Sunday, February 12, 2012

ITS COLD TEETH PRECISE











I'm in the middle of my life.
I see it as through a crowd,
from a bad angle, 
and the show continues.
I am trapped in this kitchen,
kindness a grater
that will not come clean.
The day shrinks back from me.
The petals of the fireweed fall
where they fall.

You have marked me
And I wish I could escape
the crush of it
Regret has many offices
Do not decode these signs of mine
Prayers inside are tangled in twigs
They cannot move, they're stranded
Undeciphered let my song
rewire circuits wired wrong
A chert blade no bigger
than a white lie
I want to be as thin
as the scars on my wrist
I have been lying here too long
to distinguish war from suicide

Listen: you are the meantime
It's more like that familiar wish
to become a man
when you are, in fact,
a tributary
And lilies at the edge.
Tigers in the lane eyeing you.
You wanted to be that brash.
Death-defying gladioli line the Colosseum

It would be difficult for a pagan,
never mind a communist
to love you according to the season.
Time is how one thing
becomes another.
Trade one noise for another.
Must there always
be something for which we are
prepared to lose everything.
At first nothing will happen
to us and later on it will
happen to us again.
And the whole time
I can't stop thinking ...

I have heard what happens
when you step too far
I'm blindsided, locked
in a fisted dream,
Painting a door
in the brunted
cell of my life
The world is turning
me into evening.

S.E.Ingraham©
(a cento - lines gathered from the poetry of Canadian poets: Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Bachinsky,Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Jacob Scheier,S.McDonald,Laurie MacFayden,sheri-d wilson,Matthew Tierney, rob mclennan, Leonard Cohen, Karen Solie,Jeremy Dodds,Alice Major, Nancy Mackenzie)
Originally published on Poetic Bloomings



2 comments:

  1. Amazing and I love your photograph for it...feels like a wandering, peering upward and wondering. Very good, glad to read it again!

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