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no dear.

the chimney smoke

     blows like hair

          like love

       like you

in the wind

     its ashen hum

rising through

     the clouds

    my reverend

    heart beats

 a trembling dove

a man without

 love pinned

 to a crux of spine

    dear burden of mine

o father have i sinned

   what fire turned

this bread to stone

   what sent

         my voice

      to roam

without my ribs

   that gnash

     like children

weeping in the gloam

my chest is pried

  a tongueless jaw

with nothing left

  to steal

     or say after

   those words

  how much

     lonelier

  i feel

.
Professional EulogistThe only dry eye
Belongs to the perennial pallbearer.
His countenance cold, even in Kelvin.

Pine forests falling,
Fields somewhere filling with his friends,

They're carving out quarries
And ghostwriting eulogies.

People wonder aloud what's wrong with him.

He knows Dionysus drowns more men,
Than Poseidon.

Venus takes more lives than Mars,
Walking on traintracks,
Eyes crossed like stars.

Hoods up,
Heads down.

There's no ghosts left in this town.

In a real city of angels,
In a time called black suit season,

Death is a dial tone.
Crows"Crows," I whisper and she flies,
brown arrow shot
from the bowstring of a word.
Fireating.Your showcase act,
she who
toes the line between
safety
and
stupidity

tightrope-catwalking,
straightline-kerbstalking
distance edges closer as her
heart rate stalls.

Your glitz girl,
she who
knows the time it takes to
trust
and
practise

horsetrot-swordthrowing
actgets-crowdgoing
her balance was performance but she
fell for you.
Memory1.
I will take one flower a day.
I do not know their names
but they are brighter than anything

else I found under the sheets
of conifers. The clotted colours
sit dubious, dew collecting on stems

I hate to fracture. I love
the tenuous ease, an entire plant  
ascending from thin soil. An excavation

uncovers roots like fishbones
with their message, an infinitesimal
howl. In frantic pulse of tattoo they plea:

"Remembering is destroying"
But still,
I wallow.

2
One quiescent shriek  of warning before
the compulsion of alveolar
collapse [my lungs, my thorax,
undone and tightening]
    My breath is a bomb.

I am e
The SculptorBefore he would have harvested a tree,
hacked off its limbs,
skinned it,
torn it from the earth,
shaved one by one its cells - its outer core,
until it was what he believed it was,

no more a tree.

Wiser, he walks deep in to the wood,
underneath a forest giant he stops,
looks up in to the leafy branches, sighs,
climbs and sheds his tears upon its boughs.
Hubris.today
we're younger
than we're ever gonna
be.

i. and we finally did it,
drove to the mountains
watched meteors
and let the mattress
grow damp
under our love
under the stars

ii. there are things to
be reconciled

iii. my eyes sting like
chlorine, but from
crying,

I finally disappointed
them;
the highest order of shame

iv. but you cannot put
people into pockets;
good, bad
don't mix
with them

v. and I cannot choose
who I love

vi. your lenses are straight,
elite and proud
mine, open and accumulating
filth

vii. maybe
I should run away more often,
we never talk like this

viii. and you have to realise
that I live in
petrichorNiobe weeps.

gold scattered rough across
cracked earth and the last
remains of summer - they fell
like leaves in the arms of the wind.

some scents cannot be captured.
the gods bleed onto rock,
and the stone sends her prayers
in return: petrichor.

listen - the heavy thud of
rain on parched ground;
the monsoon sealing life back in;
the sky bows and kisses earth.

Niobe weeps.
beta physicsi.
the rain wrapped impatience around your roof,
bored through the wood like a thousand million termites
(or one you-sized termite, blind, breathless)
and seeped from the cold clockwork like battery acid.

ii.
you lived in a widow's closet -

a house swarmed with antiques
that collapsed in their own gravity
and combusted -

and then you lived in widow's charcoal.

iii.
"galaxies are either lovers or termites," she mused.

(earlier, her fingernails bored into my back
Hubble's thousand million stars, all drops of acid
branding my spine.)

"they are drawn to each other for years
and in an instant, once together,
eat themselves alive.
WaitingWaiting

Pale willow girls wait by the river, brides of the water,
Guppies swim through their veins, silver darts of bright pain.
Their names are hieroglyphs of mist, frost and rain.
They walk barefoot in the snow, leaving tracks so they know the way back,
A tracery of breadcrumbs that the ravens will never eat.

