nothing but comes readier to the hand

i am in the garden

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 07:11:49 GMT

two black blights on a
crowd of colors;
one goes off to devour
the hours. the other waits, and
plucks from the bed a solitary
flower. in my head it becomes
a poppy, a rose, tall and red with
a fetid middle, a burning pose
which reminds me: a third one,
hidden, another black spot
creeping its way through the garden.
it flickers through the vines unbidden,
snaking through the peripheries. a
sticky shadow, a memory. it twines
beneath; it's on my back. i spin.
am i? i am in the garden. i twitch
and twist to see. is the third black
blight me? summer will return, again.
green and black and red will see
the lightened sky, the bumble-
-bees. the growth grows under
the undergrowth. all things in time.

Untitled

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 02:39:49 GMT

"Don't go near it,
don't go near it"

I catch the stare in
a net of hair--

The colors and the wings;
the flutter of the
lashes

The eyes shift from
tawny to brown
to green

I always see
the troubled and
the empty stares

I always shovel and
dig beneath
the troubled and
the empty stairs

I tumbled into cobbled
webs

and couches kicked to death

"Don't go near,
Don't go near"

She said
"There was dirt on the floor,
and nobody there,"

The unexpected call--
and fingers pursed against
your lips

A warm and empty heart--

"Don't come near it,
Don't come near it"

The beat's a stacatto
one, a synthetic drum;

in a shop I plucked up
a music box. It wouldn't
even play a simple tune
without my constant cranking--

I brought to my ear. It
whispered:

"You can't stay here.
You can't stay here."

as we passed

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 17:34:28 GMT

you gave it to me once
a gristled little slice
of heart
bobbing in a vial;
pressed it to my palm
as we passed

you whispered
of things we couldn't
say. i nodded
and held it to the
morning light

which caught the fibers--
mealy muscle and
strands darker still;

i thought of
pathology and the incidence
of disease as i watched
you walk away i slipped
it in my pocket

and waited. should i--
should i have
tested its strength or
plucked it to pieces or
skipped it across the sea

should i

A BEAUTIFUL TRIOLET I'M FAIRLY CERTAIN I DID, IN FACT, WRITE

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 23:09:25 GMT

Into this wall I'll slide,
for it's made of melted butter.
Towards its surface I shall glide;
into this wall I'll slide.
Last night, corpulent, I was denied,
so I stated with scarce a stutter--
"Into this wall I'll slide,
for it's made of melted butter."

the end of the affair is always death

Sun, 03 Sep 2006 09:34:17 GMT

IF per-some-chance you're wondering where half my entries went... I locked them. I hope some day in the not too distant future to publish a small book of my poetry & short stories, so I thought it best not to leave half of my writings open for public perusal. ONE HAS TO WATCH OUT FOR ONE'S SELF. AND I KNOW SO MANY WILL BE CLAMBERING TO PURCHASE MY SCRIBBLINGS IF THEY'RE NOT ABLE TO LAND THEIR GRUBBY HANDS ON THEM FOR FREE, EH? EH??

If you want to read a few tidbits hither & thither, comment here and I'll add you as a friend. Please, if you add me, leave a comment, or I likely won't notice. AND WE CAN'T HAVE THAT SORT OF THING GOING ON, NOW CAN WE?!

Shrewsbury, 1918

Fri, 11 Nov 2005 15:56:18 GMT

There were not many of them. But they came home nonetheless, delivered from the trenches by some unseen holy hand. They came home and were not altogether unchanged. Certainly, Shrewsbury was not as large a place as certain other places. They had lost many, but not altogether as many as some. Still, it all seemed very strange. He had been too old when the Great War started to contemplate its horrors, and he was too old now to be confronted with them.

It was not fair. He knew this. He had the utmost respect for all of them. All the belligerent states were in their right to remain belligerent, to strike belligerent wounds, to send send belligerent youths marching -- no, hobbling -- no, gliding -- back to their homes. They were the lucky ones, those youths. They dotted the city streets now, sitting desolate outside shops, sling-bound, wheelchair-bound. Many of them no longer had faces.

Strict neutrality, as His Holiness Pope Benedict XV instructed. Strict neutrality was to be maintained. Perhaps that was hyperbole, before, but no -- it was the thought that occurred to him most frequently, upon seeing them. It was as if someone had taken an orange and cut away most of the peel. One layer, lifted up, gone forever -- mashed to rinds, coated in chocolate, sold to those who could afford to indulge. It didn't matter. It was gone. There was a dark gash, surrounded by muscle, a dark impression where perhaps a nose had once been. And the eyes, gazing out at him, absent of his God and his Church and his unquestionable neutrality, those seemed darkest of all. He could find no words of comfort for them; he was out of synch with their existence. He gripped his Bible tightly, sweated, tingled a bit as he walked past them, pace suspiciously swift for an old priest set in his ways. Strained smile, strained heart; he walked on.

