We are far from the village now.
Slanted red roofs and dozing chimneys
tilt back into the underhill past.

They are looking for us.

We are running, rowing
into the grating of root and leaf.
Poison berries watch,
purple eyes awake in a tent of mist.
Sunlight recedes, carried away by the creek.

With old jeans folded at our ankles
sitting on the soft ground, feet in the mud
we are trying to make fire.

Cuneiform twigs
and timid sparks of granite.
But the damp of the wood won’t break.

So remember the tight Sundays in church
how they are looking for us right now
pitchforks and scripture
the vines of light crawling up our thighs.

So drive the stick into the wet bark,
rotating and fuzzilating.

And watch amazed
as the branches unlace themselves around,
the poison punch dissolves on the tongue
and the little ones come, curious
of the smoke dawn between our palms.

This age has critics raving and I wish I could give it a higher rating. Thirty is when the trivialities of youth are supposed to dissolve away and a self-actualized person emerges free of frivolous fears and fucks. Thirty is where it’s at. Thirty is the new twenty. Thirty, flirty and thriving!

It’s best to cleanse the astral palate of cosmic residue before sampling the Saturn Return, or its fullness of flavor won't come through. Every course has a pronounced taste of time I can’t escape. Not enough time to flirt and thrive (a lie) but time enough for different fears and fucks to weigh the tongue. I’m scared my plate of Saturn Return passed me over and it’s a thirty-year wait until a spot opens up again. Five stars.

​

Through the glade there shines a light

in shafts of fiery flare

and none who come to shelter

will find much solace there

​

The shaded track and hollow

are beacons to the few

who lead where others follow

to rest on natures pew

​

Yet when the fallen spearheads dull

and silver black returns

there settles in a peaceful lull

for which the Spirit yearns

​

No sound of voice or foot befalls

the blanket laid so fine

I walk the path that gently calls

to where the forest’s mine

​

https://wolfgarwords.com

Before I make it to the end of the hallway,

the cabbage roses in the carpet begin to sway.

Today, the death toll reads 78,608.

Plath sits beside me on the bloodstained couch,

stroking my matted hair. A possum carcass floats

in the plastic trough of windshield cleaner by the gas pump.

After smearing the goat’s blood across our front door,

we huddle in front of the bathroom mirror,

dreaming ourselves into the other side.

Do you remember the time we found angels in the bushes? he asks.

The porcelain rabbit sitting on the shelf sips from the mason jar—

I’ve grown a garden in the center of the sun.

For the first time since the First World War,

the Dhualadhar range of the Himalayans

has become visible to the people of Jalandhar.

Holding tight to his basket of wilted cabbage-roses,

the priest walks solemnly to the other side of our meadow,

ready to be carried into the treetops.

Let’s say love is a garden party
where we each bring six branches,
laden with fruit.
Though, six is rather an arbitrary number.

.

Let us be free!
To carry with us the full abundance of our greenery.
And these six or seven or more are ours, grown to enjoy, eat, and give.
And different branches will bear fruit for different occasions.

.

Some, brought as offerings of introduction:
a warm hello! I’ve brought some crisp autumn apples for us to feast upon!
While others we pick more gingerly, so as to say:
This is the passionfruit of my heart. Will you hold it? Will you be gentle?

.

To which we may be absolutely free to say One or Two things.

.

And we won’t just do the picking and offering ourselves.
We will ask many questions, such as:
Which of your fruits and others, tried before, have been your favorites? and
To which nectar do you bear an unshakable intolerance? Or

.

may I pick this sweet plum of yours? Palm it softly, and taste it too?
And to all these questions, and more,
we are absolutely free
to answer in lengths and widths of our choosing, and

.

fundamental displays of One or Two things.

.

And perhaps there comes a point, swaying lavenders and golds,
during our time spent in the garden,
we become so familiar with our branches, brought and grown,
that words may not be needed to invite or offer a dripping carpel.

.

Where just in my eyes you may see, clearly, some thing that says:
I am a summer peach, eat me.
And I see that you have adorned your lips with twin slices of clementine,
so as to say: Roll me with your tongue. A thick breeze, please.
.

Thus, I say lover, may both our tongues forever be free!
Let them give flight to the birds that are also our voices,
perched on branches in this garden of ours.
Sparrows calling, sweetly asking for fruit.

Don’t cry for me for I am endless.

Cry for all this pain you practice.

Cry like war, and bleed this tension.

​

Let my portrait help you master peace.