Twelve princesses slip underground,
Dance in slippers of tattered frayed silk,
Corkscrews of ribbon, stiff with blood and melted tallow.
They inject themselves with music until their eyes hum like bumble bees.
Then they sleepwalk through the day in a haze of yearning
For fierce wet stone beneath their frenzy of feet, of bon
Va'eiraThis was a lesson in just how quiet it can be
when you don't make enough noise.

Me, holding a toy gun to a stranger's head
"Remember when things stopped being ridiculous?"

You, eating dandelions in a midnight field
"About the same time things stopped making sense."

A boy in church camp carved a small crucifix
for his arts and crafts project. He won the blue
ribbon and a brand new Bible.  The next morning
I found it hanging over our cabin door.
A toad was nailed to the cross.
Still breathing.
Still breathing.

Sometimes we wake up early enough to hide the evil from our world.
Still breathing.
silkwormthe morning brazen with
work, clambering from our beds
still pulling out of dreamtime
hypnosis; the shiver, backbone rumble
leaden work of unintellectual nature
how do you dream without success?
cream molding coffee groaning
jerking out of stasis
work a lifetime away
every monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday

all my diplomas are unwritten
murmuring lullabies of grand grab bags
sickening amounts of cash
spindles in the head of massive
debt consolidation one fucking big weight
chest exhaling invisible depressive
napalm of a meta-catastrophy
sunken into little corners
of an apartment disorder

little silk threads are fallin
Working ClassSmoking is a working class disease
They said; he smiled at this.
Lean in body and broad of mind
With shirtsleeves rolled,
A modern man's philosopher
Who stuttered over the words
Like his fingers did over her chassis
Detroit rolling iron beneath his palms
Grease and lubricant under the nails.
The cigarette cherry glows in the dark
Giving him a hard edge aura  
The gloaming settling into the lines
Of his work-worn face
the hanged manThis little red book you call the human body:
take it up and shake it. Shake the flaking pages
out of it, shake it from endpaper to endpaper
until the last of the phrases are gone; shake it
until it's aching and empty, the soul of a bird.

I will give you new words.
LevitationObserve.
This is how women walk away.

In broken heels
and secondhand jackets,
cigarette smoke in their hair
and no kiss goodbye.

Do not mock.
It is what it should be.

A girl in a car,
hanging a u-turn
on a glistening, empty street.

Her body is a road to be traveled.
A shipwreck to be plundered.
She does not know how she got here,
and she does not care.

And it does not matter.
This is how women smile.

Knowing, secretive,
though her cheeks are sore.
Though the wind
is blowing right through her clothes.

Though there is no good music
on the radio, and no food
in the refrigerator.

This is just an impression.
An idea of nir
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More from *antonfrost

The way the land is shaped1.
Photons, angels, names of counties
covered in snow.

Full of blue and purple stems,
there is pale water not yet frozen over;
filling it, the smells of cold
and an expired rain.

The earth grows gently.
The snow calms its patterns.

The way the land is shaped,
I want to live.

2.
My body lies outside me,
as stiff as a bundle of sticks,

tied together with a belt and carried
over the back of who I ought to be,

toward where I ought to go.

Sometimes I peer out between openings,
jostled by the debris underfoot,

the ever uneven ground.

To stand in open spaces
that fill up with longing is to live--

every acre of the world
hol
The way to workTurning away from
his open-jawed pickup
a man crouches over the grass
wipes his hands
over the lawn
washes them
clean with dew
when he looks up
i nod
and the light flashes
between us,
the whole day
still ahead.
Like ChristmasI.

To lie down and sleep through the whole night
feels like my only task,

yet I have almost always failed at it.

What I do in the daylight gets so distant
that it disappears--

then night comes, as unanswerable as a riverbank,
as close as the space between my body and my clothes.

What I really want to do, I've never really done.

II.

There is snow on the jagged key
of the house's gables.

From bed, I imagine the way it looks.
I want so badly to say "Follow me there" to someone in the snow.

III.

Every morning the birds seem blotted out,
the way I like to blur points of light to white and orange
dandelions.

Their songs are hidde
BeigeThe rafters are soothing as warm fabric,
as the sound of fire falling from the quiet spaces held overhead.

As snow, I think,
I would live my life better.

The fire is dying quietly,
my potted plants grow without my realizing.

I look at the beige oceans of the globe perched on the table,
its colorful patchworks of land.

