magnetic poetry and prose
Prone.
In a hammock, my field of vision marred by crocheted diamonds of white, blue and green twine, only the uniform movements of black ants — busily running errands — kept my mind from fully giving over to despair. Their whole operation in the business of seeking, gathering, transporting, and delivering goods, leveled me emotionally. And the apparent indifference with which they performed their deterministic actions left me thankfully doleful.
She, fire on the lake, flare on the lens, bubbles in her bath. She.
She only thinks of herself,
filling the cold cracks in her mirthless faith
with mute summer-stock and square aesthetics.
Dramatic gestures, perpetrated behind elegant frames,
separate her external seasons from internal weathers;
hunger becomes an earthquake in her hollow, dank spaces.
Intestinal combustions will heat Siberian salt to reflection.
It’s a meme for the right of passage—youth to adulthood.
This is distraction or a cilia reunion of rest in her winter belly’s fast.
K. Shawn Edgar | Tinkerer of Assumptions | Ebb Tide Detective | Mote Chaser
Slides
Hey,
safranine-blooded sea creatures
swimming so far away, microscopic.
Do you see the stain as a shallow grave
or think of it as your giant, endless ocean?
Flash to a time when shadows didn’t need
light to exist.
Casters rolled them out like a Yo-Yo,
spreading darkness around on puppet
strings.
Pretend like it’s the weekend before
you were scooped, prepped, and dyed;
Swimming in a cool cluster, naïve.
What kind of images were you casting
deep in the refracted light?
Could they have shown a dual future
sliding along below you—parallel,
self taught, self-aware, and emotive—
controlled by forces they might not
understand…?
Maybe they played a larger scene?
The one that motivates the Casted
to become the Casters.
Eyedropper releases a teardrop-shaped
capsule of familia, still swimming.
And you sigh.
K. Shawn Edgar | Writer | Lounger | Freelance Human
÷•÷
________________
She’s gotta move; she’s gotta get out;
she’s gotta find a new place.
A cat can’t scream, “I can’t shove my head any further up my ass.” Not in English, and it’s better off for it. These words we humans curl color the Dutch shovel gray glow of the full moon burnt umber; pendulously bleeding meaning from thought, and sending harsh echos flying overhead.
The pearl-eyed woman at the micro-grocery under the overpass tells me she’s learning to think outside her box of fleshy, interstitial curves. But she’s always dampened by the memory of toothpick words from the hard mouths of fancy car drivers. This woman, dressed in full metal-plate apron, collects small-talk shrapnel and compresses it slowly into diamonds.
Outside her box, I’m thinking lively luck too: it’s the swirl of a Slushie. You never fully drink its spinning twisting cosmos breaking depths dry. And the cats scream, “We can’t shove our heads any further up, up, up. All the men have angry, scruffy shadowed faces.
In winter, I always lie with my knees drawn up; words curling up the sky. Women of false fathers, ignorers all, draw their knees around older men. It’s their inwardly curved form, outwardly projected into every dimension until they break the specter of unfulfilled praise.
__÷•K•S•E•÷__
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I’m proud to post this poem from Natasha Head of tashtoo.com. I’m sure you all with love her poetry as much as I.
— K. Shawn Edgar
To Speak of Love
He turns to me, seeking more than I can give.
Poetry drips from my fingers, but coldness protects my heart.
He claims it is only poets who speak of love.
To him I am nothing more than a word machine.
He wonders why his influence
has yet to ignite my muse.
Failing to recognize he stands strong as marble
at the core of every sonnet, every free write,
but because I do not speak of love,
He feels safe to assume, I do not speak of him.
— Natasha Head
http://tashtoo.com
@tashtoo
Facebook.com/tashtooparlour
Professor,
with mustaches of the walrus,
you are archetypal,
a refined brain in aging boxer body,
stout to your undiscovered core.
Flocked around you –
North, East, South, and West –
your assembled pupils are
young men of unmolested
potential and yearning,
primed for your educational
pumping.
Coach them,
preen them,
group them tight, professor,
for a monumental archiving
in photographic large format
around their unattainable subject,
a defiant, naked and exposed
woman—
the corsets and buttons
of society will burst widely,
as the unseen camera’s shutter
opens to the unyielding light of She,
impregnating its photoconductive plate.
