Diana Matisz
I too have sat vigil at bedsides...
Street Lamp Child12:38 am.
Tell me child, how did you get here? How did you find yourself lying in an alley on your back blows raining down on you from the fists of other children. Ragged freeze-frame images of angry little faces baby fat of childhood clinging to sharp angles of impending adulthood your dark eyes staring up in fear haloed by a street lamp. Children dying world imploding and yet, in the safety of a quiet town they fight and scream kick and pummel and for what? Jealousies and slurs or the unforgivable: lack of love? Sirens shatter what's left of night's peace as twenty children scatter in a game of hide-and-seek no longer an innocent race. I watch as you stumble away to a home where no one cares and hope you sleep well, child. I won’t. Distance is a Greedy Bitch
Photo: Diana Matisz
she's slight and sly
cowled in a cilice of stolen hours loose threads of conversations unraveled from lips of lovers before the needle can mend the tear she walks a crooked path to best conceal deceit, zig-zagging along perimeters of lush and fertile hearts, seeded with tender shoots of burgeoning affections her skeletal fingers claw to ragged wounds the soft carapace of vestal passion the pain of her wet and dirty work felt most in moments before the onset of need the thrum of it in bloodlines her call to feast voraciously and so, there is no recourse but to strike her dead or at the very least lop off her legs to cripple her stride Ma Bell
sitting there
she taunts pristine cold silent vocal cords taut coiled her refusal to speak a victory against the need screaming in my head but when she sings, oh, when she sings her soprano trill steals my breath chills enchant my skin i reach for her press my ear against hers and hear the melody i've been anticipating, my inamorato's murmur The Music of a Captive Heart
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I Wonder
i thought about her today
and wondered where she'd gone, that magical windswept creature braving the gusts of an ancestral spring on a two-tree hill i remembered that day and the ease with which she held herself once they could cajole her into actually looking at the camera clasping her own hands as proof of her comfort in her exotic singularity i recall she was a dreamer lost in worlds of knights on white stallions and sword bearing princesses in hennins easily distracted by leaves clouds the haunting poetry of a whip-poor-will she hadn't a care in the world that day not one there wasn't much of a past to remember and the lumbering weight of her future had yet to settle on her shoulders she was living in her moment, that day i thought about her today wanted to take her by the hand, run up the two-tree hill and hide away, just the two of us but i was too late by the time i'd found my way back to her, she'd gone ahead into our future, never once looking back for me Sudden Storm
Photo art by Diana Matisz. Click photo for a larger view.
sudden storm
my resolve in puddles When the Bough Breaks
i am
a passerine perched on a fragile bough quivering body hunched tight hard before the Furies eyes closed head tucked into feathered nape, vulnerable weary of storms of the effort to hold on tight hard against capitulation listening for a robin's trill beneath the keen of winter singing, sway breathe draw deep the zest of ice and pine feel the bite the lick the lash of pain for this is living now, fly Remainders
walk
stumble straighten walk into his house first thing noticed his sneakers, right where he left them where he always left them his collections his music his son his wife his favorite chair but no him the air thick with his absence heavy with the silence of his laugh clouded with the dimming of blue blue eyes sneaking glances upstairs round corners listening listening straining for something of him leaving his house crippled with sorrow bent into older age by the weight 7 -1 = 6 burying my wet face in the sleeves of my coat fragrant with Stevie's smokes [For Stevie, beloved brother and friend] Birthing
tangled hair
ragged clothes haggard eyes weeping contradictions i stand on the precipice of this dark wing dream fingers clenching tidal mud to stuff in a mouth, agape staunching the rupture of untapped love, seeping vaporizing into air gravid with fat sodden tears of a dying winter and as i lay panting, this wasted joy this sanguinary birth of loss drifts, ghostly, up, up through red nipple buds of trees in labor rising, nestling beneath blue heron wings this sacrifice, disappearing in the whispering static of wings and watershed moments |