It was off to the church, then; St. Mary Magdalene Church, or as it was colloquially known, Battlefield Church. Built on the site of the Battle of Shrewsbury, a battle which had had a great deal to do with the Welsh, and the not-Welsh, and the eternal struggle for land. He wondered vaguely if, afterwards, faceless men had roamed the streets, run over with the Bubonic Plague and every horror of the middle ages, as it were. He shuddered. He never felt comfortable discussing, or even giving thought to those dark times. They had done odd things to one another; heads on pikes, drawing and quartering and Towers in London and anguish and death and death and pain. His hands were damp against the leather of the Bible.

Shakily, he seated himself on one of the pews. Setting the Bible down, he put his face, whole and intact (if marred by age), into his sweaty palms. He took a long, shuddering breath, and thought about absolute neutrality. He thought about the distinctive curve of Pope Benedict's aquiline nose. He thought about the body and blood of his Lord Jesus Christ. He thought about candles and incense and flowers and life everlasting. He hoped that the men's faces would grow back. He hoped that they would abandon their pain, leave it sobbing and pleading at the side of the road. He hoped.

He hoped.

a villanelle

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 17:42:10 GMT

Dante in Exile Sings of Beatrice

You cannot see my living heart.
It's nothing like my ravaged face.
She's dead but still she sees my heart.

Though weary now I script my art
and my blood thrums from the constant chase.
You cannot see my living heart.

Tomorrow I know I must depart;
my offspring shuffled from place-to-place.
She's dead but still she sees my heart.

My wife's yearned for home since exile's start.
It matters not. She may never replace...
You cannot see my living heart.

I am surrounded and a man apart,
never again Florence, or again her face:
she's dead but still she sees my heart.

I've one last place to go, and I chart
the stars which lead to her Sanctifying Grace.
You cannot see my living heart;
she's dead, but still she sees my heart.

-Lara Unnerstall

aloysius the misunderstood devil

Thu, 12 May 2005 21:38:42 GMT

Aloysius was born in 1918 to a woman named Gretchen. She took one look at him and decided he was the physical embodiment of all the evils produced by the Great War, purged from the world through her uterus. But she loved him anyway, even if he was just a scowling devil’s head on a long, flesh-covered spinal cord. He came out with a moustache and beard and pompadour and a scowl flashing over pointed teeth, but that was just how it was. She loved him anyway. “Other mothers woulda thrown you down a well, Al-oh-ish-us,” she would say in her Kansas drawl, “but not me. I just love you too damn much, even if you are ugly.”

The Gift

Tue, 10 May 2005 04:23:50 GMT

There was a photo I had once.
It contained a beautiful thing--
however, I would not deign
to assume a single thing about
your sense of aesthetics. Sight
is a funny thing, and eventually,
inevitably, eyeballs harden,

and our gift of sight is lost
altogether. But there was something
to be seen, in the photograph.
I captured it on purpose, that
flitting, single grey moment,
scooped it up, and placed it on
a reliable surface, for safekeeping.

I wish I'd saved it, but I gave
it away. You'll never know the
terrible beauty of it. And it
was beautiful, believe me. (I
can see clearly that you don't.)
It does not matter. I gave it
away. I am the fool here,

plump as a Christmas chicken,
headless and gutted, though
seldom rutted which I suppose
is understandable, considering
the state of things. But the
point is I gave it away. Even
now it's being carted off,

carried through forests and
over highways, on it's way
to the hot sands of the
all-too American desert, the
one with the carnival and
the prostitues. It will stay
there and dry up like a leaf.

One day, perhaps, though it's
unlikely, I will come across a
small forgotten fragment. I will
have sandals on, and carry a staff,
skin thick and wizened as leather.
I will pick it up (fingertips yellow),
press it to my bitter lips,

and recall that dead morning when I first found it.

conquest and expansion

Tue, 10 May 2005 00:07:25 GMT

From now on this journal will house my poetry & fiction. It seems appropriate to begin with the William Butler Yeats poem from which I filched the journal's title-of-sorts.

All Things Can Tempt Me

ALL things can tempt me from this craft of verse:
One time it was a woman’s face, or worse—
The seeming needs of my fool-driven land;
Now nothing but comes readier to the hand
Than this accustomed toil. When I was young,
I had not given a penny for a song
Did not the poet sing it with such airs
That one believed he had a sword upstairs;
Yet would be now, could I but have my wish,
Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish.