Tear in my side...I feel it all.

Poet, eternally sad, coffee addict, pizza snob.

[tearinmyside]

who can you trust?

aggrieved

flightless bird, grounded by discontent and high pitched chatter in the half empty birdbath. tongue bitten and adamant to deflect the whispers— silence become compliance, is the thread to keep your mouth muted as the hawks circle over the half dead oak tree in your neighbor's yard. misshapen and body spent, canine companionship is all that remains as blackout curtains obscure the sound of window lashing from angry branches. grief mounts against your bedroom door like piles of laundry, like slain trust.

-kab

[tearinmyside]

to sink beneath the surface...

the long hours

of watching supposed potential turn circles down a hair clogged drain. receding steps that sound like every stifled yawn that has been meticulously penned into a catalog. the dead rabbit in my mouth. the dead rabbit in my chest. hours to visualize the shortest farewells. hours to pinch useless, purpled flesh. wind blooms over slumped milkweed— stomach bloat, altered sighs in zerospace. the reincarnated rabbit eating clover, marching up the driveway to lead me to its hell tunnel.

-kab

[tearinmyside]

tornado watch...

a glimpse

a scream trapped in the throat, puckered lips above expectant gutters— finger smeared windows are a view master, are a kaleidoscope in black and white, in sepia and filtered through the grainy scope of barometric collapse. barefoot in the flood, rivulets in the eyes, prisms over floorboards, your lungs blackened by deadweight, saturated in the splintered wood of a lightning struck family tree.

-kab

[tearinmyside]

is there anything left to glean?

interstellar

your wrist bone ache, escapism etched into wrinkled gray matter, leave infertile seeds to decompose in the sandy soil. a catalog of distances, crimson connect the dots and frayed rope left as a keepsake, a requiem. cross cut shreds of a dead name, of a dying voice, a death knell over mockingbird song. excavate the chest and find nebulae, weeping dust clouds and famine.

-kab

[mournfulroses]

Marcel Proust, from a letter to Antoine Bibesco featured in The Selected Letters of Marcel Proust

[tearinmyside]

another one for a collection no one will read...

vertigo

instinct to brace for the fall, ungracefully spilled like watercolor over the hardest canvas. to summon black touch— blue lips and eye glaze. hip bend over flattened cushions, slow waves as a hush falls, like distant church bells from a town you've long abandoned. watch for table corners and your weakened will. ice melt and sundown as silent companions.

-kab

[tearinmyside]

road cracks swallowing hope...

monstrous

swallowed rainwater under this vacuous evening— streetlights burn out one by one, leave a frame obscured, anonymous, power lines keep no trace of the vanquished, the held breath of a tornado watch, to share a basement with dead spiders and lint, space for hungry flood, the same song on repeat as comfort, as vulnerable limbs stiffen in the summer's tar pit hunger— the resignation of the loss of the hope for the spectacular.

-kab

[mournfulroses]

Georgia O’Keeffe, from a letter to Alfred Stieglitz featured in My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933

[mournfulroses]

Nikolay Punin, from a diary entry featured in The Diaries of Nikolay Punin: 1904 - 1953

[tearinmyside]

excised, faded...

deadheading

sun drained color removed with rust dusted shears— faded beauty to mingle in a purple bucket, memory lodged in gray matter, gentle surf and your bronzed curves in the afternoon ocean view, a picture frame in an attic, upside down and laid to rest in the ash of a fire ravaged union, wildfire smoke haze over the bland stalks that gently sway in solitude, a requiem in liminal state.

-kab

[tearinmyside]

isolation's limp embrace...

crop damage

earthworm veins gasp, pant in the nutrient devoid carpet of this invasive stranglehold. all points are a scream of nerves, of wounds camouflaged under the barriers of heat, of woven tales that exist to distract from the morning fog dragged onto a porch, onto the crooked birdbath in a dead flower garden. last light squints, vacates like happiness. safer to remain untouched. easier to be tilled and left to mingle among the stiffened corpses of ladybugs and bumblebees.

-kab

[apoemaday]

"Although the wind..."

by Izumi Shikibu tr. Jane Hirshfield

Although the wind blows terribly here, the moonlight also leaks between the rook planks of this ruined house.

[tearinmyside]

a lifetime of being left behind...

disenfranchised

a nightlight, a flickering in storm season, a burned out bulb and faith's low dirge over your ever present sadness, a mirror swallows your dissolving outline— no one bids on the shadow in the window, a chair left empty, there is no space left for you to twist brittle bones, knots permanently bound, severed from a perch never meant to hold you— a disenfranchised life.

-kab

[tearinmyside]

to remain hidden...

underneath the bark

the fresh start, a ringless smooth cloistered from sharpened axes. such a pliable mouth to engage— secret swaddling before the angry sound of backhoes, the spine snap in dead calm. stasis becomes a form of survival, muted sky blasts and a burrow into pulp. escapism towards elusive dreamscape.

-kab

[mournfulroses]

Franz Kafka, from a letter to Felice Bauer written in 1913, featured in Letters To Felice

[mournfulroses]

Anaïs Nin, from a diary entry featured in The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 3. (1923-1927)

[tearinmyside]

so much tilling...

fallow seasons

a faked death, this dormant, shallow breath under tree bark, in the tangle of roots and grubs. something lies in hibernation, extended coma to preserve the last shreds of pinked organs. a winter state in the fallout, blue and green in a capsule, your scorched soil weariness. harvest hides from your achy fingers, dried riverbeds and a sandpaper tongue in this arid topography.

-kab