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Lessons of loss

The fair voice on the window sill,
ranking gravity over dice,
teaches opportunity
as a lark descending;
a will for the staff, the hungry deft harvester
whose nuance is a hospital and stiff sheets, and radio'd veins,
and morse coded prescriptions.
It pursues a lanky kiss; a boney tumbling vertical,
rigid against the yellowing cotton,
tripping through a calendar.
 
It is a birth certificate.
It is a trench.
It is a cognitive repentance, rousing vindictive
amongst crooked marks that do not punctuate
but sneer
sleepily onto the next cardiac fall-out.
 
Monopoly was a cockroach I once knew,
snapping with sex and dancing feudal foxtrots, crawling
over my gritted jaw,
chancing the teeth
for my vocal chords
and playful with annihilation.
Somebody else's skin echoes on me -
variant to love and I envy
with scriptures of curtains,
thick with velvet snuffing the hunted brain
like a dog sick with loyalty.
 
Lessons of loss loosens me to the dot
of somebody's pupil
blinking me away
as if I never orchestrated
that violin on their shoulder:
the guilty starved pretence.

◄ Self Portrait

A Palette ►

Comments

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winston plowes

Thu 29th Oct 2009 23:23

Powerful. Challenging.

Lessons of loss
loosens me, to the dot
of somebody's pupil
blinking me away.

Is a fantastic segment of words.
And now the TV dies and everyone stands for the national anthem. The BBC is closing down.

win

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Graham Sherwood

Thu 29th Oct 2009 19:45

Marianne, please don't take this as a negative criticism, but I don't get it. I've tried and tried to understand what you are trying to say but I can't break it down. It sounds like a Bob Dylan song lyric, very clever but indecipherable. I'm feeling pretty uncool and very thick.

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Cynthia Buell Thomas

Thu 29th Oct 2009 11:08

Really good, Marianne, full of imagination expressed in outstanding images and provocative depths. I enjoyed it greatly.

Please check 'whose nuance' while the poem is 'up front' so to speak.

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John Darwin

Thu 29th Oct 2009 08:24

Astonishing. Love it.

John

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