*
*
*
[ I don’t believe in magic ]
but I do believe in
magnetism
and
*
⁝
the
direction of our stars
so don’t call this intuition
[ when all sign say you’re *my north. ]
*
-six pm | *my north
*
*
*my north
Poetry
*after easter
⨀
for fifty days i fasted,
knowing no-thing,
save the retching of my own flesh,
save the pit of my own stomach.
*
for your arrival safely we sold
our cattle, fashioned a festival
our first kiss –a first sip of wine
on the day break of Pentecost,
at last my fast was over.
*
we fashioned circles of precious metals
and strung them around each other’s
vena amori, declared forever in a vacuum
proclaimed endurance upon the coming
event horizon of time itself.
*
space swells with the ancient ruins
of men and women who shed tears
tracing the constellation trails
from one end of an ocean to another
filling the void of voiceless oceans
with metaphoric rapture and appetite
for adventure.
*
*darling, the smell of desert sand swims
firmly between your pores,
your body warm as the land
cut like mountains
between your biceps
where my head lays
basking in the moments
you are here.
*
how i adore you so.
*
proclaim eternity
enter matrimony – eyes wide open
place his heart upon a pedestal
let no slanderous word nor malicious canticle
seduce his woefully mortal heart.
*
roots and petals of calendula
poultice to quell the spasms
you take me in my blood
and i take you in my arms
when the nightmares hurt
worse than the back pain.
*
you remind me that even in the winter
the carmine-colored cardinal coos
and whistles, awakens the trees and fills
the cold world with sweet song.
*
i’m unraveled in your high collar,
blue and burned in a freak fire,
raptured by the desert
nothing is forever, we know,
yet everything is possible.
*
there is no going back.
*
on this river of time
except maybe we’ll escape
the event horizon burn
as radiation about
the black hole’s radio halo.
*
dying light is a subjective notion
when you limit every poetic persuasion
to the limits of the human eye.
*
we weave honey, orange citrus, & marmalade
into spacetime tapestry,
devote each second
as the present is our own reward
the art of being in love,
the pleasure of being alive.
*
the future is a metaphor –
as in calling the ocean endless
naming riptides undertow
we: new and other molecules
blur into water, two bodies
one brackish soul.
*
-six pm | *after easter
*the moon has a navel; we all gaze upon her
*
April Egg Moon | Photographer: Paige Six, 2020
*
i.
I am a golden dawn and this is my orchestra. There are cracks in my soul glow, carry like broken notes, but as the light breaks the horizon I carry them well. I carry the heavy load, the low tones, the vibration pitter pattern wringing out the old rag and make streams from the runnels. They called it nesting but I called it cleaning the walls and floors to no avail because I was the only one who cared about the child growing inside of me in the whole circle.
*
ii.
Time is a wrinkled fold in the corner of her eyes. I press them out with the girth of my thumb and hope the world learns to embrace change. Her skin stretches as my heart sinks. Cut the baby curls and let them populate the linoleum. I find comfort in the signs of aging, in the middle of the folds that foreshadow the way my child’s face will soften as the years callous her soft hands. Look to the mirror to see her in 30 years because I may not be; and she looks so much like me when I was younger.
*
The moon has a navel, I gaze up its intricate craters and see the umbilical cord, a tell-tale cluster of constellations, cut from Mother. Earth can only watch as space smacks her first child; mars her daughter’s glowing smile with imperfections; carving holes into her powder surface. I can only relate in the most holy helpless manner
*
iii.
A brain fold beneath a miracle, a raven crown of perfect follicles dry of melanin dripping silver everywhere. A surgical procedure carved of sawdust, and she a comet spilling stardust. If I was a dawn then she is a choir. I a setting sun and her new day a chorus. This is my orchestra but the music is for my daughter, my golden dawn but a fleeting moment and her life an endless sea of sparkle. An oasis where only time bends to the gravity, a notebook, a sonnet, a melody.
– six pm |*the moon has a navel; we all gaze upon her
*this is not a love poem
i believe up until
God cracked Adam’s rib,
that man had not yet
considered he was breathing.
*
i believe some would call this a gift.
*
we are not born beautifully…
everyone must blossom and bud.
i am a natural mother,
i understand the price paid for life with blood.
*
*
if there were an element
that we should base life upon:
it would be carbon, i assume.
so why do i base
the life i have been gifted
on the likes of you?
*
is it because you are a kiss;
a cellular conception
multiplied by folds of four
balanced betwixt my hips?
*
a perfect prophecy
of proud ancestry
proclaimed from the mouth
of the royal He …
*
is it how now
is an infinity;
now is when He speaks.
now is where we meet;
black, dull, and ungleaming
life without you.
*
blackness of bare earth
at the tale end of winter.
no promise of green
except for the old knowledge:
knowing storms always
run dry of rain;
*
knowing cold months of winter
bring forth warm nights
of summer and spring.