Her model airs and curves
will shock and titillate all sideways,
but your young men of horsehair will elate.
These uniformly diverse,
artistic men of letters and brushes,
circumsolar to her triangular rawness,
cluster humbly and yet
front their own projected
qualities and quirks,
some proudly,
some demurely,
some ardently,
one with a singular creepiness
that vibrates with things to come—
moving pictures of very young men
fiery-eyed and over sensitive
observing raw, unbalanced human life
not their own; catching it from a distance
with critical commentary and
violently forlorn acts of desperation.
Professor, come clean;
who are these assorted young
measures of man? Geniuses?
Each head held
with each man’s
internal struggle,
strife and focus,
captured in a moment
least expected, but
most revealing.
Examine the male model for one;
he shows nothing more than
an impressive, naked forearm
and strong manly jaw,
the kind a haymaker can’t harm.
Professor,
is he one of your
bastard sons,
returned to serve
at your behest? Hoping
to win the fine nude
female prize; taking her away
from his absent father?!
His stalwart, desire-emoting eyes say,
I could whup ass all over these art
pansies; brake their bony brushes
and take their geeky girlfriends,
if they had any damned girlfriends,
but I want only She, most revealed,
the model woman for my lust and love.
Professor, that boy there;
the unintended focal point,
with his ginger hair and smile,
right in the thick of it all.
How’d he get such an awkward
position? He holds the fast future
of our human race on either shoulder,
a god and goddess of sex. The future!
Only, he has the sweet limitations of
unrestrained cuteness and hopeful sincerity –
harsh black holes to swallow his own fast future.
Sadness is his coming spaceship; its cosmic
inevitability has all ready marked his narrow chin.
This life is long;
it draws me out,
and it folds me up
in reams of paper,
65-percent recycled.
It stains me with bumble
bee ink, ill little stinging
reminders of moments
piling over my head and
under my bared feet.
Half awake for days
in weeks, this is an
endless blink where those
bumble-bee stained images
are projected by blacklight
through my pale thin lids;
no blinds can fully shut out
her once buzzing stingers.
Compositing life’s long flickers,
fitted or unfitted or stacking
leaf layers on my shoulders,
I don’t have the chain mail,
my lovely lady lost now,
only flakes of our skin,
a closer set community than
we’ve ever achieved outside
dust layers under our feet or
dusty blue above our heads.
She’ll never insulate my bare
again. So there’s the rub,
our skin-like memory foam
forever shaped to a misfit
flashing and revolving in a
nearby galaxy.
I’m gonna staple chain links,
other’s false protection, into
my topographical moonscapes,
fleeting always farther out,
a useless expansion of self,
alone in the dust of other’s
skin.
New Yorker,
come out to play-a.
New Yorker,
come out to play-a.
Down comes your tower
of ugly pixels and bits. It’s
over, your hour is up.
The Sick Poets are here,
coughing in your Face.
Isolation won’t stop Us.
We’re coming for your
daughters and sons, your
hidden bank accounts, and your
aged runway catwalk wives, your
“producer” husbands.
Snobbery is gated neighborhoods,
devaluing the true lives of words.
Can you dig it?
CAN
YOU
DIG
IT?!
I’m sleeping
it off, all these
broken heartbeats.
They weren’t here
before you left
and right to go.
You said you loved
to watch me sleep.
“It’s the
breathing,
she said,
it’s the
breathing
in and out
and in.”
Polished night sky,
expressive of our
impulsive night deeds,
assisted the cultivation
of self-
less second meetings
unintended.
From the Snell Hall
breezeway,
up the glass
stairway,
to the KBVR TV/FM
offices
at the end of the
hallway,
I walked as in a dream,
flashing forward
foretelling future
of love,
of help-
ing hands,
of your giving
nature
it’s true.
I began as shining
stranger
of mysterious name
floating in the air
from friendly lips.
My reputation
preceded me
through the corridors
and to your open ears.
Once we met face to face
in dark,
expressive shots
in silent,
emotive glances
over my bicycle
at your doorway
we bounced in and out
of Lost Highways and
I became your
mission mandated
between coffee-and-gin-fueled
late-nights
of repeated weather reports
from endless TV news cycles.
Our first face to face
was dark, and
our last was darker
still.
Carbon Noise Poetry 