Imperfect Italics @amphibrachic - Tumblr Blog

As Sirius was panting in the muggy

Dusk, the sun settled itself to rest,

A shaft of pink glinted on the mangled

Beak of a dead body, a crow.

In a nest of powder blue

Forget-me-nots it lay,

While the sky echoed

With mourning caws.

Despairing, angry things.

Contorted in rigor mortis,

Its black body was thick

And teeming with flies.

I wrapped the body

In butcher paper.

Cradling its stiff neck,

In my hands, the wax crinkled.

It felt like a warm thing in my hands,

Like a child or some other innocent carrion

I set it out on the lawn, onyx

eyes unblinking, where, kneeling,

Grasshoppers brushed at my legs

And the fireflies dabbled in morse code.

I crouched and waited for the yellow eyes.

I made a deal with the coyotes.

A bird for some silence.

Futile deal. My tinnitus rings

Everlasting, evertorment.

But I wanted to see their eyes,

Those yellow glowing things.

Like a perverted sun

Had been set in the socket.

To light up the viscera

Of their prey.

Skulls sit on my mantelpiece:

dead things, summer’s leftovers.

It is the cruelest season:

honeysuckle and rot,

ferment and decay.

I dip them in silver but

The coat is patchy and bone

Struggles out. I make necklaces.

I give them away, so my heart

Can have illusory gratitude.

The crows have not stopped shrieking.

Hoarsely demanding retribution.

The sky is black with their wings,

And the air is heady with pollen.

The coyotes keep their word, silent

A pack of dirty fur and canines.

Their eyes gleam yellow

Until sunrise relieves their duties.

Crow//Azrael Fíernen

My dreams don’t have tongues. Only the nightmares were prodigies, and learned how to speak.

Poem in Progress

#excerpt #poem in progress #quote #my writing #original #spilled ink #me #ampoet #poets on tumblr #poetry #poetry on tumblr #dreams #nightmares #language #speaking #tongues #excerpt from a poem I'll never write #pip

Puto me convalescere, dimetterens te recedere in murmerem spumeum flucti ut trans littus reptat

I think I’m convalescing, letting you recede into the foam-fingered murmur of the tide as it slinks down the beach.

#latin poetry #funky #fun #fresh #my writing #my poetry #tagammenon

My father carves up the moon

Like my birthday cake at

The apocalypse of eleven

He names me, Iscariot

And then laughs.

He hands me a marble

And I swallow it, letting it dissolve

On my tongue like candy.

He then tells me that it is home

And I have eaten myself.

“Even my eyes?” I ask suddenly

Petrified of turning blind.

“Even them” he laughs and evaporates

Into the sunlight. And the world is dark

And I remembered before there were suns

There was nothing.

Stumbling blind, and empty,

And caught inside of myself,

Digesting, emulsifying.

You’ve got to learn to not

Be afraid of the dark.

Callow, and juvenile

I beg for reason to swaddle me

In my blanket and place a mobile

Above my cradle like a plastic sky.

Moon//Azrael Fíernen

#poetry #poets on tumblr #moon #writing #eleven #birthday #poems #poems on tumblr #writerscreed #starlitpoems #starlitwitness #iscariot #ampoet #write #writers on tumblr #callow #trippy

Charmed by the arabesque of the American dream, misty-eyed we shamble towards liberty...

Marriage on the Freeway, poem in progress

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amphibrachic

“The gentle brag of her hands, as the graphite smudges stray marks on her pointed fingers, speaks soft: I make, I make, I make. I think if I knew how, I would sing, like honey and green, just so she could comprehend this wellspring of heart. She told me I was a cold exposure cityscape and I nearly cried, because the swish of goldenrod, lithe and upright jaundice, was closer to her tune. When I wished on a star, she drew me a constellation and sidereal sorrow was greater than the white joy of burning. Men like to call Sappho a poetess for her friends and so I guess I write compliments. The amicable delights are filed in my jaw where the flute-teacher says I should keep my air. And there’s more room for breathing if you keep your tongue back. but my tone has always wavered and become airy, so I speak. Abandoned reason cries out at the spongy, prolific organ, when I truly desire to become graphite: an ironed syncope expressive of devotion. Now, I vomit up my heart into a jar and name it ‘Fig’, as if that will distance what it is from my chest cavity. It’s a pretty little bell jar where I used to keep fireflies and bees, stupidly hitting the glass sides, like everything translucent was a way out. As she sketches out her future, yellow, I make, I make, I make.”

