stolenhead

[stolenhead]

[stolenhead]

you’re all i ever wanted

i’ll starve myself until i’m small enough to fit in the palm of your hand

on my knees in a satin dress

slipping off my shoulders

wet with spit

red with need

looking at you from beneath my lashes

am i pretty when i cry, daddy?

you’re so handsome when you hit me

i’ll wear the bruises like flowers in my hair

[stolenhead]

virginia slim blues

(ione meraki 2024)

[stolenhead]

Sun, lonely adder. Below, your great dragon eye skins the world to the tedium of indifference. Sleep eddies, innocent as a colt’s star. As cold and forgettable. When I arrive, it is with a mouthful of leaves and nothing to feed the soul. Only I, and the pale horse. We ride into our own diminishing. I grow gray with the illness of dreams. Each night, light sloughs thin skin and turns murky. The adder looks elsewhere, an abandoned pyre. I plummet through the dark, the phantom horse pulsing below me. I am dying into dreams. The eerie quiet of portals. Dawn. The snake constricts its former, familiar shape. I wake in the hay-weighed meadow. The smoke of horses curls the air where spiders bloom in their dew-draped castles. All things are touched with blue. Poppies gaggle thin red tongues that perforate the silence with longing. The mare, her mane as black as ravens. Bittersweet laps at the sorrel haunches, the rafters in the barn peel back and reveal the blood-borne loom. None of this is real. They were never mine, these dreams, these hands, an inheritance. Night again. My hands. I sleep amongst the thistle, my horse is a jewel below the loveless stars. My bones sweeten the summer night, I remember the color of cruelty. It is too calm. The loss that stirs amongst the weeds. The horse waits, does she recognize the moment? In her eyes the world has ceased its burning.

[stolenhead]

Alas, the birds had brought me here, and here I stayed. In the interim, I wondered wildly If I would be encased in ice for all Eternity or if a worldly punishment Befit my sins. I wondered, if I returned, What welcome there awaited me at home? For, surely, I’d be put under arrest, Or killed by some hateful faction’s vengeance For the crimes of human nature I’d carelessly Committed. I’d be hanged, I think, if she Were truly dead and not just lying still.

[stolenhead]

Invade me, did you?

I shouldn’t be surprised.

What’s sovereignty to a person like you, who sees my skin as nothing more than ashen earth on which your fingers might find purchase?

Would you tell me that those pretty, greedy hands couldn’t help but encroach upon me?

As if they had minds of their own? As if you could do naught to reign them in?

But, for you, maybe, I don’t quite mind –

I can’t help but let you have your way, so,

Take me over or take me in, and I might just let you envelop me whole –

So long as you don’t mind, being stuck with me, forever.

“Take me, you fool.” V. Rue, 2024.

[stolenhead]

almost heard a smile if we turned it right up, sun reflecting off a dusty dash. i'd run, pick my feet up enough to find somewhere soft to land, but we're driving. nowhere, there's eleven yellow cars and counting punches, holes in paper roads, caught in the wind as life streams behind me, birds chasing tail, we're racing death against time and i'm always coming in short, fallen behind you, the joke's on us - lost on the way to some destination, never arrived laughing, love yet

[stolenhead]

Hewn in two, I itch for my other half. My right hand aches to hold my left. I feel my blood draining and I deflate unevenly, left before right.

@nosebleedclub prompt Nov. 8 "hewn"

[stolenhead]

[stolenhead]

don’t scare the fishies

baby seal camouflage likes to smoke

hammers a rod into the ground

excalibur if you’re worthy

for the rod is regal

when it bends to the aquamarine

baby seal black sits on his own

a tribe of two

in silent ritual

where all actions have a purpose

the erasure of all woes

I want to ask them if it works

at this point

just the name of a stranger could

but I lean on the word

no

too much

the cars are perched snout first to the water

sea birds for hood ornaments

the bullets of their eyes

aim through the windscreens at the drivers

eating hot chips

seasoned by the sea

& I am a new dog

watching the horizon like a front door

separation anxious

under the lamppost

superfluous in the daylight

the curve of its neck a question mark

a shit stained perch

waiting for the nocturnal romance of night

I watch

with the feathered vagrants

whose need for names are irrelevant

none of us even close to an answer

the question expands

a helium balloon at the circus

we’re not here for the fish

black swans launch from the basalt

a chevron letter on a white sky

the wind seems too light for such large creatures to fly

& the day is large

with no prospect of flight

I am interrupted

two gulls fucking like glasgow industry

in the parking lot next to me

©️david sichler

[stolenhead]

9-11-2024

Cling

A dark silhouette, Silent at sundown, upon the tallest barren Branch, closest to heaven. Caws, The lone rook. My memory of song. I no longer have any wistful reveries, Only perversions of the dove-sweet Dreams, I held so dear I could not abandon them, despite their years Of hapless corrosion. I feel The effigies malform; crack, and crumble In my anxious grip of bright boned fingers, And, still, I cling on, bloodless. I let the rust flakes stain me crimson; They slip like sand, And remind me my hands Were softer, once. Smaller, And warmer.

--- 9-11-2024, M.A. Tempels ©

[stolenhead]

looking for the trap door

the glowing exit sign

searching some lighter fluid

for a Molotov cocktail happy hour

to burn the ropes that bind

even in the smoke, when hands fumble in the haze

from the ground, knees battered scraping

a bastard will always find a way

[stolenhead]

something about an umbrella in the middle of the street? let's go look and call it as we see it, it's raining harder than it ever has in this new part of a suburb's worth of out-of-commission streetlights. catch the dog and let him go, laugh and get called home for dinner, living life is a static existence of swing set intelligence.

up the hill a smile would exist if anyone was home, no signal in sixty-four bits training to understand disappointment.

oh, well, kisses and the hard crash of evergreens would become synonymous.

[stolenhead]

the sweet cyclical nature

of deaths whispered songs

a muse poses on the chaise

dancing with serpents between her fingsrs

we came here

to this place we'll call home, for now

in search of a truth that will lead to a transformation

you are falling from Heaven to me

you are music notes in the air

you are another great night of not knowing what's next

and you are rapture and the wrath of God

[stolenhead]

I am the summertime blues and fireworks, work your magic 

I feel so much I’ve never felt, touch me I’m hardly here 

The night’s electric or is that my tinself skin 

All lasts forever never when time is so right

Tick tock toxic, time is rot and all the rage

[stolenhead]

Truly

ballot paper cut transubstantiation, changing the sweat of kings

into the blood

of brown people with muddy boots and green stained fingers,

a wave of red, raining as heavy as any hurricane, i breathe the copper and salt, whispering with

the whole world's voice, truly? a plea, a death rattle --

truly?

[stolenhead]

becoming

if you write, you barely have to exist

you can become a daydream or a series of daydreams

for yourself or others

and the things that broke your heart suddenly become tools

and your useless passing thoughts become blueprints

and even if you get it wrong,

sometimes it's right