maudes-tooth

[maudes-tooth]

He’d buy me the food my mom wouldn’t let me eat when she was gone

Sometimes it was peanut butter

He told me I had to try a Twinkie 

And then one time he brought home a papaya

I wonder where rosemary is now

I wish my last memory of her wasn’t my mom crying under the stairs after we hung up the phone

Her mom used to drag us across the street by our hair

The car always smelled like the orange 

peels she kept in front of the heater

My mom did that too

I wish I wasn’t so sad

I wish I believed there were people who weren’t like me

[maudes-tooth]

I guess

 saying he went out for cigarettes is as good as any,  an urban myth of missing fathers, it gained less substance and more traction with every retelling. I looked out at the desert, it was 30 degrees but felt like 70,  the weak sunlight peppered the rocks and hovered above the sand like birth of a mirage, it’s that red dirt I said i always loved. It was going to be a lonely morning, a lonely afternoon, a lonely fucking existence out here in the waste. The coffee in the french press tasted like dirt mixed with horseradish and dog piss. I’d left it for too long before drinking it, the kind of shit that puts hair on your chest. This whole endeavor required holding on to several bootstraps at one time just to stand up straight. Every once in a while i thought i heard a phone ring, i wondered if this place was starting to get to me.

the sky felt like god sitting on my chest, a paralysis demon that encompassed every waking and sleeping thought. The sun mocked me and blistered the spotted wrinkled arms that fell from my shoulders, the endless blue became saccharine and turned my stomach at its unflinching dismissal of time. I took another sip of the dog piss coffee, I thought that maybe it was Wednesday.

[maudes-tooth]

soft forest rested on the act

of submission

a deer approaching

the soulless eyes of a double barrel

shotgun wedding

[maudes-tooth]

dappled cherry trees caress the wood siding

red berries signaling fall wave in the wind

the lace under the oil lamp

falls yellow, then blue then yellow then blue

I can hear him walking

the cat brushes my feet

wake up

[maudes-tooth]

If i stopped

like the heart of a husband bereaved

to feel the cold sea

of the week of tears and nausea

wash away the fear of noticing it,

would it end?

the human instinct to swim is what drowns us

in lies of the mind

signed away in a book

red flowers kiss venetian blinds

like he kisses me through the blanket

that covers my hair like a shroud

during prayer to the many within

I'm here for a long time I guess,

I'm here forever.

All my friends here for a good time

died this year

in ways i didn't think they'd go

they slipped ten dollars into parking meters

finished off the bottles

and uprooted my favorite plants

now all i remember is the smell of booze

I want to be beautiful

I want to be loved

I want to be alive in the way

so many aren't

but when I'm scooped up

and treasured

in the eyes of the beholder

I seem to disappear.

[maudes-tooth]

Rothko

I  used to really like color field paintings.

there's a circle in hell for people who hang framed rothkos

like there's a circle in hell

where you're in a waiting room

and there's a color field painting

with a tear away study

"ARE YOU DEPRESSED?"

the grey carpet mumbles

with the swiftly approaching loafers

of the most available at 9 on Tuesday therapist

government insurance can buy

[maudes-tooth]

sub

unwinding draped cotton across

a silence of loving from too far away

things come together as far apart as they can

to crash on the shores of an uncertain vision

the chain finally tightened across her neck

to dissolve into penance was

at most the culmination of a life half lived

[maudes-tooth]

I used to

Listen to this song over and over again because I remember her dancing to it one night, I don’t know it’s like I saw a girl who loved to dance inside the one who would go outside in tears at 5am

They told me she ran away with her guy, which is the polite way of saying it

[maudes-tooth]

I met her in a train station

She said I was beautiful but I said she was beautiful and we stood there staring

the marble walls were 

clouds ringing out a heavenly chorus of businessmen who were running late

I remember her eyes mirror grey,

glassy they showed nothing but my face

And she asked me why I looked afraid

I am always afraid

She gave me her number the last thing I sent her was be safe

[maudes-tooth]

I sat on the roof of a school bus with the most beautiful girl ive ever met

they called her boyfriend but she had the same name as me. The stars were close by, the dark mountain air swirled them back into the trees as it tossed a few blonde hairs against her neck, the noise of the people below fell away as we shared a cigarette under the moon I don’t remember what we said.

