haikkun

[haikkun]

Pied

Earth returns the heat it supped all day

Owls vault on thermals seemingly reserved for eagles

Prometheus, dressed as Daedalus for Halloween,

Pretends himself to be

The austringer fostering o’er nephew; callow Talos

A shot of infrared in some winsome ocher dark

Some match-struck asteroid mark

Why could the earth not filch its own spark?

Fickle god gifts fire; harbingers global warming

And the illuminated man follows

The birds; marched into the oven

____________________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

[haikkun]

Here There Should Be Dragons

Each sea, vast,

Fasts in

Mankind’s right mind

Too concerned with the ground

Beneath his feet

To believe he’s squatting on

Less than thirty percent

O’ those tectonic plates

Awfully grabby

For our lack of conquest

And if it’s mapped

As placid transects

It hardly counts

But what lurks beneath the surface

Is always nine times that above

Who would ever care to

Brave the deep?

And if I were a nereid

This is where I’d choose to hide, too

________________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

[haikkun]

ريشة

I was a bird once

Tore my feathers in a dream

Though I beheld six kinds of light

Could only chase them via screams

And all along the feather shaft

Bursting from my seams:

The dreams of words

And other light

By quill someday:

More flight

_____________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

[haikkun]

Dumpster Fire Fairy Tales

Atop a needle attends the electric dawn

Gossamer green funeral gown

Preying Mantis meets prodigious Prada school

Protect my head; it is so vulnerable now

Hitting the back of the tower, the banks of the river,

The scalding car hood, the bed and the bear rug

I have been so rarely vertical these days

I expect my hips to swagger without moving

When I stand

The way my head spins through

Shipwreck after shipwreck

On dry land

I have still been saving the best for you…

________________________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

[haikkun]

Dust Never Settles Up

I’ve got the kick drum in the stairwell

Got the tambo and the snare, well…

Those two were a lie,

But paint a picture in good health of

Rushed beats pushing up and painting the steep ascent with thrusts opposite the side which falls to feet

Of a rhythm section that’s in the cellar

Progressively percussing on a shelf

Rattling with the beller

Of feeling played inside out

Meanwhile stairs don’t know they got wants not to be spoken of

To be stroked in opposite directions

Walked inverted like an MC Escher sketch and

No one dared to dispute physics

To have dust settle

On the unseen sides

The heart is just a backbeat, trying to stay competent, trying to stay relevant

Much as it tries

It’ll never be melody

In our eyes

__________________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

[haikkun]

Share My Gum

I cry

Like you cum

Spilling down our knuckles

Licked from both our thumbs

And the rivulets’ reflexive

Desire to meld together

Has me wondering less

How you could smell

The spearmint

Across the phone

And more

Why we cannot

Share the suffering

Like we shared

The joy

________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

#poetry #spilled ink #words #women writers #orignal writing #my words #spilled words #spilled thoughts #writerscreed #poets on tumblr #poem #words and quotes #twcpoetry #dead poets society #poets corner #new poets society #quotes #poets of tumblr #poets #still cold still beautiful

[haikkun]

Worsted

Why pray to Minerva

And hope the wool she dyes

Will be steadfast to light?

Why hope her hand is steady;

Her taste for story: true and ready?

Why hope that what she weaves

Will not be unraveled easily?

What do we gain by being written

In words or in scars or new patches of cement with

Llittle sticks or in the center of somebody’s story?

I think, if we’ve a good heart, we gain from knowing

The glove will fit

The fabric will wear

Before it ever rips

We can trust

The garment is built to last

What do we get out of being the fiber?

Other than the satisfaction of knowing

Someone is warmer

Someone is wiser

Someone, somewhere, is enveloped in color

For seeing your moment in history

And holding it up

To their face by the fire

Life

Recorded

The way we’d live it again

If we could

__________________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

[haikkun]

Struck

One bottle of wine in

and I can FINALLY SPEAK MY MIND

my lips are numb though

whoops, we’ll have to

edit all those points

File the canines

Divine their

Body language

Anodyne

Discretely walk away

Then pretend we said it

First

Consign the co-signed in

Our lunar charts

I would worship a whip

If it brought down the house

Brang down the zodiac

Brang down the stellar hearts

And packed them in this subtle hearse

Who else will write

A eulogy for the stars

If not the ephemeral Love

Attuned to

Muse’s glory

_____________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

#poetry #spilled ink #spilled words #words and quotes #writing #cleaning out my drafts #my words #spilled thoughts #writerscreed #poets on tumblr #poem #twcpoetry #writblr #prose #words #poets of tumblr #writers corner #tumblr writers #poets corner #quotes

[haikkun]

Panta Rhei

Why do we feel like blood longs To belong in our veins… When it’s forever dying to escape? Forced around bodily synchrotrons At ever accelerating rates Into loop and delta capillaries Against will and gravity Valves in calves requiring The turgor of tube stockings To keep a rigid grasp On their chain gang, coal-stoking veins, When: Blood seeps where it cannot go Defying bandaids and stitches Path of least resistance Where it rests Far away from beating breast Though congealed and cold Cupped in the hands of valleys The low dug holes, despite What’s good for us Who are we to keep it at arms length in pulses? Who are we to stop it up at all?

