#Traveller poetry

[manwalksintobar]

Wild Talents  // Fran Lock

“...there is no man who is without the hyena-element in his composition, and there is no hyena that is not at least rudimentarily human...”                                                                                   — Charles Hoy Fort

on the day of your death i became a striped hyena. hysteria’s lank technician, cursorial  man-eater, witch’s mount. i ran, filiform punk with my mane of stale thistles, over primrose hill, over blackheath, to gnaw the shinbones of monuments. dragging my afflicted eye through the cagey manors of frasers and richardsons, each lesser kray. london’s twitchy slang bloomed under me. i was not afraid. animal, abandoned to its instincts slouching down the twisting vennel steps to lick the yeast of my misdeeds. i tore your bleakest manna into strips, left pennants of its dark meat snagged on the late-victorian railings. in cemeteries i scorned inscriptions, wiped my hazy scent all over. i was the fur atlas of my loss, and the yellow grass grew sharp where it rubbed on me. your heart’s varmint. darling of the solvent park, weaving the obstinate dusk into silent film. starry cuss, i did not sleep, but lay, panting, on a raft of trash: the serial bed-wetter’s flammable mattress, saturday magazines still in their cellophane. empire, mine. my hackles in the full flag of this failed state, flea-bit. the day after your death, when they found me, hoax-wraith white up road’s wide middle. i think i was running. i think i’d been dreaming: i was the starkest hound of my spirit. gargoyle against this human bruise.

[foxbirdy]

A short comic I made about my experiences as a seasonal worker, and the way places change you.

Prints & PDF

[lunamonchtuna]

— Audrey Niffenegger, from ‘The Time Traveller's Wife’ (via lunamonchtuna)

[gascreates]

a new star

[vexheart]

[ajcrawly]

[qiinamii]

quite the poet, quite the inspo

[dakota-zen]

《Rima XXIV》

Dos rojas lenguas de fuego

que, a un mismo tronco enlazadas,

se aproximan, y al besarse

forman una sola llama;

dos notas que del laúd

a un tiempo la mano arranca,

y en el espacio se encuentran

y armoniosas se abrazan;

dos olas que vienen juntas

a morir sobre una playa

y que al romper se coronan

con un penacho de plata;

dos jirones de vapor

que del lago se levantan

y al juntarse allá en el cielo

forman una nube blanca;

dos ideas que al par brotan,

dos besos que a un tiempo estallan,

dos ecos que se confunden,

eso son nuestras dos almas.

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

[landsccape]

[mournfulroses]

Yehuda Amichai, from Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai; “Travels of the Last Bendamin of Tudela,”

[manwalksintobar]

Insomnia // Fran Lock

And contemplate this: the heat-treated hairdos of next-door neighbors, the roseate nosebleeds of fuckboys in hoodies; your own face, rinsed in the mirror, the sweet green sweat you’re riddled with in mornings, a rock pool reflection under algaecidal light. You are going nowhere. This poem yokes you, to the pain you are chronic and adipose with; to the desk, to the chair, to ergonomic purgatory. And to the body, its spasms and its rhapsodies, three-part harmonies, one-chord wonders. You will never be whole. The voices. His voice, broadcast on your remedial frequency, making its way through a rubbishy dusk, the streetlamps beaming fizzy glow like Lucozade. You will never be whole. Vomit o’clock and the brain is Kraken, white and shaking. Open the window, pry the chipboard from the window; fill your punctured eye with stars. And contemplate this: Saturday night and the dirt purrs with it; cars, litter bins, pit bull dogs. A girl with high Yorick cheekbones drags a false nail down the scratchy surface of a bri-nylon sleeplessness. A man rides ignorance like a white horse, kicking mirrors from parked cars. You have the itch under your skin. Insectile dysfunction. Lust, with its own murky gravities. You will fail. You have not made a friend of this city and you will fail. Cup your eyes like coins. Addiction holds such simplicity. Check your used-car contours in the broken glass. You are going nowhere. They cannot nail you to a pronoun, hot mess of cravings and behaviors, tainted frailty, old meat’s rancid rainbow. Ugly. Contemplate. Consider: your lilies, toiling like deaf ears, tearing the tired night a new one, stirring a sulfate dust in your veins. Your eyes are blue with pseudo-scientific toxicity, with chemical expectancy, a dread that dries a smile like paint. Your blood is on fire, full of bellicose adrenaline, nitrate and neon; brighter, even, than the hoary fluorescence of angels. It is so late. And you are pining the rhinestone shine of a lost narcotism. Now trauma’s your ergotamine. Trauma, your ergot, your argot of rye. Awful thought that treads the brain’s rank breadth. Silence. Pray silence. Pray the dark room away, the candles, the pious vibrations of flame; the dim bulb with its gospel of moths, one hundred pairs of gloved hands clasped to powder. Marooned in your gooseflesh, one hand does not know what the other is doing. It’s three a.m., the mind’s alive like frostbite, a cold burn that blackens things. Your graphite smile could shatter. Thoughts of him have poisoned you, rust in the blood. You have not eaten for days, you mottle, run your own hands over your oxidizing thighs, watch the bruises ripen to a landmass, a landmark, a brave new world, a here be dragons. You listen to yourself, creaking like rope; your body, its canned laughter repeating mean and low, throwing out thought according to the malnourished algorithm some devil has devised. You clutch and sway in a crêpe air and you want-want-want what you’ll never have again: sleep; his image breaking across your scrubbed flesh like surf. Contemplate this: this is forever. There is no movie montage where you’ll shop yourself to transformation. You will never be whole. And grief is not a line we walk to wellness; the tidy smirk of therapy, the therapized, the girls licking flakes of gold- leaf pastry from a Pret a Manger croissant, saying you should take up yoga. Grief is a longing in the body, your body, the machine-tooled aesthetics of starvation. It’s so uncool, a super-terrestrial emptiness; the acetone-eroded teeth of your disorder. He will not come again. Sleep will not come and make an amnesty of bandages, the white ribbons rendering you prematurely maypole. It will not wrap you. It will not keep you. It will not launder or succor you. It will break into your ballerina box, will chew the jewels from their semiprecious sockets, set them pulsing in your frontal lobe. Your heart has a headache. Drink raw egg. Or Dettol. It’s up to you. The sky is pasteurized by thunder ... 

[rocksama24]

For someone so sweet, I wish you a happy dream

[lunamonchtuna]

— Audrey Niffenegger, from The Time Traveler's Wife (via lunamonchtuna)

[nobeerreviews]

But where, after all, would be the poetry of the sea were there no wild waves?

-- Joshua Slocum

(Nora, Italy)

[wordswithloveee]

[carolinatsversion]

timdamas