Spat out of my mouth

[matonabierce-blog]

Broken Record Player

Gifting dirty fingerprints and spit

in old liquor bottles. Wrinkled collars,

air for dinner, rough nights

you can’t pass without a smoke.

You won’t pluck strings but you’ll

suck anything that still has a high.

Empty lips begging for a drink.

I have a cup, I have a record. Let me put

you to bed so you will wake up tomorrow.

[matonabierce-blog]

“I can’t go back to yesterday”

A patch of frightened, stunted flowers

bend under his leather feet. Only to desire,

never to speak, the unatoned reflect

from caverns on his face, but

he can still see? A red jacket flutters

and catches his burnt out windows, yet he

cannot prey. Moral cancer breaks down his

toes like an animal for consumption. The delicate

rose tries to sing him down, but the red jacket

has folded away and he didn’t want to come

here innocently.

[matonabierce-blog]

How to Break My Heart

the chair was warm when

i found it. i stood it back up,

sitting in the silence of the

cluttered house. i lit my eyes

into his notebook. he doodled

cats and small lines of

poetry. “...and the crawling

cough of reasoning…”

there was a picture of his

mother bookmarking the pages

of a bunny eared book half opened

on the floor. he gave me

no lurking discoveries or

disclosed wishes.

he left behind a headstone

in Oak Hill.

[matonabierce-blog]

The Argument

The virgin clock rips through

its first hour, just like you

blew through me. Should I say

we spiraled off each other?

Moths hitting lights just

a tad too hard and dizzy,

you took my every word

and let it disintegrate in your

mouth. I was an expensive bruise,

but you blinked through the pain.

[matonabierce-blog]

Cedar

Tight jacket of a confident slope,

restlessness with a cigarette in hand shook and

hunched over the window sill. Symbolic of his

mood--- an empty

jar is tipped over on the floor. There are

brushes scattered across the desk and

a candle struggling on it’s last burnt

section of wick. He had worked so

hard to hide the inflection in

his voice that he had

forgotten his form.

Play at melancholic, but that is

something he could never be.

[matonabierce-blog]

Leaving Vermont

The sky isn’t friendly. It swallows

the earth, maybe it swallowed all

my green? Spike of greed. Asking

takes too much space. There is no air

to breathe between the white wash

face and brick.Where have all my

mountains gone? Are they hiding under

the two inches of snow? I think

they are mad at me.

[matonabierce-blog]

Friday Afternoons

Music faintly tinkles

from the

old radio above the

washer. A breeze from the

open window, and the

curtains leak outside. A

tea kettle is

screaming but the phone

has been unplugged.

Moonlight Path and

Old Spice. The

bed is full. There is sheet

music on the table.

[matonabierce-blog]

The Quiet Ones

There is an abandoned place in the woods

with thick glass bottles and buttons from coats

smashed pottery and plates

jutting from dirt mounds

car shells rotten, overtaken by weeds.

With stripped ivory and rusted hammers

pianos sit abandoned, sunken in:

but sometimes if you hit a key just right

you can still play old songs.

Bruise-colored shadows stretch from piles

overgrown with gnarled apple trees

roots suffocating the once trodden places

quietly tucking around the sleeping

and the leaves just decay,

the trees just stand,

flowers come and go

turning their naive heads,

at the place where the fallen

come to rest,

the dispassionate bystanders

as tongues expire,

soon just silence but for the rare clunk

of a piano without strings.

[matonabierce-blog]

Colored Emerald

The slightly curved reflection

rests in parallel.

Like a limp cloth, curled up

colored emerald, silvery white.

It shivers. Wishes to be doted

on and loved which shows in

it’s quivering breath.

It wants to be precious,

spread for you on a white bedsheet.

It looks at the mirror.

The slightly curved reflection

rests in parallel.

There is only quiet

here only quiet here only quiet.

[matonabierce-blog]

untitled.

I’m afraid I’ve misplaced my bones,

could I find them on your mantle?

Or perhaps on your dripping roof

trying to clog the holes?

I believe they grew away from me like vines,

covered the sagging porch,

filled the empty house;

the sink, the cracks, the lights

and crawling up your guilt-bent spine

are now limp around she

in your rancid bed sheets

reclining heavily against pillows.

I walk down the hall and

Silence waits in a room nearby,

tapping it’s fingers on the busted radio

and I see Patience step out alone

to the choked end of static.

But as I enter your sterile room,

from your bed she greets me:

“Good afternoon!”

Then goes on in her winsome way

making flutes out of femurs,

and I step from the room.

I sigh, ripping plastic from the walls

and filling myself up

“ all the same”

I say:

“all the same.”

[matonabierce-blog]

All The Things You Are

All the things you are,

are things I find dearest to me-

the dimmed light of  passive spirit,

the indecisiveness of the sea.

There is clear clarity like the winter,

across the land in a frozen sheet.

Gravel tongue like the rough pavement,

that bays not to passing feet.

A graveyard statue stark against skies,

or even the starry night

but gentle like wind beneath wings

as it passes in flight.

An ever thoughtful mind,

the warmth in the dark,

the tenderness in soft sheets-

A beloved and cherished mark.

Impossible to avoid,

like the setting of the sun,

the last few echoes of a note-

Inevitably to be done.

And someday with hope like that

of leafy climbing vines,

I hope to find that all the things you are

will finally become mine.

[matonabierce-blog]

Interwoven

She sits and is painted

under the shade of young oaks;

as birches are too milky

and wash out her apple cheeks.

The sparrows circle and dive,

and the grass hatefully obeys new weight.