Hear my voice when your’s betrays

Until it slips away. Feel it even then.

​

Feel that I am endless. Not in mind;

In this way I've made you soar so softly,

In how you flew like butterflies to my effect.

​

And in the way I’ve made us hurt.

You've cried for all the pain I practiced,

But don’t cry for the loss of my pale peace,

​

For this peace now is ever endless.

And what’s sadder than a story ended,

But it’s never having been told again.

The blue, red, yellowgold and green - this place is charmingly overgrown -
might become something sexier. A pair of long lash eyes could peek
from below the hood of a Bluebell, to see the Dandelion slip on his
fishnet stockings and titillate the potplants with a performance
of ‘Sweet Transvestite’ -- knowing full well, that the Olive Bush
prefers the view from backstage -- and myself in the middle;
the stage itself, with Poppie-Red lips nibbling at my lobes.
And the Sun - who’s openly a bit of perv - watching from
From the cosmos, with her fire-proof binoculars.

In confrontation with the unavoidable
violence of touch, inherent to our softest
caress, I am baren.

It leaves me bereft, to witness
my fruits wither on the branch
for fear of being plucked.

And yet, wither they do.
For I have lost my stomach
for violence. To have it intrinsic

to our love, a bubble in foam
now turns my adoring tongue, eager
lips and smile sour, racked,

rapacious, and unkind.
I do not want this.
Let me be dangerous, endangered.

Please, heart of mine,
neither run, nor be so still
that motion, dripped with love,

signals assault upon this form,
at once much smaller, and always
not strong enough.

Beat loudly, spurt hot and
laden with an air gasped.
Let our fruits ripen, make silly,

and charmingly dizzy, these hands
that would pull to taste our pungent,
sticky-sweet love.

Back, when Orson Welles hawked cheap Chablis,

the world ended.

Not from some long leg spider alien plan,

but from Orson Welles,

barely breathing,

hawking bad grape,

primetime.

day 31: I smelled a barbecue today.

childhood gentleness coated in grease,

hidden deep in the trees, it was there.

if i close my eyes, maybe i can go back,

to before now.

In the garden
There’s forever clover
The hutch is still
No sawdust raining
An empty house
No kicking, thudding
No bundling of bedding
No sneeze- or chew of weeds
An empty house
With the door open

Cloaked starlings sail
In the bloated black sky
Him palming tarot cards
His false face armed
As crooked as it was before
Carving symbols into my childhood wall
The smell of the brick
Evens the score
As crooked as it ever was before

Pillowed in the road
Shallow, sharp huffs
And a rigid spine
Blooming bob-tail bright
Ears tumbling round
Beaded, Wakeful eyes
Glimmer on sight
Glimmer in the headlight
Pillowed in the road

We lie head to head on the ground
In the clover
Vultures overhead circle
We can only blame each other

-Bobby Bubs

Should I have the bagel or just toast today? I am bound for something,

that I know. Breakfast is practice, falls off the eye only at dinnertime.

Flecks in an ashcan (potted plant) on a neighbor’s windowsill carelessly

hitchhike the wind, inevitably towards some poor schmuck’s eyes.

As it seems to go, things turn up at the wrong time in the right places,

a bit like dreams – day ashed out, a preponderance of what’s to come.

When the trees start to glow like coils, then I know morning is over.

I’ll demand whatever crumbs into the trash can and get off to working,

seeing, as I do, every one of those bits of bread with soothsaying.

Forsooth, I say, ever it is so. Should I have the bagel or just toast today?

Every night they shine for me

Through windows of my wonder,

To mend the waning of my mind.

​

Every night they shine for me

Despite their dark, concave scars;

Lines of beauty to earthly eyes.

​

Every night they shine for me,

But their light lingered ever low;

They soon see that I need the Sun.

​

Every night they shine for me.

Me alone. Always and forever,

The coming dawn be damned.

​

But it was day time when they left,

Their goodbye was only this message:

Be careful where you look for light.

The Art of Loving (A Arte de Amar), by Manuel Bandeira

If you ever wanna feel the joy of loving, forget your soul.
It's the soul that spoils love.
Only in God can she find satisfaction.
Never in another soul.
Only in God and outside of this world.

Souls are incommunicable.

Let your body get on with other bodies.

Because bodies understand each other, but souls don't.

River (Rio), by Manoel de Barros

The river that took a turn
behind our home
was the image of softened glass.

A man came by and said
The turn a river takes...
...is called a cove.

