natespell @natespell-blog - Tumblr Blog

Thoroughbred

So they're off, and how the race is Full of fury, fierce and heavy In the nostrils of the specters Floating, sat spectating high, Fit for squatting in their pallor— Watching athletes under ride And gallop blindly for the line Where winners, losers, all arrive To meet the fate they run to find. I'm the worst of all—or worse The best of such voyeuric crowd, The peeping tom of peeping toms— Unduly skilled of eye and tongue Born legless, like a watchful worm.

#poem #poetry #creative #writing

Firewater

What, has whiskey failed to loose My knotted mind, to bend the steel I'm pinned beneath, rock me slow And soft out of the endless wake Of one more cruel, sleepless day Spent crawling further in to find How red desire crawls deeper still Than I could hope to ever delve Before the psychedelic march Of neurons finally subsides— And what use is this ear for blues When I and all are gone and none— What can bourbon burn away That time won't soon have seen undone?

#poetry #poem #creative #writing

So It Goes

Worn-down wanderers are we Torn between the barren land And rocky sea that would devour Us in silence or in fury,

Anxious for a place to stand And plant our souls to flourish on Beyond the planter, never tiring Of nomadic metaphysics,

Never dreaming of a gymnast Flying, twirling, catapulting Like so many shrapnel-sparks From one insatiable blaze,

Never listening For landing ash.

#poem #poetry

Crawler

Midnight worm on a rotting bush— Climbing faster than I'd thought, Scaling expertly. When you reach the top You stop To camouflage yourself, Perhaps in case I am So hungry as you guess. Now, when I take a light, I see you are no worm But a caterpillar, Cater-ing, pillar-ing, Making up a branch That never was so silver, Crawling, at midnight To breech a gap between The dead wood And a rotting leaf. I wish you wouldn't stop. Please, eat it all Away in front of me. No, no. You ignore my wish, "On my own porch", I think. You only freeze in place Like it is all you've ever had, I'm mad Until it hits me that the earth— Its branches, and their leaves— Are much more yours than mine, And I will soon be much more For your cousins than my own When earth un-births me. It seems much nicer When I think of you, And how you didn't listen to me Very much, at all. Couldn't. I look back now And were you ever there? Only you could say, "I love you, anyway," And make my pale cheek blush.

#Poem #poetry #creative #writing #literature

Because sometimes you write a limerick.

I'm a mustached maestro, A migrant man from Mexico, I make a marble-mocha macchiato My muchacho.

#Poem #limerick #shittyiphonepoetry

Crystal

Get you an empty crystal glass and sing, never stop till the crack in you flies out your voice and belts the cup with your red desire. Blood is thicker, unhesitant in its rhythmic course through a falling race, it races with unreadiness and honesty.

#shittyiphonepoem

Daisy

What is a daisy when it's tucked behind her right-side ear? It's a smile calling sunlight silly, pinned so far away. Golden petals grin, blind to their wearer pouring heartache out in rhymed verses. My head hangs hollow and I whisper, "The daisy you wear is drooping, dear."

#shittyiphonepoem #poem #poetry #creative #writing #literature

Merriment

I'm not gray when Your smirk starts Firing like buds Of springtime. Good grace, it's you? I wonder Why fireflies Abandon Trajectories. It's grisly To imagine The desire For lighted bugs In summer skies.

#Poem #poetry #creative #writing #literature

B&G

"Easy come, easy" I really love the things that you do. You’re a boy. Well, my glass is empty. Who’s fault is it you drank it up. You’re hot, wanna move to Denver and hang with me a bit. I’m not gonna do that. Why not? God, you didn’t order anything to go. No? (Can an outsider sit infield and consider the changing summer breeze on an unworn horizon?)

“Close cover • Strike gently” Can I get a lager from you Ash? Bottle, draft? From you, just bottle please. Bottle? Please. Salt and lime? No lime, please, and no salt. As you wish. Have you seen? Well of course. It’s a shame. Why? Virgin eyes are green and brimming ignorance. It never is blissful anyway. Hot damn. So, I won’t take another. I believe you’re both drunk and lying. So wrong, Ash.

“Keep away from children” Fuck me then, don’t drink this shot. Or this. Or here, gin. I hate it. Who doesn’t? Alcoholics. Exactly. Good one, that. Oh hush up. Why do you even come? The waking of winter in my dry skeleton. That’s just booze muddying the waters of regret so even tangerine lake-floors bleed cinnabar. No more, then? Not from me. Goodnight, Ash. Tomorrow?

#shittyiphonepoem #poem #creative #writing #literature

Prying

I hear her in my ear, and in my heart arises my response—I keep it hid. What good am I for having it, I thought, and what good is a thing she cannot give? “The tongue deceives,” she says, “and not the eyes.” “So look away from mine,” say I, “The facts are harder to be born with than the lies and heavier to bear than ignorance.” But with my gaze I speak a thing so light it never could be harshened into words— unblinking, I search out the farthest sight that can be seen behind her lash-veiled lids and find a crowbar leaning on a wall. “That’s it,” she says. And I just say, “That’s all?"