I want to live
there.

The pattern
of air
exhale
air

lets me think,
puts me to sleep.

The center
of something lingers like air.

I think how good it is,
knowing that what you want
exists
nearby.

Then I am asleep.

 
The way the snow says nothingI want to say that you are like water
and the light that shows off it--

but maybe you are more the bird that
just barely grazes the water with the tips of its wings.

Or maybe you're the woman walking over the sand
who sees everything that I see,

but expresses her wonder
in better ways than I can.

I have this habit of looking out the window
for more words,

but there are no words in the world.

The word for you is not water or bird
or woman.

I want to say that you are not out the window.
That you are not unlike a word.

Saying it would mean that you are like so many things,
you are unlike them.

I want to say
your life is a sno
DanceThe tin awning catches the rain
in the way that I want to use my hands.

I watch the dancers leave the rehearsal studio,
opening their umbrellas
or shrugging under the arms of their lovers
who have been waiting for them.

The dancers are all beautiful. They make me ache,
the same way their lovers ache
with their bodies shivering against them.

In the every day they are all just
as petty and as weak as I am.
It relieves me as much as it depresses me.

They drink too much, cannot cope with religion,
and fail more than they succeed, like the rest of us.

But dance is a way of working the form around the space,
of getting at all we'

Featured in Groups:

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Beauty is in the words...

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January 31, 2011
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[x]

Dear Reader

:iconantonfrost:

on the roof
simpering with
the pigeons
i throw
sheen after sheen
from buckets of paint;
you do all
the work
getting
in the
way.

awnings
spattered
like lips
with the color
of kisses
shiver
and move.

and listen
to this:

the birds
open their mouths
in the rain

spread one wing
then another
and lean out
and over--

the river
opens
onto salt

as the moon
blooms
like a coin
in a fist;

lovers
part lips

while
friends
part ways.

the bartender
peels a lime;

the doorman
pulls at the door

while the waitress
clears the table.

i open
a window,

you open
your eyes:

work
is making space.

here and
i have
made
room
for you.
:iconantonfrost:
work is making space (i was watching snowplows when i realized this)
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Daily Deviation

Given 2012-07-16
Dear Reader by ~antonfrost Suggester Writes: The words in this poem carry a distinct duality in them; work and relationships. The vivid descriptions and metaphors are only made more powerful by the poem's closing lines. ( Suggested by ^NicSwaner and Featured by ^Beccalicious )
love 2 2 joy 0 0 wow 0 0 mad 0 0 sad 0 0 fear 0 0 neutral 0 0
:iconkathrynodriscoll:
`KathrynODriscoll Mar 5, 2013  Student Writer
Hey there, for #projecteducate this week we are exploring poetry forms. Myself, `thetaoofchaos and =AzizrianDaoXrak discussed Free Verse poetry here and featured this deviation. Just thought I'd let you know! Thanks.
Reply
:iconnicswaner:
^NicSwaner Aug 1, 2012  Student Writer
How did I miss this receiving a DD? I suggested it and thought it was never going to be featured and it turns out I somehow missed it. So here's to it, cheers, with a cup of :tea: I stand by what I said, the poem is astounding, and the line break in "work / is making space" that makes the reader pause gets me every time.
Reply
:iconantonfrost:
*antonfrost Aug 1, 2012   Writer
i'm glad you still like it. :heart:
Reply
:iconcrematedman:
Mood: Love =CrematedMan Jul 19, 2012  Student Writer
"lovers part lips while friends part ways". Great line.
Reply
:icondark-harou:
=dark-harou Jul 16, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
This is beautiful, very vivid. Congratulations on the much deserved Daily Deviation!
Reply
:iconantonfrost:
*antonfrost Jul 16, 2012   Writer
thank you!
Reply
:icondark-harou:
=dark-harou Jul 16, 2012  Hobbyist Writer
You are quite welcome :)
Reply
:iconmae-fliy:
~Mae-Fliy Jul 16, 2012  Hobbyist
I love how vivid this is. I saw the image of the birds particularly clearly :) Beautiful :D
Reply
:iconantonfrost:
*antonfrost Jul 16, 2012   Writer
glad it gave you something. :heart:
Reply
:iconseraph5:
~Seraph5 Jul 16, 2012  Hobbyist Traditional Artist
wow this is incredibly beautiful. i love the vast amounts of imagery that appear from these beautiful simple words.
Reply
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