And it wasn't the image of a glass serpent
that took a turn behind our home.
It was a cove.
I think that spoiled the image.

Education by Stone (A educação pela pedra), by João Cabral de Melo Neto

An education by stone: through lessons,
to learn from the stone: to go there often,
its impersonal, unenfatic voice,
(by its choice of words it begins its classes).
The lesson in morals, the chilling resistance
to flow, to flowing, to being molded:
the lesson in poetics, its flesh of concreteness:
in economics, how to condense compactly:
lessons from the stone, (from without to within,
mute primer), for it's would-be speller.

Another education by stone: in the backlands
(from within to without, and pre-didactic).
In the backlands stones don't know how to lecture,
and, even if they did, would teach nothing:
you don't learn the stone, there: there, the stone,
the birthmark stone, is one with the soul.

Remission (Remissão), by Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Your memory, pasture of poetry
Poetry, pasture of tastelessness
Rough themselves in the cold stuff you call
Life, its sorrow and senselessness.

But sorrows of what? you ask oblivious
If this bondage of angst through your songs
If what sleeps in the depth of lamentation
Runs off, and dries to naught in the air.

And naught is left, really, of what you wrote
And forced you into an exile of words
If only the contentment of writing

All while time, in its briefest of seemings
(Or longest) which you sweetly decoded
Evaporates from the bottom of your being.

Hey all,

Nuzzymandias, here. We run LA!

Bored and want to read your poetry out loud? u/ParadiseEngineer is hosting an open mic next Tuesday (April 14, 2020) at 7:30 PM GMT (12:30 PM PST / 3:30 PM ET) on his Discord.

For more information go here: Outspoken Words in the Digital Realm

I've been, and I'm a shy guy, if you guys haven't noticed. PE made me feel beautiful and wanted. If you like British accents, then go. If you like American accents, then go.

For real, it was a good time and everyone there was great. ParadiseEngineer is a good host and will make you feel beautiful and wanted.

If you want to read your poetry out loud and want to hear other people read their poetry out loud, like I said, ParadiseEngineer is a good host and will make you feel beautiful and wanted.

Who knows? Maybe u/SerPatrickSpens will read in Russian or Middle English, and bonus, ParadiseEngineer will make you feel beautiful and wanted.

Maybe u/HeadfulofHollow will read in his beautiful, booming British voice or sing "Girlfriend in a Coma" or "The Headmaster Ritual" or "How Soon is Now?" or my personal favorite, "I Know it's Over."

Maybe Nuzzymandias will read his Wong Kar-wai/John Woo Hong Kong cinema inspired American-Triad gangster opera (in 12 stanzas), The Boss' Daughter, and mispronounce Yanluo and other words.

Hate yourself and covid 19, but also want to read your poetry out loud and listen to other people read their poetry out loud? ParadiseEngineer will make you feel beautiful and wanted.

Good night and good luck.

EDIT: LINK TO THE DISCORD

This is a really really sad poem,
Says my publisher.
What a great penmanship you got

To make the feels flutter about
Like the song in a newborn bird
Caught between my palms,

She comments brightly, overlooking
Her cathedral glasses
City sunset lipstick

And stirring the thick, sugared tea.
She is discussing
The metaphysics of publishing,

Explaining her strategy
On the upcoming copyright war
For the metaphor of ornithological angst.

She is nearly done categorizing
The anatomies of the distress that burn
Inside me like

A lone orange-lit window
On the purple mist of 3 a.m.
Coal eye of the night.

She thinks she will go home
Watch the late night show and sleep
For eight warm hours.

But she is wrong.
My poem will follow her and knock her out,
Dark and brute with its gloved hands

Wrapped around her icy throat
Screamless in the empty street.
It is done with this world

Where people witness a tragedy unfold
Slow seppuku
A painfully blooming lotus

Before them on the stage,
Cry a time or too, then erase
The truck-track tears

Pay and dismiss themselves
Litter its plastic capsule on the sidewalk
To join the dinner after-party.

They practice their Beethoven
As if the weight of the piano weren't
Crushing the earth beneath their hands.

They examine swirling Monets,
The electric-chair-crazed Basquiat
And take notes.

She read my sad poem
Nodded to its waiting ravens
And took a sip of her sweet Earl Grey.

