(What if intense sadness covers everything that’s left?)
Tentacles gravel through an amalgam of trash.
Tentative filtering, fingering, floundering.
Finding nothing, empty mouths open.
Vacant notices plaster poles with pleas,
Vacuous and never – )ending
Plastering bullshit until it stings eyes.
Dung bricks begin to fall from heavy tongues,
dis- (balance) -rupting.
No one notices a fence until after it is fashioned.
Brenda Warren 2013
Gravity pulls hard on the drunkard,
shifting time in alleys.
Prophets born in bottles
spin circles around the edge
of everything he never was
as expected whatnots thunder in his ears,
forgotten.
He binds his back to brick
and trumps his dreams,
sliding into blackness.
Nothing mends his world
like tomorrow’s waiting dog.
Brenda Warren 2013
Visit The Sunday Whirl
A basket of stars
swept night’s flesh ripe
in a clever tapestry
of blinked secrets,
while her hand
nested chance
in the crotch
of his pants.
Dog saw everything.
Brenda Warren 2013
Visit The Sunday Whirl
Visit the Mag
Backlit clouds hint
at the presence of the day star
illuminating stones beneath our feet.
Shallow light rustles mist
over autumn’s raspy grasses
saturating chills beneath our skin.
Our old dogs lag behind
on this journey toward shelter
panting stiffness beneath their stride.
Thunder pushes our shoulders low
until roofed walls open protection.
Screaming sister wind
whips rain like trains
on tracks against the sky,
and we worship the time we are given.
Brenda Warren 2013
for Dave
Driving east on Montana 200,
Unbidden recollections spill over buttery fields.
Floating like ghosts between Square Butte and the Little Belts,
They swarm through the shadows of life’s early hillsides
Back there, where we worshipped no god but Now.
Passing Moccasin, your death
Breathes deep curves in the road.
falling into patches of darkness
As time sharpens the edges of forgetting
Who we were.
Brenda Warren 2013
Visit The Sunday Whirl
Apples hold secrets like forests hold trees
deep in the husks of their seeds.
Secrets like cyanide can become lethal
and exile desires to breathe.
Screaming for freedom, secrets are stories,
peering up from beneath our dis-
ease.
Three blind spiders spinneret nests
and cosset enigmas in spirit,
piles of promises (cradled arachnids),
clues to secrets’ deep web,
like cyanide in apple seeds
buried in flesh
through stories wrapped round in red.
Brenda Warren 2013
Process Notes: The first two lines are from The Soul’s Arsonist, a poem I wrote in June. After writing about three blind spiders, the piece stopped. Clicking on the apple tag in the sidebar I found apples and secrets in two lines of a piece, and started over using them for this week’s Whirl. It was nice to see the spiders spin in again. Little pieces can form bigger pieces. Eden’s Promise is best served aloud. I like it. I didn’t use the words rash or claws from the wordle.
Visit The Sunday Whirl
It must be hard to be almost dead
when the only thing sassy and sumptuous
is vanishing faster than you can breathe.
Tomorrow grows vacuous and absurd.
Violet memories slather your vision
with short vibrant breaths—
single moments that shine in your life.
A spread of final. vivacious. splashes.
A cheek on the top of your head—
your grand finale.
*
Desperation grows pointless under death’s auspicious power.
*
Brenda Warren 2013
I love you such my boy.
Visit The Sunday Whirl
Pre-treated in her subjective dimension
where good deeds ring like bell towers,
the stains on her spirit
mark avenues of change
used to remind us
of the price she pays
from her own pocket
to lift the rest of the world up
from its misery of circumstance.
Fishing for praise,
she says it takes time to answer
all of the pleas for magic that poverty
propels from hungry mouths.
(It’s almost like she’s an angel.)
Only,
she says,
it’s not a big deal;
she doesn’t mind doing it.
Brenda Warren 2013
Visit the Sunday Whirl
Note: I didn’t use intrigue.
Hot embers lift feathery sparks
that pop scarlet holes against
Pandora’s inky night.
Our shining cheeks lift with laughter,
oiled by fire’s gentle sway,
polishing summer’s reverie.
No doubt we fit together,
this close circle of faces
watching the young ones
feed flame with branches that burn
until dawn begins to brush the sky,
then wets the grass
shooting from our mother
to tickle morning’s feet.
On our way toward tomorrow,
we create another yesterday
to hold us aloft,
when lost moments
cloak their hungry pall
over our empty nest.
Brenda Warren 2013
Visit the Sunday Whirl.
Process Notes: On the way to DC we spent four days in Pandora, Ohio, our home away from Montana, where we filled time around fire telling family stories until morning came close.
Invisible in this heat,
our breath threads through the air
and we expect pillars of salt to rise,
casting shadows where our shoes
melt against gravity’s pavement
connecting us to history’s
sweaty landscape of fry bread and
Ferris wheels.
Fresh horseshit sends us
a breeze of sweet pungency, and
our eyes connect in smiles
as we sense our plan’s fruition,
then head to the barn to breed.
We take this last chance before war
fetches you again, like a dog
lays claim to its bone.
Brenda Warren 2013
Note: Every summer of my youth, I attended The Last Chance Stampede and Fair in my hometown. Other than the title, the piece is fiction. It started surreal, and worked its way into something else. As our poet friend Catherine McGregor says, sometimes poems have minds of their own. Indeed they do.
Visit The Sunday Whirl
Adventures in Poetry and Writing
brenda warren
Reclaiming my inner badass at 50
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poetry by nicolas ryan brown.
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