To the Budding Flower

(Prefer to hear it read aloud? Click here!)

Just a little taste of spring:

Hands jerking over rosebuds

Wheeling inside a weightless wind

The slender self would flood

 

Numbers, sunlit fall

Without winding, nor binding no

Not this kiss, for that’s all it is

A kiss and a thunder so

 

The flower smiles today

Before the morrow’s sunless yoke:

The higher they be howling

The sooner sets the stroke

 

And age, it cries out for the coy

For youth knows yet the blood,

and time the wisdom of the sleepless

knows the quiet of life caught in the bud.

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Bedside

* A work in progress – critique welcome!

Broad strokes, bedside

broached the topic of

wedded blasphemy,

through bygone whispers

renovated in bravado,

battered with the blue breeze

bloody braggarts call carnal bastardization.

An immigration of conscience

instituted something like incontinence.

Winged Aphrodite pulled hormones

through the shaft of her soul,

but ringed Bast barred in gold;

lovers circled bane and bust,

but the band bonded true—

like a shadow, lust, pulled

through the needle of love’s eye.

Transmission: Life

Time for another quote of the week, and this time it’s a long one, boys and girls, but a good one. The quote comes from one D.H. Lawrence, and it’s got all the things people quirk an eyebrow for these days: life, work, sex…

D.H. Lawrence, image care of Wikimedia Commons.

As we live, we are transmitters of life.
And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow
through us.

That is part of the mystery of sex, it is a flow onwards,
Sexless people’ transmit nothing.

And if, as we work, we can transmit life into our work,
life, still more life, rushes into us to compensate, to be ready
and we ripple with life through the days.
Even if it is a woman making an apple dumpling, or a
man a stool,
if life goes into the pudding, good is the pudding
good is the stool,
content is the woman, with fresh life rippling in to her,
content is the man.

Give, and it shall be given unto you
is still the truth about life.
But giving life is not so easy.
It doesn’t mean handing it out to some mean fool, or letting
the living dead eat you up.
It means kindling the life-quality where it was not,
even if it’s only in the whiteness of a washed pocket-handkerchief.

~We Are Transmitters by D. H. Lawrence

A Waking in a Kiss

 

By Lisa Michelle Arhontidis

A waking in a kiss

Cold lips in black light,

There is a life here that does not sleep

Between the sheets of memory, wrapped

She beckons and I heed, this endless

Obsession of souls, commands:

Drink these lips.

* Photography by Lisa Michelle Arhontidis, from her gorgeous photos and interview I conducted with her, as featured on One Stop Poetry.