Watching her swim in the river reminded me of leaving notes in someone’s desk at school, I wanted to be near her but I was married to grief. The night my getaway driver undressed at the spring, I dreamt he was angry with me and the next morning I took the train to that town that started with a C, something like colville but that isn’t it, and I never saw her again.

[maudes-tooth]

I am divisible by 1

The human mind a clumsy ruler

For measuring the divinity of the philodendron on the windowsill

Watching dark matter caress

The silence of the corners of

The room

Bring me fresh fruit

I’ll stuff the pink flesh

Between my lips

And tear at its body

Shivering in its last cry of martyrdom

That never made a psalm

To be sung by choir girls

With cigarette holes in their shoes

Who just happened upon

The playboys

In the dumpster behind the church

They say fort Flagler is haunted

I think ghosts are no more

Than guilt

For the people we left by the wayside

But the choir girls found them too

Dancing in the shadows of the barracks

Singing psalms of the martyrs

That god loved most

Eating fruit that fell silently

To the belly of the earth

The tree that grows there sings

White noise to the dark matter

We hear it when we sleep

The psalm of pink flesh

Goodnight, cruel world

Goodnight

[maudes-tooth]

A hand in

Fabric pulling

Flesh to flesh

And bone to

bone

Lip meets skin

Arms encircled

Chest press

Falling sky

The spirit of America

hangs in hair

Is this a series of decisions

A chemical

A feeling

All you dreamed of

Or something else entirely?

#poetry #writing #writeblr #poems on tumblr #poem #love poem #love #romantic #romance

[maudes-tooth]

The sea glitters

Concrete in the distance

Cars backed up one by one for miles

This is your Saturday and you can’t find a fucking parking spot.

“Escape” a Ford.

Everyone came here to escape

You see it on casino billboards too

Babies scream in strollers

Joggers with their headphones in

And the sea it sits there

Glimmering

#writeblr #poetry #writing #poems on tumblr #poets on tumblr #poem

[maudes-tooth]

To be soft and made of stone

An absence grows smaller

An abscess

With every moon passing

Growing full with every heartbeat

Command, child! Lost at sea

Become who you were meant to be

Leave silver snakes to die

In desert dust

Leave yellow bruises to their musters

Grow! It is spring again

Let hands lead eyes and idle hands leave lives

You yourself are loving

Set sights high

In opal dawn your truth forthcoming

#poems on tumblr #poetry #writing #writeblr #poets on tumblr

[maudes-tooth]

A soft heart belongs to cold hands

Left in pockets

Sideways glances

An inner critic from hell

Your lesson is:

This wasn’t a failure

[maudes-tooth]

A life of silent lips

Waking in a cold bed

A single cup of coffee

The only occupant in a four door sedan

White noise on the freeway

Finally an utterance:

“ nice turn signal asshole”

#writing #writeblr #poetry #poems on tumblr #poem

[maudes-tooth]

A fatal spring warmed by the palms of many hands was subdued by a storm of violent tears.

The grass ate the fingers of the two sitting on the lawn of the metropolis at the birth of June,

Her resplendent embers casting aglow the faces of those who sought her radiance.

Despite her their words were cobalt like the trenches of the sea, a disease cast its shadow in the suggestion of a void

One of them remembered May spilling in through a window and something mumbled

Atlas held the world in balance then.

Plum evenings flowed with syrup from glass flowers

Layers of white paint on the cracked window beckoned echoed voices of thirsty spirits below

Linens and books were a door and a cage scattered across the pine landscape

A dream in indulgence

#poem #poetry #writing