O You - Imitation of Life

Palo Alto - humidity
somewhere off, a Green
Ground smell - of pine -
pavement, a Yellow building,
with the odd prick of
the natural food store here
and there: some sort of headache blase
blots out all of that blue and
I convince myself, yes,
"this is Heat" at
- half-time despite
all those Watches -