I'm dreaming
dreaming of days with full clean
sunbeams
to fall on our thirsty skins
and brilliant wildflowers
to bathe our eyes
I'm dreaming of the earth,
regnant and resplendent,
her womb open
as she delivers life
to the soil and the sea
My sleeping thoughts are of
hope and goodness,
peace, goodwill towards men
and women, and the people
who don't look like this movie star
or that politician
My freed desires frolicking,
they take the shape of
mouths filled (bellies, too)
and bodies warm in
homes big enough
and hearts big enough
for all us lost people
to live in
when did i become
a poor baker
a man who shapes
malformed loaves
when did i become
the one
whose souffle always collapses
whose puff pastry fails to rise
whose cookies look
pale, sad, spiritually sour
as if plucked
from the cradle of a plastic carton
when did my ginger bread
stop starting from scratch
and my soda bread
become bitter
the flour on my apron is stale
and the stains are lonely for newcomers
tortillas shape too slowly
beneath my rolling pin
they are thick
and not round
and too small for tacos
I refuse to shed tears
'cause society told me
I'm too smart, too much,
too stupid, too fat
for love.
I wipe my eyes.
I go on loving and losing,
learning that life is a
double-edged sword,
poised and pointed
at my soft underbelly,
at my heart.
My heart, with its mollusk valves,
and my ears with their gills,
those Eustachian tubes in which
I have to equalize pressure when I'm freediving:
Love is just like freediving.
You jump or fall into something deeper than
you are tall, where you can't breathe
and reason does not escape your lips,
and you have to figure out how to walk
and swim through the thick substance of dizziness,
carry the weight (
Holding you in my arms,
I cradle the brightest thing
in the universe.
Between us, my hopes
crackle in fingers of lightning.
Your skin feels like my own,
cool and smooth. I feel our breath
in the movement of our arms and legs.
I feel the memories of your tears, kisses,
pleasure, and warmth falling on me,
raindrops,
wet and mingling.
Sometimes, making love, the light
is just right, and the world falls away.
Almost every time with you is like that.
I want to be the one that holds you.
I want to be the one.
I curl, a climber-tendril
around her shoulders,
curling around the pain
and the pleasure inside me
I curl around her
Sometimes I weep in her hair
and feel my eyelashes touch hers, damp
I unfurl, a new leaf,
stretching out to my
green soft edges
and feeling the warmth of the sun,
her love
I plant roots in her, around
the softness of her,
around her heart
I want to shade her from the world
and leave blossoms, petals,
bright colors on her skin
surrounding scars and bruises and tears and fears
which have no name, but can only be remembered as
nights spent awake crying for help
with no one listening
but now I am here and I listen
and I touch,
Bullseye
concentric rings
of black and white
where the world pins
people-butterflies
to the wall for a collection
or exhibit
the pin
in my forehead
gives me a migraine
and the label
outside my box reads
"queer, pagan, neurodivergent, liberal, fat, druggie"
but inside I have different
concentric rings,
an oak tree inside me
with layers that say things like
"loves beauty"
"likes to run with dogs"
"smokes medicinally for chronic health problems"
and
"survived many abuses"
The butterfly-people
in the natural-history-museum-zoo
of the world
all have concentric rings inside
telling stories
but they are not black and white
or set in binaries and a
I'm dreaming
dreaming of days with full clean
sunbeams
to fall on our thirsty skins
and brilliant wildflowers
to bathe our eyes
I'm dreaming of the earth,
regnant and resplendent,
her womb open
as she delivers life
to the soil and the sea
My sleeping thoughts are of
hope and goodness,
peace, goodwill towards men
and women, and the people
who don't look like this movie star
or that politician
My freed desires frolicking,
they take the shape of
mouths filled (bellies, too)
and bodies warm in
homes big enough
and hearts big enough
for all us lost people
to live in
when did i become
a poor baker
a man who shapes
malformed loaves
when did i become
the one
whose souffle always collapses
whose puff pastry fails to rise
whose cookies look
pale, sad, spiritually sour
as if plucked
from the cradle of a plastic carton
when did my ginger bread
stop starting from scratch
and my soda bread
become bitter
the flour on my apron is stale
and the stains are lonely for newcomers
tortillas shape too slowly
beneath my rolling pin
they are thick
and not round
and too small for tacos
I refuse to shed tears
'cause society told me
I'm too smart, too much,
too stupid, too fat
for love.
I wipe my eyes.
I go on loving and losing,
learning that life is a
double-edged sword,
poised and pointed
at my soft underbelly,
at my heart.
My heart, with its mollusk valves,
and my ears with their gills,
those Eustachian tubes in which
I have to equalize pressure when I'm freediving:
Love is just like freediving.
You jump or fall into something deeper than
you are tall, where you can't breathe
and reason does not escape your lips,
and you have to figure out how to walk
and swim through the thick substance of dizziness,
carry the weight (
Holding you in my arms,
I cradle the brightest thing
in the universe.
Between us, my hopes
crackle in fingers of lightning.
Your skin feels like my own,
cool and smooth. I feel our breath
in the movement of our arms and legs.
I feel the memories of your tears, kisses,
pleasure, and warmth falling on me,
raindrops,
wet and mingling.
