carrotpoet

[carrotpoet]

Proximity to Godliness is Measured in the Holiness of Dirt

Crafting perspiring daydream,

the thickening skull you occupy weighs itself,

I see you fall onto the mattress, and every last

breath

Is a sickly sweet lullaby

You drive yourself home and

turn on the dome lights

Scented like sap, you reach for each plume,

pluck

moist cloud-cotton from the air

The windows have broken into cold sweat

You lick clean

Before the engine clicks and purrs

Taste it, mouth filled with sweet melting water

and

Silence

That factory smell of warming plastic leather

Never bothered you

But I, migraine-induced and frenzied,

driven wild, like startled oxen,

bodies bucking and sprinting

The artificial nature of the stacking of your bones,

your tendons and sinue twisting

and popping out like pistons

The way you held yourself

as though your skin didn’t fit

You sat quietly

And turned the volume up

Sharpening your knife with an apple

Cool metal against cool sweet skin

The warm metal in your blood

Is still right here

Pumping, like all things do—pistons, hands, air

Moving, forcing, milking

Wringing your hands with the soap

Empty handed, fingers vibrating for their vice,

trickle-dripping with lather

[carrotpoet]

Waiting Room

( @smittenbypoetry November Poetry Challenge!! )

You’re waving your arms frantically when you call my name in a tone I do not recognize

The air goes thick, thickening like stars concentrate the sky, crowd it

Do not tell me to hold on, the waiting room a beckoning

You, like energy, are containable only in pieces, and slip away ultimately forever unbroken

So no, I do not fear that death will bind you, but I do fear the coffee mug you left on the counter

And how I orbit the life you occupy and seldom do surrender

Untimely

And we all sell ourselves to the sea and continue the onslaught

Because we are breath and the lives it takes

We are breath and the lives it takes

[carrotpoet]

Hypothermic Sweaty Sea Heat

Reconsideration,

retiring from routine

and wracking up emotions that have scattered

around the yard,

made into neat piles you can jump in and never

sink to the bottom

You’re back now,

that’s what you’ve said,

and I feel the uneasiness about you as we begin

this dance

we’ve done before,

but now we’re battle-worn and our forms are

practiced.

Show me again how you turn,

and

how you turn

in your sleep, it’s new.

Shake me, winter,

I do not trust your mouth

or this new dressed way about you,

it seems to tell me

all the same things but

with that clothed shame and

a pretty silk tie I do not recognize

You want to begin again,

I want to see the way your jaw works

when the time isn’t right and

you’re begging like a soldier for the

warmth that

I can bring.

Kiss me, darkness,

let the cool ocean consume me like

fire,

the way my body lights up against yours isn’t

old flame, my love

it’s hypothermia.

Still I’m sick with

cruel wanting,

you win.

[carrotpoet]

Grasping Straws

Are you another version of me? Rolling over and consuming time,

folding over into platelets,

layers like baklava with sticky sticky honey?

You’re rolling on your back and I touch you like an instrument,

you cannot hear me when I scream and you cannot see me as I am, but you see and hear me

through the eyes and ears of hunger,

it’s miracle enough to feel so wanted as an animal. Your teeth sunken

in the freckled round of my shoulder.

I keep my voice down, keep my head down, keep each casket

in its musty fragile grave down underneath earth flesh.

Who is there to call when I dial dull-light

and stare for hours? And you are

little comfort,

though it would be a lie to tell you I don’t picture your body

across mine and don’t picture the cabin

I can feel

in the crooks of your elbows. There’s woodsmoke in the collar of your flannel

and dirty eyes—

set comfortably in your furrowed heavy skull.

To trust feels futile and childish, your voice a cooing

little tune,

I promise you I am not hungry. Take your chipped full plate

to someone who is.

You couldn’t see me, but I was staring at you between

my thighs

with my eyes mostly closed

and my nose tucked in soft plush of my arm.

I could see the way

you tightened your grip

and the way you wanted to watch me.

I imagined that you needed me so I could like you back.

The way the floor creaked when you snuck into my bed. The rough plush

indentations.

[carrotpoet]

Multitudes and Considerations in Inherent Insanity

Everyone is a little scared that somewhere in the nauseous pit of their stomach or seeping out the pulling,

inching roots of their hair, that something is wrong, and that they are a little bit lunatic.

Actually, everyone is scared that they aren’t really a lunatic at all,

that they know something, and no one else does, but everyone fears them, or would fear them, that a whisper could unfurl that tightly wound rug and now you’ve done something—how could you?

