Tag: poem

poem

If Only

~ LA Fogle ~ Leave a comment

Wow, I held back for so long.
Shamed by how the depth of it
knocked me to the ground.
I am afraid of real hallucination.


Joy, I never gave up my heart to this
shit assessment—mentor delusion.
I’ve a governor. A sea of dead lovers
who speak to me; they say “if only”
from books where loneliest brilliance
never found its soul mate.


You grow better and, you’re welcome
I meanwhile do not have to sit
in the lowly status of idiom’s prowess.
It is miraculous to be heard by the living.


You were right that I am no one
to you—
gladly, to you, I am no one.

prompts: sugarcoat fingerprint primrose retrograde saga dormant hypothetical implores plumes resolve normalize shame

~ LA Fogle ~ Leave a comment

November 4, 2021 to November 18, 2021

from the new moon to the full moon in Scorpio

rim glass photo
Photo by _Fidelio_

sugarcoat
The sugarcoat fairy has a white wand that sprays a sweet powder onto desserts, glass rims, and hard truths.
Often followed by the elusive tooth fairy who sneaks in to collect your teeth and the occasional sock.

fingerprint

fingerprint
o your voice
unlocks
cliche
ridges, whorls
veins, shape
disturbs the air
in a lover’s mouth
vowels
of
admission
quicken, thicken
the formant
folds deep
in throat
open and close
tremerous
sympathetic
bones and body
lash and tongue



How fast you move, swift Mercury
how slowly your myth wanes
Appearing to regress backward
as you pass in retrograde

Venus relaxes on cowslip wine
made from the primrose
of youth, when a paused
message of love was new

saga
“Sorry about that! It’s a monthly saga. She sought help but her insurance might as well be a coupon for 10% off Midol.
Her support group changed locations without telling her and, oh no.., I can’t find my wallet—“

“GO!” The clerk said, standing in the rubble. “LEAVE!”

dormant

“The term ghosting is an insult to ghosts.”

Cere cut deep into the burning bush, removing dead weight from the dormant plant to stimulate growth in the spring.

“All you can do is treat yourself better than that—care well for yourself—and love comes back. New love.”

hypothetical implores

It hurts. The expectation.
But it was a lipless hypothetical notion.
A narrative unspoken neither guides nor implores action to reach that forever ending, where pride belongs to everyone.

plumes photo

plumes resolve
plumes of lament
$2k in car repairs
filigreed wreathy elegy
time = money + interest
shearing scytheless stylist
resolve mends or ends
in determination

thoughts
like a fresh
haircut

normalize

“Not everything has to be normalized. You don’t comb the beach looking for the least exceptional rock.” I looked at Ash. “Sorry, the graveyard, seeking unremarkable stones.”

Something like a smile broke through Ash’s stolid face. “Or the bones of sane people.”

shame

I’m a firestarter
A ram bored with shame
Blood cut off from tight reins
Cold hand fumbles matchstick

A shrug-off warms up
this sympathy dance
Great romance cues
the strings, notes
like tears drop
Douse a flame

Relax the grip
gentled baton

rosa gallica

~ LA Fogle ~ Leave a comment

classical style from the poetry book, the waywith sun

rosa gallica photo

rose
any of a genus (Rosa, family Rosaceae, the rose family) of usually prickly shrubs w/ pinnate leaves and showy flowers having five petals in the wild state but being often double or partly double under cultivation

Rosa Gallica

O rose, o rosa rose, thou art the same
tho’ rueful romance oft’ has touched thy name;
a passing bitter simmer and a trace
of the sweet scent that simile did taste.

What in your properties do awaken,
from the stem, the thorns, the leaves, or the scents,
analogies of transient emblem?
O perfect love, but likened to be kept.
The cut keeps the fragrance everlasting,
the thorns defend the attempt;
trail flower

I follow the bloomed blaze of vast retreat;
thy path of five petals, count thy wild beat
Fast in the wilder; Gallica scent for me
What lovely name? O rose, thou art the same.

rosa gallica by LAFogle from the book the waywith sun

the muse left me / exposure to the abyss

~ LA Fogle ~ Leave a comment

writing published August 22, 2021

The muse left me

The muse left me for a polyamorous cad who grew tired almost immediately. Now our visits are plain-spoken, almost sad. Take place on the ground without wing or abstraction. It is as if we are at a holiday party catching up with a run-down of our accomplishments: How was your year? Well, I’ve been fine. Ron has faced some changes. They rounded up the men and put them in a pecker house where they were trained to work as peckers. He took right to it; world’s oldest profession. 

One very lucid day, the muse was going on about Venus being a disco ball. And “Kiss me with the radio on. The waves they bend my favorite song.” It was a complete creative cop-out. I think the muse was trying to look unaffected by the actions of the cad so broadcast this big happy-happy-joy-joy routine. It was hollow. 

Here’s hoping the muse will become tender again without needing a twelve-step program or a priest. I will wait and meanwhile try to provide a motivating soundtrack. 

