Word of the Day Poem: Parvenu – a person who has recently or suddenly acquired wealth, importance, position, or the like, but has not yet developed the conventionally appropriate manners, dress, surroundings, etc.

Rich Misstep

One year ago today
you won.
The prize sailing deep
from one end of your earth
to the tips of your fingers
steaming slips of paper taking
the place of lamenting
and lines drawn on your hand
lavishing your pain licking.

The reality of your fortune
amassed
the misstep taken on the terrace
the baggage left at the trainstop
the dance
of dripping on the floor.

Your milky countenance is found
your unlocked closet door
displays in you
the parvenu
the wealthy looking in the mirror
unable to remove his poor.

Word of the Day Poem: Fritter – to break or tear into small pieces or shreds.

Cogitation on Torn Paper

We sit at the diner,
two mirrors facing their reflection.
The tip of your chin sits perpendicular
to the words you dribble onto the counter.

I can see your feelings silk-screened onto your face,
funneling into your hands, in the way they fritter the napkin,
then the straw wrapper.

I can feel the little pieces,
blowing across my skin
scurrying onto my plate
from the draft in the door

I can feel our words fly similarly in the air,
swiftly navigating the tension of time
and drift across the surface of our solidarity.

After the diner, we say goodbye
and I wrap my arms around your bones
my frittered soul
coming back to me.

Farther and Further *

I watch the nod of your head,
tracing the sleepiness around your optic nerve

wiping my hands on my skin in obeisance
as your lids begin to close.

I recall the exactitude, the incunabula of your suffering
the quiver of your muscles

and the latent broadside of your misstep
the clerical error of your heart
hopscotching toward me

with little to no trepidation.

I should have shooed you away
fluttered though my feathers felt

I could claim this act as remuneration
and springboard you in a new direction

farther and further from me.

_____

*using the following words of the day:

remunerative – affording to repay; profitable: remunerative work

incunabula-the earliest stages or first traces of anything.

Word of the Day Poem: Consanguinity – close relationship or connection

Road Construction

Maybe I knew, growing up
that something was wrong with you.

That your way of hiding things in your pockets
was not the natural way of things

and that others laid them out on the carpet for all to see.

I always admired the way you smooth over
the way you stuffed words into holes in the road

to keep everyone’s cars from veering into the ditch.

I loved that you cared
as much as I hated your politeness, forcing
sweetly down the throats of my friends

and they drank the sugar water like they were parched.

It bled into me, this method,
only I found myself surrounded by carpet people,
those who had no pockets for secrets

and blatantly knocked down my world of non-honest

enveloping me in their consanguinity
plucking the pain from my wastebasket
and fitting it back into my roads of smooth.

The lies were too slippery to last anyway.

Word of the Day Poem: Mysophobia – a dread of dirt or filth.

The Pit

There you stand, watching
as we dip ourselves in the mud.

Our hair, plastered brown swimcaps
Our teeth, gleaming and whiter than toothpaste commercials.

Each crevice covered, each fingertip slops and goops

You never choose to step into the pit,
as you call it.
Your clothes are pristine, your slacks pressed
and cuffed above your shoes.

Your pocket square is bleached and ready
To dab at any flick of muck that makes it way to you.

Oh sure, you’ve been brought here before,
but your teeth never gleamed.

Your trepidation astounds us
the mud clears the pores
it unifies,
it scrubs away the stark purity of assumption

But you’ll never know that until you try.
Your mysophobia shone like a neon sign
As you screamed and clawed against us

Before we tossed you in headfirst.

Word of the Day Poem: Beforetime – formerly

                            Back into the ground
                                                                   
                           beforetime dying
                     beforetime grieving
                beforetime praying
           beforetime waiting
      beforetime caring
beforetime learning
beforetime working
beforetime laughing
beforetime writing
beforetime hearing
beforetime saying
beforetime teaching
     beforetime studying
       beforetime crafting
            beforetime painting
                 beforetime singing
                       beforetime playing
                             beforetime speaking
                                 beforetime growing
                                      beforetime crying
                                           beforetime dying

                                           Back into the womb.

Word of the Day Poem: Subfuscous – slightly dark, dusky, or somber.

Smoke Break

I watch them pull on the clove,
lips squeezing the black cylinder like a kiss
before inhaling the insides of each puff.

The slender stick elongating her fingers,
highlighting her bone-colored skin
rubbing the reddened tips with a subfuscous substance

Made lighter when he plucks it from her,
his hands twice the size, the motion practiced
like they had been sharing cigarettes for a century.

I remain in the corner, 
studying the approximation the hood of her coat
makes to the jut of his ribs
now pressing and squeezing together, like their lips,

the clove crushed on the ground,

Word of the Day Poem: Thalassic – growing, living, or found in the sea; marine.

Thessalonike

Longing for those words, that one phrase
sits fair Thessalonike, a tearful wail upon her lip
a salty sigh upon her breast.

Not one to be countered, she would live
for years on land, loving and championing
her brother, Alexander.

It was not until she became one with the thalassic mind
drowning herself despite her washed locks of life
magic in their immortality
that her true empowerment became known.

Is Alexander the king alive?

One phrase, one
only one could calm her seas
bring the besotted safe to harbor.

He lives and reigns and conquers the world.

Who could really believe there were no other interpretations
No life beyond the life of her love.

Bear it not, these words were tantamount
Or she would release the whiplashed storm
flailing sailors far and wide, wearing their skin far from their bones

It is to be so
Her way

Or sail to the bottom of the sea.

Word of the Day Poem: Weltanschauung – a comprehensive conception or image of the universe and of humanity’s relation to it.

The Spectrum of Weltanschauung

I can scrawl each word on the page,
kiss every person I love
and count on every finger how many times I have stared up at the sky in wonder
of how the Earth exists and where it looks upon me in that moment.

I see others in the stark repetition of the pains and pleasures I’ve felt
Ruling out each idiotic representation of a new generation
Blocking out the phrases and stickiness of culture’s penetration

And exclaim again at the sky, now darkened and chill
How this can be the Earth that scowls upon me?

How here,
how human are we to choke at the sight of struggle
or snap in a tension tightwalk?
How there,
are you reading, wrapping your head around these thoughts
these strangulations of censure
of selection and natural evolution

Here, beginning in ones and twos
There, infinite strings of numbers too long to grasp
Weltanschauung stretches out in between.