You talk like your words hold all endings. I can hear it in your consonants and how you walk with the bugs on the floor. A certain type of withdrawn that feels less like hiding, pulling wool over eyes, and rather like suppression.

Everyone fears that everyone else is a lunatic.

The stranger in the eyes of your mother, the arms you’re wrapped in and how cobra tightly they could coil around your throat like hot rubber. Trusting the man on the sidewalk to stay a man on the sidewalk, as inconsequential and unknown as the starlight against him.

Everyone is a crowd, and everyone is a sweltering amorphous spotlight.

This means no one is listening. Sure. This is the logical and synchronous conclusion. We feed the tender doves their seed and they drown themselves in the lake. Infinite cycles of entropy: the Universal Oxymoron. Likewise, the earth holds your footprints and counts your breaths, the neighbor saw you dancing through the red curtains, etcetera. Time goes on and you are not individual, so nothing can happen to You and everything always does.

Dipping the fingers in candle wax, extend them in the shower to watch the sweet rain drip off the ends,

rake them through your hair and act like no one is watching. This is again, true and untrue. You live within a dance, it is sensual, deeply moving, and wholly inescapable.

You cried so hard one time you began to feel a strange fear

that your feelings would snare you, like an overextended joint, locking.

The impending invigoration before a fight, when your father told you your eyes would get stuck as a presumptuous 11 year-old. Staying up so late you shake. The concern is simple,

there is a point of no return and you can reach it.

You know you can reach it. And it feels like you’ll reach it right now. And everyone is watching.

Just a little further and you would’ve sunk the joint in its ball and you’d be stuck. And no one would come to save you.

Everyone is afraid of themselves and of you and can’t tell the difference, and everyone loves you because they are love and

the arm extends and cannot be told apart and you cannot tell why looking out of your car window feels like a spaceship and why

the itch down your throat feels a lot like the time your words went dry on stage and the only thing to catch you was everyone you couldn’t touch. Touch me now, extend your arm, break the seal or brush against it, become moonlight and let the old dog slumber, drift into me, tuck into me and let me have this dance. Please consider dancing.

[carrotpoet]

Photo by Marc Lagrang.

[carrotpoet]

[carrotpoet]

Xavier Dambrine.

[carrotpoet]

Wretched Fawn

What are all these feelings disguised as anger?

A girl holds both my hands and asks me where on my body I feel right now.

Her palms are warm but her fingertips are cool and rough, her smile smooth yet lopsided,

like a brushstroke, there’s pieces of pink in her hair that I paint different colors in my head. (Blue, green, the sunshine you feel when the cool breeze and scholastic magazines smell like strawberries and hot plastic)

I tell her my anger is in my arms, in my hair like a lover, tangled in my womb and shaking, hiding in a place behind my heart like a Sunday-dressed child behind the legs of his mother.

How many labels can we put on things before it hurts us? All this naming of the unnamable, like our words will shape all of this into the Right Kind of existence, and not something we pretend we don’t abhor.

“Perhaps they will.”

And I don’t reply.

The biggest secret I ever tell her is that the thing I’m most terrified of is presenting ungrateful. I don’t have an answer when she asks me why. Calling the fire ‘hot’ and then going to bed scathed.

I tell her, also, of the boy who cuts his own hair and treats me like a fawn

It lights my body on fire but it’s making me rude

She wants to understand me and so she does

She wants my love so she takes the tangerine

And the next song ends

[carrotpoet]

Nectarine

He’s frustrating, head cocks and angles shaking thick curly hair

His shirt doesn’t fit right and the rings across his fingers

The rings across

his fingers

And he sparkles like the salted waves

Take pain

Sit down

Pills like an offering

You’re faking

You’re falling into something you don’t understand and you don’t want to just yet

because It’s starting to get good

“It’s getting bad

again”

Weighing your head in the sweaty heart of your palms and the men keep chewing on your heels because

You are the concept of sex

You smell off— slightly sweet, and carry your hot temper around you like a thickening heavy coat

All that pent up anger reeks of sex

Like sucking on a nectarine

And the itchy drippings on your chin

You walk, thighs pressed together

Like you’re trying to hide all the desire between them

Back straight and ample

Like a trapeze artist on a wire

Moon milk and lazy rivers

Holding back and shaking through the limbs

Finding something sinister and brushing the hair

Brushing

The hair

Stiffness in the bones and chest

A delicious repression begging to be released

And one thousand men like an offering

Protruding and intruding

Will never know what she truly needs

Won’t feed her like a nectarine

[carrotpoet]