*
*
understanding pain
forecasts growth;
and love
foreshadows pain.
*
how men and women
were never made the same.
*
my memories look like
the red glow in the rearview mirror,
if you and i were a one way street.
red light in the dead of night
dimming every imperfection.
these brightest spots
are all we can still see,
fading into the black like dusk.
*
i believe in black holes.
black eyes big as pansies,
so big they could swallow me up.
bold and italicized by
ethnic ambiguity.
dense in gravity.
*
behold: you are so ambitious,
and we felt so endless;
infinity masquerading as security.
i found myself staring intent
while you flew west,
watching your eyes offset
the sunset
until they were just
two specks of dust.
*
i believe the apocalypse is
a midlife crisis,
and an untimely break-up.
i believe never ending
life is a sentence given
to those who allow a mirage
to manipulate their minds;
a viscous cycle of
‘if we meet again‘s’.
paranoid hallucinations
that crazy men
call heaven.
*
no. it makes no sense.
i call bullshit!
i request hard evidence.
we exist because a woman
paid her blood for it.
*
i believe
Adam sacrificed nothing
when Eve was conceived.
i believe Adam broke
his own rib,
so Eve ‘d cave-in
and care for him
before he re-wrote history
*
oh and, yes.
i believe Lilith existed.
i believe Lilith’s burning kiss
burned because
Adam was fucking selfish.
-six pm | *this is not a love poem
*the super slow motion of yearning
*
We were ready to lay dormant
until the next spring.
Rolling beneath cold clouds
waking the landscape’s frost.
When you found him in orbit about,
a nearer moon.
An unexpurgerated diary entry,
about how woman lay boiling.
A small body of water
and all of it’s creature’s within.
Brought to a stand-still
while the tide’s ripped.
Transforming the water
into a solid sculpture,
about an ever changing world,
still but alive.
To read your work is to know that
not all revolve around the sun.
As you orbit a nearer moon
upon a distant shore.
And his impact is dramatic,
as the moon rises and moon sets.
His height, his trajectory,
his monthly phases
thinning your full breasts
the scythe of a crescent.
A dizzy dissent across
the cosmos in ellipses.
Earth casts a shadow
overbears the surface
the journey that changes
us most of all.
Reveal the beginning,
at the culmination of
a tragic end.
Gravity lifts the water.
Resulting in the rise and fall
of rustic lung.
Sand stands still,
and the creatures cast,
adapt to this
intertidal wedlock
burrow along the coast
Await dual windows & feed fast.
Sheltered within
shore stone cracks.
A woman lay wasted,
you do.
Evaporation run-off warmed water.
Mist seen rising after
morning dew collapse.
Transpiration a phantom
passes through pores
in the atmosphere,
and tiny leaves.
Spring time awakens,
a nearer moon dotes
fertile, nubile,
flung off a surface
crater, cast satellite,
another coastal accumulation.
Another woman lay bare there,
you know.
Close to the warm ground the moisture
is invisible to the human eye,
such fine steam,
colliding as a nimbus cloud
above the coastal highline.
Grow heavy,
groan,
and rain
Gravity brings it
back down to Earth.
Sensitive animals dash,
flee, a marathon
You’re almost out of breath
Earth casts a shadow
overbears the surface
But it is the journey that changes us
most of all.
A bud blossoms at the beginning,
befallen your tragedy’s end
Our time passing as it elapses.
Pages yellow and your dreams
espouse their tender vulnerabilities,
forever cast infamous,
poetic masonry.
–six pm | *the super slow motion of yearning
{This poem is dedicated to Anaïs Nin}
*i want more time with you
.
.
.
.
i had just read a brief history of time. remember that night? cosmic vertigo took hold of my insides, i quit cigarettes that instant, i crushed my last pack and i declared, to you, that death takes everything.
stephen hawking explained: the universe will have an end just as it has a beginning. so having no more time to waste i told you i loved your face more than any other faces and if there was to be even the tiniest trace of me left behind i wanted it to be the way i felt for you that night.
you blew smoke rings from stitched lips, and i talked in circles around you. bleary and bloodshot our eyes closed. you maybe never read stephen hawking but i know we both ran like bandits from sleep.