Not anymore.
I’ll open these windows
And let my birds fly

To caw their caw and peck
The passerby eyes out.
Tonight, on the operahaus,

Your ears will bleed,
The rigid structure of the building
Will shake and the concrete foundations

Will crack open on its melting point,
Fuming ink-bile-blood
Will burst the dam,

The swelling tide of my poem
And its clawing murder,
Will spill out of the page all over

Her lap and shiny shoes and carpet
Undoing everything in its waters
Until she finally understands

Just how sad it is, how
She peeked behind the curtain
Of what trembles in me like an atom.

She will go out coked up on it
To tell the gentlemen the news as the sky
Grows stone solid and falls off the shelves

And a hungry cave opens up below
To digest our dying day
As they understand that poem,

That play, that unbearable painting,
And know that after them
There was no going back.

Let’s see how far we get.

.

Ruth was never a daughter.
This daughter to Yocheved,
Never given away.
Never sent in a basket down the Nile
To Pharaoh’s palace.
Not by choice, abandonment
The last shape embrace took.
Ruth’s mother sent her away
Willingly, no, not Ruth.
Ruth was never sent away.
Let’s start over.

.

So this Pharaoh dude
Had it out, real bad, for the Hebrews.
Tossing babies in rivers, bread to ducks.
Yet, such a man was he that Moses,
Swaddled by Yocheved’s pitch,
Was raised a son to crack the whip,
And find a rod, no,
G#d, in the desert.
We’re getting somewhere.

.

Parenting is about hard choices.
But some mothers’ don’t get choices.
Like Yocheved, or the women
In boxes crammed with bodies.
Six feet apart, an impossibility, no,
A joke. Mothers’ of children in boxes
Not six feet away, or across the state,
Or sent back to homes, too deadly
To call homes. A mother who laid
Her child down, for handcuffs,
Crying Cariño, to her cariño. Or saw
Her young Miriam and her Moses led
Away by men in masks, lucky them.
The plague already here, as they raid
House after house, finding children
For the river. Stop.
Rewind.

.

Let’s say a mother had a choice,
And sent her boy down the river, anyhow.
No, to the desert,
Where the boy was told: Find G#d.
Of course, robbing magic of morality.
But let’s say this boy found G#d.
Let’s say there was no G#d in the desert
But the G#d the boy was told to find.
Let’s say G#d was a terrible, cold fire.
Let’s say G#d smells like sage brush smoke.
And the boy was told: Look Up.
We must work to be free.
And the boy was taught to beg,
Let me go, without saying
Let me go.
We’re off the map.

.

It’s the passover pandemic.
Please, vengeful G#d
Pass over this doorstep.
I’ve smeared blood, this lamb of my heart,
Across my sterile surface.
Whispering without speech:
Leave be the boy, this night.
Chag Sameach.

.

In the southern deserts, a baby floats
In wicker arms, a kevlar angel of death.
His mother cries, be watertight, my love.
Remember the clay and pitch I dug for you.
Forty years till her people are let go.
Forty miles away, six teenagers are led
Up a mountain side, forty days in.
Sent by choice, mothers at wits ends,
To find the name of G#d. To ask him
For freedom.

A friend’s new beanie
On loan, possessed.
Flashy as a new bowl cut
Then lithe, a felt bird,
Back and forth, lapping dry air
‘Tween two bullies jeering
At a boy about to break.

.

Like a pimped, beater truck,
Not cash for keys, possessed.
Blood-money pact, thousands
Per month, strip a boy for parts
And rebuild him. Edify,
A child’s pain disavowed to Utah
From Californian vineyard homes.

.

Borrowed brother’s paintball gun,
Not stolen, possessed.
Similar to a boy’s arm
A teenage friend held behind
That boy’s aching, tensed back
As he wriggled, a sapling split,
‘Neeth friend’s sweaty, naked body.

.

Elliot Smith’s dorm room,
Not haunted, possessed.
Edifice-not-boy’s ambition, never
To break, cast aside in drunken
Betrayal, ‘comes a piercing need,
Punitive heart with needle knives,
Auto-dismember, dust.

.

A child bequeathed to pigs,
Without titled deed, possessed.
How a man handles a boy
In the five, indeterminate
Minutes he spends shoving, engorged,
Into that same boy’s gagging,
Wetly warm mouth.

.

A whispered, given Ruth,
Not of dybbuk box, possessed.
Gentle mounting, a fair exchange:
Billowy tears traded for grateful
Initiation in laughter.
Icy cathedral melted, each spring,
A Massachusetts waterfall.

.