The bees drag over each stroke of

black and beg her not to move,

but the hummingbirds soon shake their

heads at the bee’s effort and turn away.

It’s all an affair,

but immune, she delicately yawns.

The slight breath shakes the ground,

the canvas runs away

the canopy tree bends and petals fall

like wet snow drops melting into her

burnt woods hair.

She looks up with doe eyes

and a young, crooked tree sways

and bows before her.

“Woman” he beckons, “to exist, to conjure up my

secret heart.

The very fates reside in your

step and the

muses would sing to you

if still alive

and though they’d probably

fail to catch your image

just right, you’d at least

be immortalized.

You are not a miracle, but more.

That you exist is poetry,

every bow and turn is lyrical.

Who could not devote to you now as the

light kisses the shadow and the earth, the heavens

the moon, the sun

the air, the leaves

and death, pink lips”

She reaches up with another soft exhale

blowing out crystaline water that swallows

the spiteful grass and the moon pushes away the sun

before her seas eat up it’s light

and the air becomes so frightened

it flees for a single second before her

inhale draws it all back in

and death shies away and

heaven starts to crumble,

but still remains the tree.

“Yes, sweetness and sweetness still.”

He wrapped her up in his shining greens and whites,

and if he could kiss her with his viney hands he would.

She laughed and the tree pulled her in,

and their arms stretched to the porcelain sky

which cracked and fell down around them

and her breath became the wind that ran

through the shivering leaves

and nothing waited behind.

The earth greedily sucked up the water

and the sun took all the sounds and tucked them

in her junk drawer,

shifting back to the moon

for another kiss in their

broken home

and only the woman’s perfume lingered

just for a second longer before a passing sparrow

stole that too.

[matonabierce-blog]

The Streetlamps are Dead

The streetlamps are dead,

but we still try to burn them.

Sometimes one will light up

and it sets off a dim glow

for the rusting,

skeletal trains that take up

train tracks.

How frozen its feet must be,

stuck through rust, rain and ice

I wonder if it ever decided to

wake up, if it would be able to

climb or

would it crumble in on itself---

there is rot in the doorway.

The streetlamp flickers out.

Even the mosquitoes stay away

as the trees bow and pay

their respects.

[matonabierce-blog]

in my mouth.

I suck on a cigarette to

burn up the need of you

in my mouth

and I know I should have cried

all of you out by now

but you’ve shit all over

my mind and

shut up in my liver.

[matonabierce-blog]

Matona

A bundle of sins in

hand, he said that her

tears wouldn’t protect

flowers from rotting days

from leaving moons

from changing children

from crying homes

from crumbling

but the bitch spat out

immortal flowers and

snatched a day from work to

never let it leave and

cried with the child and

built an iron fortress with

six thousand pillow forts

and never let him in.

[matonabierce-blog]

Tea-time

An abundance of polite shyness,

she uncomfortably reclines on

the faded upholstery and gives

a light-hearted smile

over her brimming cup of

lemon tea. There are flowers

pinned into her dark hair

and her makeup has smudged

underneath her eyes. He, crowned

only for his clumsy anxious-

ness smiles back,

purely there to sip her

scent and not the bitter tea

He spiders his stubby hands

across the worn table, snatching

a crumbling sugar cookie

off the platter. Another

smile more like a cringe

as he watches him

watch her. He does

not take a bite.

[matonabierce-blog]

The Bat

There are not a lot of fancy furnishings in a dorm; sometimes there is a shelf someone brought along with their mini-fridge or perhaps a comfy chair, but most of the furniture is used and worn down by students before them. In this particular room, all of the original furnishings are in place. The desk is stained as well as the chair, and the current occupants of the room have done their best to put everything into its best arrangement. The walls are mostly bare aside from a couple cards from home carefully tacked onto the provided strip of cork board, and the room would feel overwhelmingly empty if not for the abundance of colored lights and the mismatching rug on the cold floors. A single ancient mirror dangles from a thin wire above a cluttered desk full of pictures and books. The pictures are of friends; snapshots of the group doing musical performances or other little activities like shopping or going out to lunch.

However, the point that draws the most attention at the desk is not the mess upon it or the pictures, but the small stuffed bat that hangs above it. Attached to the side of the mirror is a medium sized, hot pink, clip light whose purpose is to light up the desk in a way the fixed room light could not. On the neck of the lamp is where the bat hangs, wings wrapped unnaturally around it as if holding on for dear life. A traditional, living bat would wrap around the thin, flexible neck with its feet. Instead, this one has been attached to the lamp in a sort of hug, both of its wings velcroed together.

Something about the bat is both life like and overwhelmingly fake. Its eyes are a deep, shiny black with auburn rings that remain permanently open. The nose has long fallen off since its production, but the indent where the plastic nub had been sewn remains, along with the carefully stitched mouth. Small ears point from the top of the head which lies closest to the lamp head, and one is able to see the parts of the cheap felt fabric which has been worn thin and those that are still thick through the illumination of the light. The rest of the bat is a varying shade of tan, much like coffee that has a tad too much cream, made of a nicer cotton material. The wings are the darkest shade and have the barest details of a bat’s wings stitched into them.

Everyday it hangs over the desk like some sort of guardian. Many who come in and out of the room don’t even notice it, but the roommate will glance at it every once in awhile. He doesn’t ever ask after it, however, and it continues to be a silent question. Only one person has ever bothered to touch it recently, a single finger down the head from between the ears to the absent nose. Occasionally she will take it down to hug it, trapping the little thing between her thick arms and chest. She only holds it for a few moments before wrapping it back around the extension of the lamp, snapping the velcro pieces full of string and hair from its age together and letting it hang back in silence.