Winding Down

& every day a list. Yesterday at N. Mart, I tried this whitechocolatepeppermint flavored coffee and think that it and Chocolate Velvet will be what gets me through winter. Dental appt. today, heaps of snow and a morning plan to walk to Metro and activate myself to leave what little warmth the apartment provides and head out into the chill.

Tried to update the I-tunes so as to add more Uncle T., and look around for something new to make a mix out of. Something that doesn't mope and helps me to move about in the white city with the grey sky I call home now. It will be April someday. It will be May.

Vividest early morning dreams, so strange and upon waking it is no wonder I craved some Sylvia. Her stark voice reminds me that even as the insides fight it, the seasons change and what likely won't console, re-writes. If my pen could marry a hurt like that! Her petals are half babyskin, half razor--trustworthy cries, hers. I am taking my injured self out into the poppyless landscape, with a gift-free, unasked for dreary-pants of sky. It's hard to imagine sunlight on such a day. I need good music, more coffee, and lots of work done by evening. I need to imagine my good friends reading this somewhere warm and good for them. Happy Monday, Crew.

Poppies in October
Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly --

A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky

Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

---------

Poppies in July
Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?

You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.

And it exhausts me to watch you
Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

A mouth just bloodied.
Little bloody skirts!

There are fumes that I cannot touch.
Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

If I could bleed, or sleep! -------------
If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,
Dulling and stilling.

But colorless. Colorless.