Two unfinished pieces from class (for 4/11 and for TODAY!)

Chthonic Voice

My voice is in the earth
My voice has demonstrated in laughter and despair
a spelunking depth & vivacity
that would rival the sunken tale of Kubla Khan.

My voice is in the earth.
It's got sound-sensitive skin
like the webbed ears of the bat
that keep its company.
The bats slather screeches
on its chords
my voice is well camouflaged in muck and soil.

My voice is in the earth.
Fallow.
Hibernating the toxins away.
waiting for the weeds of apology to grow themselves away,
waiting for the deprecating syllables to break
& become more usable soil.

My voice is in the earth,
you can use a metal detector
to find the most condensed deposits of meaning.
Dig them up,
wipe away the dirt,
shine them.
Show them to your friends
Tell them your trophy is actually a part of someone's soul.

But that is getting the mythology wrong.
Those are just my favorite collections of elements.
I pooled the sounds there for finding.
So please
I invite you,
hover over me
waiting for detection,
my voice is in the earth.



<3

In the museum of the body
the heart is the most staggering of bio-mechanical marvels.
It's the Mona Lisa of the our soft organ world,
because it is and can so often
be stolen.

Although not the oldest piece in our collection (that would be the digestive tract),
nor the softest (that would be the liver),
nor the most sensitive (that would be the tissue on your lips and genitals),
it is perhaps the most often damaged organ;
the piece of the machine
that is susceptible to the widest array of possible pains inflicted.

It is important to note that because of the high sensitivity
the heart has developed both
marathonish endurance for painful activity
& an incredible resilience seen nowhere else in the body.

The four chambers of the architecture
was designed specifically
so the organ can support itself
when one of its four rooms have been
ravaged,
poisoned,
or
occupied by dangerous intents.
A heart with four intentions will never fold or break,
it can only be bruised.

Your Voice, My Name, Love Letters

Your fingers find music in my ribcage
like a child meeting their very first piano
words bounce like quarters off my sternum
coinslot sighs caught in the latticework of lungs,

You say my name like rosebushes  
climbing, 

ambitious past their trellis.

Your voice is a train whistle in foreign city
Your voice is a fever comprised of equal parts mathematics, alchemy, and hearbreak
Your voice is a helicopter heartbeat 

all four parts conjoin a centrifuge of THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP
Your voice is cedar burning thin and clear.


Yesterday in the shower 

when you asked
how I’d feel if you took my name
Your voice hit my bones like a tuning fork

my body became water over riverbones.

You say my name like rosebushes
Long-stemmed words exit out the throat
Ten letters running skinny-legged in your signature.
Take it.
My grandmother told me
the root word of our name means.
Home
And I want your voice.

You say my name like doorknobs and evergiving hinges
Take my name
open all of my syllables
on dotted lines and after each expectant X
Our matched signatures will be rosebushes burning.

Talk

Networking
In conversation
those eyes were dancing like two sparrows on a chain link fence
open and round and swaying like an amber thicket beneath the moon
mouths moving in pink agreement
we ended like an unfinished sentence
or a greeting card whose punchline is waiting to be opened.

I think about your throat
and hope you don't notice the forwardness on my face.
beneath the shadows colliding like breezy lace
our tongues press down the angles of the sun,
is it night already?
I am thinking and you make me think about
how telephone poles must keep each other from being lonely
when they live in the desert.
So many lines pressing up and marking the belly of sky
like swooping bars of music

Ghost music whispered though the blades of a ceiling fan.
I can hear your voice from all the way across the country
summer heat boils into syllables and anxious talking over talking.
You're my favorite one to interrupt.

I wanted this to be more haunting than it was

This sickness is an angry pinwheel on the back porch,
the hissing of pipes in the basement,
a shivering window in the night.

The bright gray gets sucked up by hanging rain
converts light into fog
and fog into conversation.
Words get sticky and you have missed your puddle
the conversation bus stops
beeps incessantly,
lets out the air,
echoes out an empty destination,
in a voice rehearsed every 28 minutes.

Mouths snore into another subject
and that rain just won't come down like it's supposed to
like a bushy-tailed spiral feeling
or a transient raccoon scuttling under the porch.
The air is hissing like so many suspended waterways
and the glass gatekeepers sigh
refusing to let the wind break.