#poem #poetry #creative #writing

Grace

Her face said she wasn't when she said, "Fine," and slid another whiskey across the bar which I took outside with my smoke in dry silence under the wood awning where I tumbled my suspicions smooth until they shone behind the eyes that saw her ask me for a light and for a forehead-kiss before she broke into confession of, "He's booked, you know," which I did (months before she'd mentioned the probation broken, the court date, the hopeless odds), and I said so, so she shook out a yellow coil of smoke and crescendoed, threads loosening: Trey webbed with a dozen others, and her—what of Grace while he was banging them and as he bangs his head on cell walls while the cell of him bangs round her belly and when he fires, bang, a plea for mercy at her walls, what of his loves-not—crumbling in the arms of her loves-not—or what of the sky's blind eye squinting at wreckage in the dark?

#poem #poetry #prose #whatdoicallthis

Eventide

Staring down the sun you can’t stop from setting, pregnant with loneliness and starting to show the profiled outline of a weighty absence, cerulean blood battering time in your veins, you wait for the dusk and the moon’s winking laugh.

heart

ruin of ice— frozen, dead, ever-done. where is the warmth of fire and light— bright, beating, licking air and burning chest?

#peom #poetry #literature #creative #writing

Self-Poetrait

You—lyred out, beat— spend hours on the line and space filed between the inkling of rhyme, on a moment's breath caught, spun round a coil drawn by handles left empty. Liquor spoils the catch and release. Drunk blemishes croak rough exits through streets of cigarette smoke, where they tumble like rain on a spherical pane.

#poem #poetry #creative #writing #literature

A Dull Persuasion

a dull persuasion spreading through the night—the hailing horn growing near. and like a cartoon strung out, bridged across the steel with spine and breath, her hair fanned on grass and blacker than the pine-shade fence aligning with the track, she’s still, still waiting.

but does she wake? to what?

to pulse numbed and head-clouds rolling in her eyes, to sudden brightness nearing where she sits wincing at the light she'd heard she should expect? or else she doesn’t, only stays lounged in steady dreaming, riding on a wolf like horseback, over sky and under sea, passing sand and stars, howling with her romping stallion at the waxing moon?

read cards, read leaves, read and read and read. but she and I won’t mutter out another babbling sentence of the vademecum.

#poetry #poem #literature #creative #writing #creative writing

sip

something caustic in the head began its leaking down, dripping to the toes,

scraping the esophagus, bone-caged bellows melting, belly split, sunk.

radiated brainy bits of greenish-gray grime slid and slunk down spinal

discs—those wired cavities, creaking nerval chutes lined with marrow lube.

so, lean and take a slurp. drink the philosophic rind, the bitter truth, down

with too few shallow shots of whiskey. and will those bitters numb the sour spate? yes—

no—it depends—who gives a damn? who would take a drink to dry off?

#poem #poetry #creative #writing #literature #anotherbadpoem #wannabeapoet #hashtagshmashtag

The Winding Pall

Always runs the winding pall, And I have always watched it from the side, Wrapping those at ease in day, soothing those unrested in the night. I haven’t sought it and it’s all I’ve found.

In the thumb’s crook my red mixes with a patch of soap suds, spreading Thinner than that Rioja would run from a punched leather bota Bounced against the sun-strained back of a tanned peregrino. Leaking like gall from cracked clay, smiling at sharp glass, watching a kind of loss, I’m thankful for the favor of a cut, the rush of a little escape, And I’m sad these things only happen once a summer night When the rest of me is far from where I could be bled.

Wear a look-alike’s skull. Take photos of fire and call it memory. Spray jargon like grapeshot at the pixilated sea. Yell about the virtues of vice and vice versa With befrienders of the one true Void.

In the dog’s sidelong stare and panting tongue the contradiction Of love impatient, unkind, boastful, Of provision debouched from a smacked stone timidly, And not affection flowing free, only chow and leashes And self-sought tolerance. I lack it, a type of love that could be called despair, That makes bones shudder and eyeballs swell, Makes me muse if Adam taught his progeny to garden shame Because he couldn’t bury nakedness in soil.

Did I sit at the bar with a squat-bottled rubia drinking the health of a Guatemalan matron, Swallowing mollusks raw with salsa roja and splitting saltines in two above the counter, Wiping crumbs with a wet paper square, waving to the barman shucking, Waving again unseen, calling ¿primo? (I’d heard in La Paz From a Jersey-born hiker) till he turned to find me asking? Yes, he gave another, another, another and on till I couldn’t fish the number back. Chest full and heady haze, Shoelace shimmed between the stool-leg’s crossbar, Worn of sitting by the chiming cashbox at the storefront, Stomach bulging with excess, I exchange for my grubbing with plastic and drive toward an unmade bed.

Riding disjointed by the open window while pavement flashes underneath and past, I sing a desperate man in drought Who found no help in the union’s plan, Who lost his horse to madness in the fire, Whose barn was turned to char and ash, Whose prayers beneath the moonlight made men think on lunacy, And smile that they who early sang august southern airs Could wring songs from the barren dust trod by a Cadian habitant And tune his wails and teeth-gnash to the beat of shuffled boot-soles on the dirt, That now their voices carve across the humid Houston summer at sixty miles an hour in stereo. I join and cry for corn and rice blown by the wind, I find the silent fields an eerie clarion with them. They gave first groans, but I have mine to add and add them yet.

Always one eye on the winding pall That hangs between, climbs beyond, naturally descends, That lies with all who tremor in day, stays by all who sleep sound in the night, That calls me what I am and doesn’t know my name. I’d like to fear it if I only could.

#poem #poetry #literature #creative #writing

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

natespell