Elixir

Satiety’s the bounced check toward Everest. I’m climbing now into a driftwood sea hand tooled as though just yesterday. These headlines lattice my way north until I find you sketched here just ahead of weather. Bless equals a secret kept in a square swatch of tin foil left atop a place without coordinates. Silver with tattoo breaks mounted on and well in tune with entre-nous discursive crepes. The louvered turn resplends our seaway. Parse. Declare. Be risen fire. One sliver or two. Displaced to where my window overcasts. This brief illusion. And the optic center of her fire

Choice predecession dowry planted her at sphere’s own center qua relief plush with atonement. Never wear the reason down. Her only century replayed like winter quilt. Handmade synonymous with wing-set. Darling. Patch the deep mown center stage with altar silk. Pray fathoms from this jasmine park. A précis only cartwheels from the dance. Enlistment borrowed spaces aldermen from blades of grasp. How telling are near wheels regarding a proximity to water

Here is how affection’s infancy would barricade the leash. One instance of momentum and then botched elixir graced the total package. Outside is a glyph of window seams showing in nether wind. The timing is still parched. One word against mere branches seven instances from here at gravity’s indented schematic. Dozens of owned men were trained to gather. As a matter of routine a price was just assigned to lives. The chart was full of what had been. One quickly unlearned the science of speed reading, separating chaff from degradations of the same. The fifteenth copy of a film, approaching pulp. If you look closely.

Early Tuesday

I begin to recognize her poverty

is all I have, and I do everything

to prevent it but respect it and to soften

her view out the thin window

that becomes my own, a blurred line

between her vision and mine

requests more ink, a boundary

that's palpable in more than two

dimensions, as I hear pride

in her voice, her fluency, her claim

to the pale reserve of what she now has,

how tomorrow hurts before it's here,

and I want to decide for it,

declare its shape, prop open

closure between what we know

and what we'll feel before a bitter

chill reduces us to failed

guesswork, that she accepts

as how the calm tones

just occur,

one then the next.

verbatim

immersion is the best
bread left unsaid
so live with us retreat
go down to the the the
inseminate rancho gregario and pout
my little demi-joy
until I come for you
and then and then and then
the trouncing that I feel won't be continguous
or blanched
we'll have our wheels
we'll cart another one around
and trees will sill across
our minor drama
to inflate it to the pinochle
with someone driving we respect
for not respecting us

Matter of Fact

Tired of having someone constantly arrive for a small purpose. Dyspeptic in comparison to a large project. Some sort of conflagration for inelegant if at all clear purpose. First in the pretty part of daylight when it’s young I coasted into places where the left clouds blew. It felt a blessing to have letterpress involvement mimic strolling through the daisies barely visible at that hour. In this breastfed part of afternoon the lack of hunger struts across bold print pavement. Everybody barnacles to better structures. One’s charity runs to silken thread. An open bankbook ladled out of the top drawer awaits inspection. These chalky eyebrows are not mine. They’re hers. They leech onto a silver-seeming deadpan of asylum. Make it go away. Invent the keel and call it even. Such alacrity as has been postponed ought to be canceled anymore. A sprig of mist my darling sanctifies the off-sized clan of diametric moon. We’re all reflections some time.

Cement My Prey

Elastic in reverse spells formulaic charity.

She dovetailed with my inefficient sleep. I moved this way and that.

Then the sunup wrapped itself around space-time continuum,

and oh the trial went wavy after that.

You should have felt the rush of paint enlisting this whole body into the consumption of
crayfish.

Every deadly incident compared to softness in that furry hour.

No place was safe.

No off-ramp fulfilled.

I eased out of the way only to paint by number the interrogated fish

one at a telltale time.

Each perch an icy or indifferent dissection.

It was a time of babysitting kismet as though it could not do for us or for itself.

Look with longing to persuade your object to defray the cost of your presiding.

Of your chase (eventual).

Of your intention.

Use second person singular at all times.

Gradually release reflection time until the hub is handled with conception.

Misrepresent the overtime in favor of the client.

More to show obeisance than a full larder.

Chance openings op cit.

early trees

birds plenary their own acrostic

     jouissance    in mid-haze of a s hallowed

morning     when

                 the act of waltz

     has motioned to a time

not present tense         

           resemblive of untaught meditation       

     absent caution    

  as the mainframe

   history weighs 

      what soldierful protective feeder cities

         pass along

how wind secretes a shadow

 pale still      prayer    conjoined with

         elemental       heft

        a lumpen moon

               considered the result

  of selfing       amid

         change as lack of change  

said something to look forward to

could absorb each

could endure each

could replace each

could become each

nomenclature shifted from debate to higher flower

battleground

defaced narration

plundered

then and then

connective t issue c lamped s hut

shoved under wheels of non-remittance

governed by totality of history versus

histrionics of endeavor plus

the shimmer of s light

portrait combed prior to repartee

s often repaving sentence

each programmed

each s lighted by

some seasoned seasoning

in past tense robbed of locked

foreground pondered (con)text of incontrovertible suppressed speech

of hinterlands once hindered

as in textual endorphins

sunned selves blond dry

encumbered combed beach

litmus paper published nuance

then far fields stretched as kismet left the plundered world and triune
gift racks splotched the aerial view

askitter membranes cautioned forelined

as intact nexus burned

by chiseled clench

by hand by heart and counting

Copyright 2004 Sheila E. Murphy. All rights reserved.