— Let’s Call This a Plathitude

I watch you kiss under a cloud

Of pretty little red electrons,

Excited and perfectly uncertain

That they are the right amount

Of unholy and holy.

Excerpt//Azrael Fíernen

The roar of my ears is echoing the rapture’s trumpets, silver and bright: a homing beacon to my own brain.

A Poem in Progress, Neptune

The gentle brag of her hands, as the graphite smudges stray marks on her pointed fingers, speaks soft: I make, I make, I make. I think if I knew how, I would sing, like honey and green, just so she could comprehend this wellspring of heart. She told me I was a cold exposure cityscape and I nearly cried, because the swish of goldenrod, lithe and upright jaundice, was closer to her tune. When I wished on a star, she drew me a constellation and sidereal sorrow was greater than the white joy of burning. Men like to call Sappho a poetess for her friends and so I guess I write compliments. The amicable delights are filed in my jaw where the flute-teacher says I should keep my air. And there’s more room for breathing if you keep your tongue back. but my tone has always wavered and become airy, so I speak. Abandoned reason cries out at the spongy, prolific organ, when I truly desire to become graphite: an ironed syncope expressive of devotion. Now, I vomit up my heart into a jar and name it ‘Fig’, as if that will distance what it is from my chest cavity. It’s a pretty little bell jar where I used to keep fireflies and bees, stupidly hitting the glass sides, like everything translucent was a way out. As she sketches out her future, yellow, I make, I make, I make.

Let’s Call This a Plathitude

I will come pouring out like radiation and with a vengeance set into my cavities.

Poem in Progress, Solar Revolutions

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I am just grey-feathered and degenerate.

From easy, a poem in progress

#except from a book i'll never write #excerpt from a poem i'll never write #exceprt #easy #writing #spilled ink #poetry #poets on tumblr

amphibrachic

“Why am I always the witness, called up to the stand to testify on my inaction? Anything’s right if it sounds pretty enough on your tongue. So, why am I tasked with recording the screams, the screech of the tires, the sinew peeling off from the bone, the shockwave, the radiation, all those pleas that stick between your teeth? Why is the aftermath of all that disaster left to me? Why am I cleaning up the sorry, sorry mess your mistakes left behind? Why am I always the spy, the eavesdropper on a fractured love, cautiously peering from around the curvature of the moon? The witness of an illicit starlit scene and the empty beer bottles shattered on the dock. The flash of the cigarette lighting, how you quench it in the lake, how you kiss and I can’t look away. You whisper his name like he’s holy and I wonder if I pray just because I like the way God sounds in my mouth. I cordon off all these infractions and when the court calls me up to judge your character, I lay them out piece by piece, stitching together a narrative that screams GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY, like the incessant shrieks of the crows as they chase the hawk across the clouded sky. And I’d be a liar if I didn’t want you to serve your sentence and regret ever letting me watch every single falsehood drape across your shoulders like the shawl of dusky cigarette smoke you always carry with you. And I’d be a liar if I didn’t want to run away with you at midnight in a run-down car and have the law chasing us. I’d be a liar if I didn’t want to be the criminal or even your victim. Anything’s better than writing down history but never taking part. Always sensible, always reasonable; well, reason has no part in the way I want to watch my veins bleed out at your hand. I am the ground, steady, reliable in my reliability, always expected; a calculable being. I am tired of mapping the curve of a course you charted for me. Prescribe me some Thorazine for this lack of self-preservation. For once I want to be a surprise: I want to be the rise in your pulse, I want to be on either end of the gun. I’m tired of scrubbing off the blood and then showing the photos as evidence. I’m tired of always witnessing a crime but never taking part or at least being the blood spilled on the kitchen floor, seeping into the records.”

