Lost Letters, Found: Texas Hold 'Em

Note from Dennis: I really dig this metaphor and the abstract prayer even though i’m a nonrelige dude. It doesn’t come off hokey, and really, tells a beautiful story about a daughter that loves her father.

jazillarose:

I want to skip charcoal across my soul.
I want to sing the pitch of midnight.
I want to take temptation to bed with me.
So when the Lord asks me why my soul is so dirty, I’ll have an excuse.

When my body is stained with old memories,
Hands, decorated with liquid pain, too mangled for use,
Eyes, shaken from the trauma of her modest corpse,
I want to tell Him my intentions were once cleaner than my fragile skin.

When my heart is a jigsaw puzzle before me,
The edges of my spirit too rough to shine through,
My brilliant footsteps leaving behind nothing worthwhile anymore,
Feet scarred from walking on those I love most,
I want to tell Him I ran for honorable reasons, even when there are none.

Though my knuckles may be beaten,
My knees scraped with shame and asphalt,
My ribs stand like a ramshackle hut, trying to be a castle.

*My face still falls like a deck of cards.*
My magic tricks are always coming up short.
I’m sorry I’m not the pocket Aces my father always wanted.
If only life was a five card draw instead…

But as the river flowed out before me,
I couldn’t change my weak hands,
Grasping for something better
That just wasn’t in the cards.

So instead, I lay on the riverbed,
Wishing the high tide would have shuffled me into nothingness again

poem is a verb.: Hemingway's Shotgun

Note from Dennis:  This is amazing.  A strange place indeed, the places we go and the places we are.  Melt a Picasso painting and you’d find this.

poemisaverb:

Hemingway’s Shotgun

One day I saw the smiling face of death,
while I was looking in a bathroom-mirror,
after spending the night in the last motel
on a road going nowhere.
A strange place,
inhabited by even stranger people.
Angels who became atheists, living next door
to broken-heart-couples,
killing time on their honeymoon.
Novelists who have sold their souls
for poppy-field-born fantasies, 
melting in the heat of candles,
on the soot-blackend tongue of
once silver-glinting spoons,
who write their poems about evanescence 
and mortality on toilet-walls.
They use needles to write the same poems
on their belt-spanned arms.
As the ink floats into their veins,
the voices are muted for a second,
but after a moment, they are turning into the same
haunted people, that they always were.
The kind of person who spreads his arms
to hug a train, like an old companion.
A person who’s neck is a breaking match
in the hand of god,
who knows that street-lamps were not designed
to lighten the dark places inside us.
Someone, thinking that love is the sweetest
word, hidden in the devil’s dictionary.
Someone, lost in never ending nightmares
about secrets behind locked cellar doors.
Nightmares don’t care about insomnia.
You can’t escape them with caffeine or amphetamines. 
Sometimes they visit you,
when you’re lying sleepless in your bed,
Hemingway’s loaded shotgun under your mattress.

Kerim Mallée (weltenweiterwandrer.tumblr.com)

The Exquisite Release of Weeping Sadness: Through a Door

Note from Dennis:  Man. This one really got me.  Being one that sometimes goes out of my way not to interact with other humans, this touches the subject of Anthrophobia so beautifully it hurts.

weepingsadness:

I heard their voices through a door.
In tones of cheerful niceties,
they spoke in words obscured by wood.
I listened for a while.

And when they left I lingered still,
against the door, in silence stood.
I checked the lock, it was secure,
then went about my business.

But who am I, to they outside?
A man alone, with crude intent
to intrude upon their niceties.
I lack the strength to try.

They came again, another day,
to speak about the rain which fell.
I pressed to hear the two converse,
and take a part, however small.

Afraid to speak, if only to say,
“I too, have felt rain falling.”

Bonjour Amelie: Smokey

Note from Dennis:  See how simple story telling can be. Something very profound about this piece.  Holding societies feet to the fire in regards to the things we simply ignore.

xxxxxxx

My name is Arturo Jimenez aka Smokey with my homeys

You don’t know me, do you?

I was shot in the chest at a birthday party

three days after the Rodney King Beating

threes days out of road camp

three days back with my girl.

They left me on the sidewalk, called it crowd control

wouldn’t let the ambulance through

I don’t know but I think I was already dead

‘cause all I remember is the virgin

trying to calm the sheriff

trying to hold back his finger. 

Nineteen years old. 

Poco a poco, I’m getting closer to you.

A Rainy Days Blog: Obituary

Note from Dennis:  Haunting introspective piece of literature. Beautiful.

azukilynn:

Named in the obit of a man I never actually met
Biological father, dark specter of my childhood
Knowing only what I had been told of you
Suicidal alcoholic, a man who had beaten my mother

In my youth, I always sought the darkness within myself
Your darkness
I expected it to be there at every turn
As if there were scary monsters embedded in my cells
Buried in the chromosomes you gave me
I became an outsider
Alien even to myself
Angry and alone

Not sure whence came my day of dawning
I only know that, somehow, I grew to reach
For fragments of what I saw as good in what
I had come to know of you–
My Native American heritage
My Italian roots
And after doing the math
With the Swedish from Mom’s side factored in
The solution to my life’s equation reads as follows:
Meatballs, Temper, Peace Pipe
Not so terribly dark when looked at this way
Not too shabby, I’d say
I can live with that

I now fully embrace the idea that I was not somehow
Tainted by your blood
I no longer see your chromosomes as
Scary monsters
I am not you, and never was
Never even a part of you really–
Until this day, named as a surviving daughter
Named with your last name
A name I’ve never used
And I find myself wondering who you were
What your scary monsters looked like

So today, I looked long and hard at your obit picture
I studied it as if it were my own face in a mirror
I studied it without reservation or judgment
And I can see that there was light in you–
I can accept it
It is enough for me to say at last:
Rest in peace, Blood Father

Azuki Lynn

On a Mote of Dust Suspended in a Sunbeam: That One Time I Wrote About You

Note from Dennis:  Again, who hasn’t been there.  Unrequited love and realizing the mistakes of our inability to act upon a feeling.  Those are the scars that last forever.

secretagentxy:

I had only ever touched the cotton

That your shirt was made of

The few times I had seen you.

It was never on purpose,

My hands were always in the way.

So I wrote your name in the mulch 

At the park where I would play when I was small,

And there I sat on the swing,

And I pretended I knew you.

The last day I could have told you,

There was a lunar eclipse,

The moon looked brown and dull.

Instead I wrote a thousand pleas to god,

And lived as if he’d granted them

Then the moon passed into Earth’s shadow.

I never will understand why people look then,

But not when it is bright.

Poetry: Twin Flame

Note from Dennis: This is a really cool melding of theme.  It almost reads as a war cry.  A really beautiful war cry.

poetictruth2625poetry:

I sense you,

even at this distance.

We are connected by

(A BEAM)

something stronger

(KA)

than our confusing emotions.

You are

(SODALE)

hiding from it,

like I did.

But its only making the

(BEAM)

connection stronger.

Our beam

(KA)

cannot be cut,

(ERASED)

only tied in knots.

…