___________________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun Prompt from Mark @definegodliness

[haikkun]

Dysgraphia

I’m feeling deflated Not enough ATP To produce hot air lung contractions Failure to grasp (gasp?) Any words that crack Like a too-full balloon neck getting snapped Instead, I’m loose latex Cold, condensed saliva inside Stick a pen in and maybe a Word would ensue But it could be confused For a sigh That’s what the mundane does to you Oh, what a trip A trip to the goddamn grocery store Still buying ramen Though you don’t have to no more I need a little excitement A little heartbreak A little indictment Some sniffing salts to jumpstart This tongue and fake my muscles Into shaking out a poem or two God, I don’t know what kills worse Being bored Or being blue

________________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

[haikkun]

Kill Code

Still you

Still cold

Still blue

Frigid digits

Pecking code out from the hue;

Binary lies,

Never meant for my eyes-

Anyways.

Ode to the habits;

Of swallow, fore chewn.

And all I want

And all I ask:

Some chance to set

The game to past;

To play the level again,

To believe without pretend

That it was not

All by

Design

____________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

#poetry #words #quotes #spilled ink #writing #poets on tumblr #spilled words #my words #writerscreed #poem #spilled thoughts #words and quotes #twcpoetry #dead poets society #alt lit #lit #literature #riddles #writers #writblr

[haikkun]

Synonyms and Antonyms

Suffer me insufferably

Hold me beholdenly

Embrace me bracingly

And love me madly

But do it in a way I’d never know

____________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

#poetry #spilled ink #my words #writing #quotes #spilled words #spilled thoughts #writerscreed #poets on tumblr #poem #words and quotes #twcpoetry #alt lit #literature #lit #poets corner #dead poets society #writblr #poets

[haikkun]

Loam

Things like mushrooms take on weight as they hummect

My gilled brain has been, too long, unwet

You could drown in thin air

In this season

Nothing swollen, beyond reason

And if the thoughts of you, produce the dew

The few, the far between, the shrewd

Let me think of you

And swell, and stew

And acquaint death some other morning

____________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

#poetry #spilled ink #writing #quotes #poem #my words #spilled words #spilled thoughts #writerscreed #poets on tumblr #words and quotes #twcpoetry #words #lit #literature #writers #writeblr #writblr #dead poets society #poets corner #poeticstories

[haikkun]

Physics

You know how grown men

Can be taken down like a bullet

By a bee?

It’s like trying to chase

A bee with a bullet

Press the pillow so hard

Against your ear

You hear it like a clock beating

Keeping track

Of nothing

___________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

[haikkun]

Arthropoda

A satisfying cricket picks a click within the violent anthology of silence

Summarily: no one pays attention; no one gives response

Science does not acknowledge help

The librarian pins the jest opposite her ambitious dress

The chemist pumps ash

His fun greed barks without a mumble

A calculator staggers beneath the pressure

Of a wonton world approaching the limits

The talking derivative crashes

Crawling arithmetic thirsts after intellect

A query listens next to a quota

Why does an arguable idiot elaborate opposite evidence?

While a rotated romantic

Summarizes patterns and tactics

______________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

#poetry #spilled ink #writing #my words #quotes #poets on tumblr #spilled words #writerscreed #poeticstories #writers and poets #writblr #poem #words and quotes #spilled thoughts #spilled poetry #lit #literature #spoken word #poets corner #my writing

[haikkun]

Wool

How well will the sheep dust the fence

In tonight’s counting events?

Limbo reversal

Wool to pull, and yarn to shed

Can they make the leap?

Can I count indefinite

In numbers, discrete?

I’ll untie every stitch I quilted

If you do not appreciate it

Can a tear, months-long in the making,

Be so easily unrent?

I’d love to see your hands interrupt

Maybe I’d

Believe it

_____________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

#poetry #spilled ink #writers #writing #quotes #my words #spilled words #spilled thoughts #writerscreed #poets on tumblr #twcpoetry #poem #words and quotes #words #lit #alt lit #dead poets society #new poets society #love poems #writblr

[haikkun]

Ebb

I hear about “quiet quitting”

And realize that, for me, it means

Not punctuating the ends of sentences any more

Not rushing to open messages

And not holding onto facts to pass along

I let pictures and stories slip through my fingers

I put armor on

And I question its position

Along the scale

Between “aggression” and “self-preservation”

In a world where you don’t pay attention

Wonder if it’s worth wondering about at all

Find I care

Less and less

________________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

#poetry #spilled ink #my words #spilled words #spilled thoughts #literature #writer #poets of tumblr #poets corner #poem #writing #lit #my writing #words #quotes #quiet quitting #words and quotes #poets on tumblr #spilled poetry