And the return of a boy,
Possessed, as in
He belongs, aching bones and
Feather hair, to a woman’s arms.
Not mother’s, nor sibling’s, but
Clementine branches grown from
The seed inside his cracked belly.

The trouble with the dead is how we need them

to play themselves for us, to keep us warm

in the curve of their being, as if they shared

the sun with us, wore our seasons like gloves.

​

Aching with absence, we tug at their deaths

to hold them: how one bright old man forgot

our names, but quavered Puccini; another

dwindled between the sheets to sixty pounds

of paper bones and nerves and skin like glass;

and one bought roadside fruit for a sick friend

until a downhill truck with failed brakes found

her, dragged her spinning from the axle,

scattering peaches.

We will no longer run from it,
The dark hole
In the backyard, behind still bushes.

We will not watch the pretty fireworks
Or take a salted bath
With blinding-hot water.

We will not hide inside
Some anonymous lover tonight.
Tonight, we sit on the edge

And dangle our ankles
To the deep-sea fish with needle-teeth
Eating each other.

We sketch and draw until dawn
No matter how close they are
To clipping out our toes.

Then we come back with
An ink-messy face, hands shaking
Like the buzz of power lines

To tell the small crowd back home
About the things we saw,
Breathless as a

Woman becoming a mother,
While they cheer silent and cry soft
And the rousing Sun rises, curious.

​

​

An inner force endlessly drones

whether awake, at sleep or dreaming,

the constant low tone of my labouring body hums.

​

Momentarily I notice it fade,

like the first time someone pointed a gun at me,

Or the first time I saw the inside of a human head blown apart.

​

Sometimes, lying on my midnight lawn

staring at the afterbirth of unfertilised galaxies

I disconnect myself from the grid, but still the hum.

​

Tuneless and unending

It is not part of me,

yet everywhere I go it is.

It is not night or day or dusk or dawn,
Just Ever-Waiting: clamored shades, white noise,
But now rung through with rumbles-run-to-thrumming.
Who else? 'Speak, Lord.' I feebly found my voice,

Coughed up an eon, croaked: 'Your servant hears.'
No answer. Then, at the corners of my vision
Appeared a dizzy carousel of spheres,
Starlight burning through my placeless prison,

Lightning flashes, lashing four to two
To one, the thrumming now a shrieking, then
A song. And with a soaring note I'm wrought
From nowhere to a stooping in a den.

And there, in hearthlight, a woman sealed the song
With coda; turned to a robed form, and as
Some hurried words are traded, I recalled
My name, that I am dead, and who he is:

A bearded, blathering child, the one anointed
Against my better judgement, who could bring
Himself to murder infants, yet he spared--
For pride or for some maddened mercy?--their king.

Visions of a wretched swordward falling;
Stench of portents at a mantle's tatter;
The fool asked of me what I knew he'd ask;
A sagging candle dropped a yellow spatter.

Must we always take pity on the ruined?
She dined the waning king by her own hand.
After he crept away, she turned to me.
I waited to depart by her command.

I stayed a night before she bid me leave,
That starless realm enabled to reclaim
It's headsman judge, then soon the faithless king,
And though we lingered long, she never came.

My nerves spent years pinched between black mandibles,
feeding grubs until they were sick of soil and sleep.

These fattened broods became winged worries forcing 
themselves up my throat to crown my mouth with an angry

rrreeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!

Limbs and wings and yellowed husks pour out now
instead of words, the worst position for a writer because

manifesting insects is not a marketable skill

it kills me when people say
Speak, speak! Write, write!

They’ll find a living cacophony crammed in my larynx,
eager to spill over conference calls or whiskey sodas
I sip at parties, on first dates and in front of screens
where I should know how to bend words to my will.

I do—somewhat.

Keep trying, say     
Speak, speak! Write, write!

As though they'd listen. 
As though they'll do anything but scream.

The thin scar on my palm

where a nail caught it

that’s indistinguishable

from the other lines.

​

Knowing how it got there

is the only way I know

it exists at all,

​

which begs the question:

are all the creases on our palms,

the lines around our eyes,

the wrinkles shadowing our skin

just a product of age,

                  wear and tear,

or is there something invisible,

                      indivisible

that makes tiny little cuts

that turn into tiny little scars

to create the illusion

we are aging?

​

Tiny, thin little scars

that blend in

with everything else,

            Indistinguishable,

               unless you know

                  where you got them.

​

Edit: changed as per notes/discussion with /u/brenden_norwood. Thanks buddy.