I talked about how Robert Jordan said, “the wolves had no notions of time the way men did, no reasons to divide the day into hours” how the seasons and the day from night were all they needed. you had a wolf grin and would reveal a smoldering smile.
earthy smell of marijuana permeated your beard and seasoned our tongues. *omitted, wasn’t it really something? being young and together the way we were. smoke stacked to the ceiling and the lamp glow casted halogen haloes around our heads. don’t you agree how the sun always set too soon?
i’ve watched the stars, since, hoping the universal flow might be reversible. i assure you they tell me nothing of what will remedy any earthly turmoil. especially not that of someone like me, so small and so alone.
though, i love you so deeply when i set my eyes upon you my pupils pool wide as i embrace the pressure of your body’s presence wrapping steadily abound my every bone’s soft marrow: i don’t dare proclaim that your love i know, nor that the love i feel could ever heal a single mortal’s bones. despite all it’s desperation and wonder, the emptiness that swells my soul like a cavity could never be filled by anyone other than me.
when i divide my life into fleeting seasons i recall how the spring loves flowers so greatly, it lifts me every year without fail from the winter blues. yet, the winter still claims every petal and every leaf, eventually. just as my warmth is always devouring the cold weather you breathe. the motions wait for no one, time is a lethal thief.
though my brain wanders towards you and my limbs creek like the branches of trees, fingers empty of your touch like the winter misses spring leaves. i know you were a season and i needed to grow alone.
still the movements of time and her changing seasons, this bitter wisdom that has come from age and grace, nor these emotions that crash like waves cannot keep me from reminiscing so sweetly how we spent entire days and nights: undressed, wearing only one another, or how the sun came up too soon… *darling, i want more time with you.
–six pm | *i want more time with you
I would like to share my tiny letters with you, because I once heard that a voice does not need to move mountains to move people. (Guante)
*all the elements in honey
i. most magical-beings prefer wild things.
time was where you existed. here. in this space where i have banished your physical form. i print your photographs and reduce you to only 2 dimensions. i spell words, iambic poems, and call the lyrics hexagonal. weaving messages like memories engraved as memorials into the air. symbols burned into my lungs drumming down my throat in heartbeat pattern morse code. pat pat pat the cadence of your character presses beyond its own boundaries and establishes new limits.
bars of sunlight create glitter of dust, but cannot provide magic powerful enough to overcome the grip of this depression. no words can cast a spell over overcast nettled clouds conspiring rain exclusively via creamed coffee eyes. turns them wet and red like koi ponds drowning the sunlight in your ripples.
i have had an eternity to ponder the philosophy of life. i have come to this conclusion: god’s first display of power was to name things. when you kissed each one of my eyelids and named me ‘honey’ i saw my life the way you’d been dreaming it. and so you became holy my blood thickened to the consistency of a viscous liquid saccharine, too morose to pump reason through my veins.
i longed for you. no. more than that. i fought for you. and you are a warrior so you must understand how much you meant to me. i was delicate and focused until you wrapped you madness around me with your lips and i kissed you and drank of it until you grew bored of me and then the madness abandoned me to the quiet.
your body tanned by the unforgiving work in this sunshine. i admired it like Adonis. i saw my reflection in your sweat pools and fell in love with myself in you like a sick twisted Narcissus. like dust in the air the sun made magic out of a thing so common, made gold of a working man’s skin tone. and i—ivory slave to the moon kissed by her beams, spoiled by pillows and pashmina and sleeping until noon, soft boiled eggs for bed in breakfast making love in the frame of our bedroom window. with purple eyes bruised by telescope keyhole making the tiny universe large enough to bite… making me so much smaller. so small that you stepped all over me. too small to swallow you.
ii. i was almost ripped in two, once.
together we were decadence, furnishings forbidden by all ethical code of conduct, conduits of sin: ivory inlayed with gold filigree and no honest man would dare destroy it once it was put together… had we not peeled ourselves apart. pushed awry by the moisture of an enveloping world, God’s masterwork raining on man’s made masterpieces of precious materials soaked in the ripples of rain. nature has no regard for peripheral trinkets like carved tusks and mined metals boiled and thinned and pounded and husked to be a shadow of what it once was. we were to be reclaimed like everything too ornate for utility. we would be stolen like the jewelry we are and tucked away until the estate sale of someone less grateful but more wealthy.
i thought I had it all, that i’d finally held everything…
but my gold-rushed to the coasts of C a l i f o r n i a.
leaving me- ivory with a cold bone heart.
3 0 0 0 m i l e s, from my head on your shoulder.
you are banished from my pillow case.
a scar across the sunset sets the scar across my forehead purple while my neurosis picks at scabs turning towels red. the scar across my arm begins to glow under the moonbeams casting soft hue about the encroaching shadow and i turn on flash to take its picture. the dusk sets the scene for a martian planet without ever having taken off from under the oppressive atmosphere of mother.
i lay down on top of my roof and pray that i might roll off and never feel the falling. gun metal cold of a steely eye contact briskly cuts me without ever having to make real contact at all. i lay here fuchsia in my panties, i squabble with the seconds. i forge a foxhole in your neck nape to survive the nuclear winter. i reserve my american right to lie bare in your arms...
….i delete your number from my phone.
–six pm | *all the elements in honey
◬ɼ† ₪ ₱ʘʓʇɹʎ 