— Does being in love with the accused recuse me from testifying?

“What do you want most of all,” asked Polaris to the poet and she wept in a symphony of a thousand golden-edged violins. “To be written,” she said, “because I am choking on the ink on my tongue, because I am saturated with something brighter than flesh can hold.” “What do you want me to write?” “Everything, as long as it’s a lie that sounds true enough.”

Polaris knows the way, quiet in its solidity.

It holds its place and guides us the way

in the pale faint light,

wobbling on the river,

as it swells at the banks

where the cattails blur earth

and water.

The poet is lost in this place

and she sings to Polaris

in a croaking voice

and she balters,

begging it to be graceful.

Does she drown, searching

for a symphony in her name?

Does she beg again,

for a constellation to engrave

her story into the sky?

The poet sinks into the mud

rich with nitrogen and pain

and lets time forget

her soliloquies.

Polaris//Azrael Fíernen

#starlitpoems #starlitprompt #starlit prompt #writing #polaris #stars #poetry #spilled ink

amphibrachic

Absolve//Azrael Fíernen

amphibrachic

I hide between the ampersands

&

Try to forget the way that moonlight

Is intoxicating

We’ve all got our vices mine is just

Melancholy. More chameleon than anything

Shattered mirror, piecing back together

Refracted fragments

Somedays the bucolic sun

Is softer than silken marble

&

The way your name sounds on your tongue

Is akin to plum juice running down my chin

All this decadence is undeserved

I just want the moon and I just want

The crucifix to absolve me of loving you

#transcription #poetry #ampoet #poets on tumblr

Absolve//Azrael Fíernen

You do not have to to be good

But how I want to

how I want a golden halo to slice open my palms

it’s easier to be loved when you’re bleeding

Tell me about your despair, yours-

Oh, I will don’t worry

I am spewing my life story

like anyone gives a damn

most of all the clear blue sky

scrubbed clean with bleach

each morning when we are restlessly asleep

It echoes back at me in the nasal cries

of the wild geese flapping across the sky

in V-formation, a clean-cut triangle of space

I spin, clinging to the film of the earth

and wonder at my place

in the family of things

Wild Geese//Azrael Fīernen

Have you ever tried to tame a maenad while she is moondrunk, restless? I comb out her tangled hair, black curls unspooling like the fates’ threads at my fingertips.

Dionysius comes to tell me he wants to kiss me and he wants her back. I say no on both accounts and spit at his fruity lips because even gods forget how to hold their liquor and his golden blood is swarming with potential for madness

I tell him I’m not going to fuck her like some animal and I watch her rib cage inflate and sag as oxygen fills her lungs and brushes across the grape-clusters of her alveoli. I watch how the freckles dusting her cheekbones look like constellations. I tell Dionysius to go away because she isn’t some fermented wine to be swallowed and forgotten and she isn’t there to burn off her own skin for entertainment.

He slinks behind a tree, a laurel wreath perched precariously as it hangs off half his head. His hair is dark as the night and his cheeks are flushed but there is sadness welling in his eyes. I remember that he had love once and I still don’t want to kiss him but I hope Ariadne is kind even though she has been splintered a thousand different times.

and I whisper to that maenad that she’ll remember how to dance again and I will pluck the lyre like sinew when she wakes up. I too fall asleep to the rustle of her breathing. There is something quiet about giving and in her small hands she carves out the honey from the ground and the milk from the streams she is take take take but I am content to let her scoop out my heart like soft fruit

Maenad//Azrael Fíernen

#poets on tumblr #writerscreed #poetry #mythology #mythological poetry #myth poetry #maenads #maedand #her name means wisdom #poems #poems on tumblr #writing #writing on tumblr #aphelionbruise #aphelion bruise #wanna talk about loving straight girls?

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