Papergown

White sleeps by the bucketful.
White lies down in pieces.
White snaps like the pearl bones of birds.

White staggers in its enormity, its pachydermal sadness.
It shores up the dyke denying night.

White burns its blank onto my retina,
slips a cake of soap into my robe.
It claims me as erasure.

From time to time white reminds me
of all the water shapes that quake, beads
tugged by suction through a tube.

By the tic of my eyelid, I am moving
towards white with all alacrity,
with all my parts,
which are sore and terrible.

**************

My starting word was "papergown," which I read somewhere I don't remember, and which triggered "pachydermal," because of the P and also because a papergown is like skin to the pachy's dermal. I also collected "enormous," one of my favorite words, though it morphed here to "enormity." The other words just came.

Read Write Poem prompt 17

Drawing Exercise: Dissolve

To be truly sad, you have to know the right people.
But since the whole world was marching,
I kept on marching.

The leper was kneeling by the pond, turning
to crumbs for ducks and pigeons.

Instead of roadwise, I took
to rounding water.

If I could have sealed out that erosion,
I’d have sealed it with a footprint.

If I could have filtered salt from avalanche,
god knows I’d have filtered.

Without rippling, I was going lightly round.
By the second day, I could not spot him.

His clothes were lying on the ground.
The pond turned blue.
The road was brown.

.
(the prompt asked to choose an element as a springboard for a poem. Make mine water.)

Moody Snow Poem

Snow brings the necessity of sleds
which means a 20-mile drive northwards.

By wailing, the brakes take note of damnation.
Toddlers in snowsuits like comrade reindeer
stagger incapacitated in the aloofness of cloudveil.

In haste, I’ll grasp at any antler
but there is no place to park.

Sky, you doer of fireworks, we’d settle
for a short walk in peaceable packdirt.

But snow brings out the beast in everyone.
Theatrical colonist of mountaintops,
whistle some sleet into man’s moodiness,

let these wheels spray milestones
into the avalanche we’d well abandon.

.

Waitress

My motive is more:
more sparkle, more potion,
anything that counts among
the more delectable....

*

RWP prompt #116

a photo prompt from Read Write Poem. You can see the photo here.

Winding Down

After running, I lay myself down
on the throw rug, belly floorwards,
and listen to the blood's beat slacken.
The throb untangles and draws out
to stillness. Recumbent, a heat
flushes outward and there’s a trance
of the mind in abeyance, the body unwinding,
the snag of inertia that follows exertion -
a feeling not to tease into thought
until the run is over.

Like a tunnel emptying at both ends,
I feel myself lengthen with each exhalation.
It is strange to observe the body
close down, like letting a clock do its work,
deciding nothing. I press the heels
of my palms against my eyelids.
I turn my eyes back into my body
and see there’s nothing in there,
nothing and no one.

.

Wordle prompt / RWP

Packmule

In the age of eggshells, it pays
to be acquainted with decay,
which moves slow among
yet slower travellers.
Along Hairsbreadth Trail,
the sky drops frogs today,
the prophecies of ice and fire
disgraced by the red of rain.
The preface to avalanche is patter,
its amphibian quickening,
and he who says the soul
seeks calm speaks fiction.
The soul belongs to panic
when the lightning begins
lightninging; its holds tight
as a twin when the rain nails
its lubricious body to the tail
of the packmule carrying you.

********

Prompt words used: eggshells, nails, lubricious, panic, red, patter, fiction, decay, frogs

rwp prompt: s*x in strange contexxxts

Digits

I never do the math
when we sleep together.
I let desire run into the triple digits.
I let lust, that dumb slut, multiply like toes,
little piggies eating roast beef, getting fat
and round at home, till I am born
to your ten fingers, which fuss
like snouts beneath my clothes.

.