pearls

Enough

Posted in quatorzain by maggie on 2006/11/30
enough 

I knew them all. I loved them all like mine
when all my demons gave me back was dirt.
A hundred nights it's taken to malign
this opportunity to scrape my hurt. 

A blade too dull to break the callous skin,
my words lie still. You don't know who you are.
Impatient for the road, my time wears thin.
The hole I leave behind won't even scar.

Enough. My timing oils an aching joint
of nervous beasts. My intricate designs
have brought me in a circle with no point

where strangers gawk like limericks and each friend
works like a piece with only fourteen lines.
This wasn't how my work was meant to end.
Tagged with: , ,

4 comments

4 Responses

Subscribe to comments with RSS.

  1. maggie said, on 2007/07/06 at 10:57 
    When all my demons gave me back was dirt
and spit, I took the hint and made a child
who my own word and flesh alike beguiled
into believing convicts might convert
as easily as changing out one's shirt.
It isn't. Raised to fight, I'll go down wild.
So too my love, at best a hellstorm styled
to mimic passions neutral and inert.

My child played father to the man who knows
that nothing I have ever said's the sin
that damns me most, yet still wants me to say
it anyway, to follow where it goes
as if to hope I might conceive within
myself a love absurd enough to stay.
    Reply
  2. maggie said, on 2007/07/21 at 13:57 
    A hundred nights it's taken to malign
this opportunity to scrape my hurt
into the hole that holds my voice, then squirt
it out as though I meant to, by design.

A hundred more before I've gone benign
enough, these exercises I exert
won't have sufficient energy to blurt
how little of their words was ever mine.

You'll think back here. Or not. And then you'll know.
Or not. How everything made sense. Or not.
Before we found some time to give away.
Again, or not. To what might be as though
it always had been so. Or as we thought,
as never could have been, yet still might stay.
    Reply
  3. maggie said, on 2007/08/06 at 20:18 
    This opportunity to scrape my hurt
was found this lost. Why else would I not mind
it being rubbed the wrong way, trade in kind
for how I got created.  Why not flirt
with one's creator?  Might I disconcert
some more established thing, some gig defined
to be more lasting?  At worst, just rewind
my reel. If not, no loss.  No red alert.

Which day did you expect I would return
too late to catch which words you fancied changed
sufficiently to lure me back to bed
with you, so by such words as those to learn
what love had not composed, just rearranged
as if I'd never left like this instead?
    Reply
  4. maggie said, on 2007/08/16 at 11:50 
    A blade too dull to break the callous skin,
a poison too diluted to spike clots,
a rope too frayed for hanging by its knots,
an oven too burned out on gas therein,
a charge too weak sent through a wire too thin,
a lake too shallow in its deepest spots,
a gun too blank with all its best aimed shots,
a ledge too gentle on too shy a sin
as would asphyxiate my word's own tongue
with its own vomit, choked on lethal lies
so as to exercise its only choice
to echo though creation death's still voice,
each fails in turn to find the home each tries
to reach, like noises we go lost among.
    Reply

Sincere comment by readers who accept responsibility for their words will earn my respect, my appreciation and my response.