Sometimes, making love, the light
is just right, and the world falls away.
Almost every time with you is like that.
I want to be the one that holds you.
I want to be the one.
I curl, a climber-tendril
around her shoulders,
curling around the pain
and the pleasure inside me
I curl around her
Sometimes I weep in her hair
and feel my eyelashes touch hers, damp
I unfurl, a new leaf,
stretching out to my
green soft edges
and feeling the warmth of the sun,
her love
I plant roots in her, around
the softness of her,
around her heart
I want to shade her from the world
and leave blossoms, petals,
bright colors on her skin
surrounding scars and bruises and tears and fears
which have no name, but can only be remembered as
nights spent awake crying for help
with no one listening
but now I am here and I listen
and I touch,
Bullseye
concentric rings
of black and white
where the world pins
people-butterflies
to the wall for a collection
or exhibit
the pin
in my forehead
gives me a migraine
and the label
outside my box reads
"queer, pagan, neurodivergent, liberal, fat, druggie"
but inside I have different
concentric rings,
an oak tree inside me
with layers that say things like
"loves beauty"
"likes to run with dogs"
"smokes medicinally for chronic health problems"
and
"survived many abuses"
The butterfly-people
in the natural-history-museum-zoo
of the world
all have concentric rings inside
telling stories
but they are not black and white
or set in binaries and a
I am growing.
I am flowing.
I am shedding my skin,
leaving it all behind.
I am twisting.
I am turning.
I am an enigma,
a superfluous fish
out of water.
I am smoke
I am mirrors
I am a magician
better than Merlin.
I am me
I am you
I am everyone
Everyone is I.
Super nova
Super sight
Super lover
of the Light
of the Dark
of the Gray Shades Inbetween.
I am sexless.
I am dreams.
I am visions
of the Deepest
Reaches of your Mind.
And mind the mind that minds
the ways of elder woods
caught beneath the past feet
that trampled us into dust.
Leave me to this object
of my fate,
caught between the arms
of earth and sky.
You took it to heart.
That fortune cookie's words.
You wrapped them in your mind
with silk and thread and a bit of time.
Soaked them in love and watched those
words grow up in to a strong idea:
formed into a life.
You threw a galaxy on a spinning wheel once
I moved into the circle of light in the room
that big, only light, it was warm.
We chatted as your hands moved, and I found a wheel
and I didn't make anything like what you made
but you still liked it anyway.
And we sat and we made and the light stayed warm
and time moved by, as it is wont to do
And before we knew it, we opened the deadening curtain
and there was a great lightness that covered everything
and it spun through the air and it whispered and sang
And it tickled the sky and the earth and the trees
And we sunk our feet into it and it was nothing like sand
but we let it bury us
If there lived in the world a man
as rugged and as strong as I,
who could forbear with me yet go against-
who took to the black woods and the silver hills
mostly unafraid-
who savored salt and the lay of fur
with fingertips of dirt and weather,
whose lips rolled words like smoke, like fog-
I would creep into his arms in the prologue of the night,
air sweet with the scent of new-cut hay,
alive with the nightjar's call.
guide me to the pillars
that I might
in one last act of sanity
pull down the artifice
of the idol worshippers
and pass, with some dignity,
into the questionable histories.
when all is said and done
and shed and won, the truth
is that I will die alone
in the presence of my enemies
and be eulogized by those
who deserted me in life
as an inconvenient passion.
William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.
a story as linear as time by canislupusaeterna, literature
Literature
a story as linear as time
1.
black line bats told me to tell you
the dots on your inner thigh
are cancerous
and will, in time
give you the equation that would allow you to
surgically remove my metaphor
I think
but then cancer has a way of growing in the awkward places
and like emotion
cancer doesn't wait for you to whisper to it
emotion nurtures your unhappy
smiles
and black line bats has gotten it wrong before
but the scribbles underneath the table
they were probably malignant before I was told about your dots
and so I think maybe
we should just ignore them altogether
black line bats might kick me for telling you this
but honestly, you're more prec
Warm gusts from the gulf of you,
kisses sustained in mid-air
drenched of my rain
washing salt from sea foam eyes.
Contusions line the mucus within,
releasing me of emotional pain
in spite the cruelty of this dimension.
Rising weightless, thermals turning-
a lightness of being molded into you
amidst a storm that tethers us.
The sides of my skull burning,
a blinding sirocco, its white heat
bursts from my palms
the screams recalling your predator
escape from my broken lips.
Your desire; the dark discolor of scars,
a raging pulse of reptile
that I have given all of myself
and taken all of you--
proof.
I was harried
and hurried,
wolf-teeth-worried,
broken down and abraded
by the horrible sluggish pitch.
I was preserved for a million years,
a perfect unmoving artifact.
The earth froze and thawed.
The ice crystals of my soul
slowly began to run,
as I was chiseled out of the abyss,
carried slowly to the surface on the
groaning back of a winch and crane.
The metal arms that enclosed me
touched me with rust
as the sunlight wrapped around me for the first time
in a million years.
The light licked
my being
from my toes to my inner core,
filling me with warmth.
I had survived everything, even death.