[carrotpoet]

Going down, you taste like gasoline and gunmetal

Smear lipstick wine

Bruised blushy cheeks

Your teeth a rotting miracle

There’s beauty in a cigarette

Like beauty in a bonfire

Take this flame and wed it

Lace across your shoulders

Lace upholding your bosom

Feather-light and shaking

Dresses on the floor

Tassels hanging on her window

Tussling through empty sheets

Your skin as soft as cotton

There’s posters on the wall

[carrotpoet]

palms pushing wood

As I gently scooped you from hurricane earth

we hid under blankets to watch the tv

Tucked in like sailors in stiff little ships

I weep a little tune and

you dance in your socks

It’s not so familiar

all this living in the shape of ourselves

Nothing so tender worth leaving alone

Picking old scabs with a butter knife

leaving the table

And shutting the door

[carrotpoet]

Insatiably yours

We drop our umbrellas and feed back to the sea

An object worth palming and a glowing light inside my sternum, you should go and take the wind, you were never motionless.

We wake up and find seashells in our hair.

Over and over, this is what life is made up of;

hot water, coffee, the nasal in your voice as you resist becoming laughter.

Empty, shallow caves and a New Perspective.

“Insatiably yours”, I’d sign the air.

Ringing the phone and shining that pale light on, your cheeks as red and wide as wilting roses.

You buy me a new dress and I lay in the warm spot on the floor, my body shines through the fainting silk in all this sunlight—

You told me I look like a painting, a little piece of forever in all this meaning.

Impression of a woman in love in silver, pink.

Over and over, our entropy is inundated

With every little instance where time won’t let us go.

And we shall ever prosper.

Our home smells like overripe vegetables pawed from the earth, when you come home smelling like sweat and dirt, sweet and humid, and I think of you like a painting. A weaving and an oath.

[carrotpoet]

Captive Soldiers

I had a dream my ex fiancé and my first love were sitting at a table together,

all limbs and angles, cotton tshirts smelling like warmth, a coy grin and a frightened monster. Dirty blonde mess

and the pseudo-savior.

My lover cut my bangs in the mirror this morning, trimmed black hair on the floor.

We’re already going somewhere, if so take me there

So it’s all wet dreams and monsters under the bed, hiding places for soldiers and the rotten little creatures.

You don’t frighten me, though I wish you did, something to feed the nerves.

Such greedy little hungers, taken silently in the dark.

Spider web growing in my windowsill and coughing on the smoke, missing something that isn’t real

and walking around stunned with a little ache,

I think you already know the story when I try so hard to rid you of it.

Out of mind, out of mind.

I only write about what I’m terrified of, tempted by the little black holes that whisper tender bloodstained false prophesies and kiss me one night stand.

So it’s not over and you’re not here, consider it even. I’ll stroke the bitten dragon and talk too much.

There is no pain you can present me with that cherry-stem tongue I won’t be thrilled to pen.

[carrotpoet]

Cryptic Translucent Tango

I am bored and I want to be pushed level with the popcorn wall and arch into you.

In the air floats dust clouds that settle in the sun like glitter. The sun makes you sneeze, you hold your hands in fists and grip onto life like you’re drowning, like you’re trying to grasp the sunlight.

I wish I could reach you on the other side of the dining table at this strange dim cafe where the wood is too orange and everywhere but you’re eons away and when I speak your eyes shoot open, you cringe at the obtrusion.

Do I make you nervous? I can’t seem to deal with it. I’m flattered, but I need your teeth, or something tangible from you so I know you’re real. Do you know if you’re real? Has anyone ever told you that you float above the floor? Do you know you haunt each space you live in?

You smell like the cedar lining of a casket and I couldn’t taste you if I wanted to, because you won’t let me.

Let me under you so maybe I could reach you. If you’re dead or I’m dreaming I’m sure I could find something to grip onto,

I just know this kind of transcendence has a taste if I could reach it. I’m always right up next to you and trailing behind you. I’m licking breadcrumbs off the coarse earthen trail with my cat-tongue so you can’t find your way back.

I’m hoping you’ll turn around to try and realize I’m the only thing behind you now. But I can never catch up,

breathless, and you don’t seem to hear me. The sun topples over and descends into dark fog,

so the cataracts over your eyes and I’m as cloudy as the dust in the air when the light hits it,

do I shine in the light? Do I look as heavenly as you in all this smoke?

[carrotpoet]

The Bite - Edvard Munch (1914)