Exposure to the abyss

A good friend will hold you by your feet and dangle you over the abyss to show you the footholds in the walls. A good friend will suggest a twist or kick for momentum or that you use bat technology to scream yourself off the walls. They’ll send you training tools like books or quotes or brushes; suggest new mediums: bristles dipped in tears, malleable dreams where sleep is a long luxurious blink. How it all works together to flush the sight of shards of memories worked around the nerves in sympathy. The body forgets its process while a good friend refuses your censorship, rides the shame to shamanic exodus. Holds the flashlight while you climb out of the abyss.

prompts: trust signifies cafe innocence intimacy accidentalist hurt foreshadow sleepwalk

~ LA Fogle ~ Leave a comment

October 20, 2021 to November 1, 2021

from the full moon to the new moon in Libra / Scorpio

trust

Back to the wilder
from collapse
under stacks
of undecayed
inorganic
matter—
It’s all temporary

Underground digs
in sentiment trapped
Prone to lucid dreaming’s
involuntary maw
Steps into the yawn
of your own pitfall

Take to the trees
like Tarzan—climb
your agile mind—
swing from trust-
worthy vines

signifies

In his ghast and livid beam, no colors absorb; absence signifies his subject in virous torrents of rayed devastation.
I am spared—my eyes cauterized at first sight. Mere ash beside a vacuum, patient for the Spring. Cremains in the kindness of a friend.

cafe
I’m a tourist in their cafe
where they talk over a good song;
Collectors of the medium/ who trade
the pain of kids who don’t belong.

It bounces off the reclaimed beams—
factoids, brag, gimcrackery;
lathers popularity
without a sole
analogy/ of us

on the island of loneliness

innocence

Innocence is a gift—mingled in commitment—of passage.

It has been slain on the altar of infant helplessness sulked in vengeance.

It has been saved by the certainty of power relinquished in permanence.

One day you won’t give your heart to bargainers.

intimacy

At the corners of their bed sate epic tales of wind, fire, earth, and sky loving the anthropomorphized form of their senses, conjured from the aromatic pyre; a tinder nest, intimacy the tender.

Not even the fires of hell refined worked so well to warm the dead.


She was an ‪accidentalist in one great big song about obedience.
More deistic than contrarian, because those small-town panderers just couldn’t be the gatekeepers of divinity.
They sounded more like creations of comedy.

hurt

“You’re being emotional and kinda paranoid,” Maena said. “Read the situation like a book.”

“Like look at a few words, jump to conclusions, and cry into my pillow?” Cere asked.

Maena smiled. “No, we don’t read books like the words are going to ‪hurt us.”

foreshadow
In the afterglow
of a gamma-ray
burst/ in her hard
bright light

His silhouette whistles—
harsh foreshadow,
blocking the lumen;
inkling black hole,

a cold hero’s trope

sleepwalk

I sleepwalk & talk
expose the bare truth
that fear & pain
hang from the pall
that covers the life of day

Mantle worn by soothsayer
who blankets infantile babe

There, in low waves
while the mind hides
memories, ring words
of the dissembler:
vestments
unpicked to rags

©2021 LAFogle / Lesley Ann Fogle

prompts: autumn winds dandelion poem blackbird tangling fireflies river funambulo ebb stranger hesitate

~ LA Fogle ~ Leave a comment

October 6, 2021 to October 19, 2021

from the new moon to the full moon in Libra

autumn, winds, dandelion, poem
‪Autumn winds
compose fire-pit scents
under dandelion parachutes
—echo bloom;
crackles underfoot

As trees discard
their rupturous leaves;
cells grown in between
life-giving stages

Deep discoverable mystery
unlike a poem’s
slow
arrival
on high-speed internet

blackbird
At noon, hiding her shortest shadow in alignment with the bridge, Maena followed between the dark images of the blackbirds bouncing across the water, ignoring the ripping vortex of shattering muck and slosh as the surfacing malevolent spirit lunged to tow all shadows underwater, leaving its victims soulless and forever staring at their own reflection.

tangling
In same footsteps/
wind & sun ‪tangling for our skin/
the weathered abrasion of a rock
we stop to pick up/ real weight/
shapes of polished angles
tumble to dents clove
from the whole/

Our fingers bump
across the crust
of our proud
mantle

fireflies
My love’s eyes strike like a floodlight
When he blinks, ‪fireflies disappear
Every week, a brave new season
I’m just here, prepared—
I got boots, flip-flops, cloak,
sneakers, shades, change of clothes
Umbrellas are useless in storms, climactic
And the rain just feels good.

river
Our cup spilled
unspeakable
divine fem
granules
whole flawed alien
Entire love
I could never be
but in that night of time
scythes
petalled revolution
bloomed execution
o the so-called weak
gentle tears
better part o u
I will singe us together
our cups will form a river

funambulo, ebb
Spored tears, at lashes tip—
‪funambulo cries
from ‪ebb of rope,
subsides;
Moist moss untwists
quiet, fast arias
—balloons—
post-wildfire.

May the fire-lighters,
wisdom pre-dominant,
palettes & moss,
plan the burning.

stranger, hesitate
Our guards and guardians
have never acted stranger:
they hesitate, nip
at phantom peripheral itches.
Animal mom, animal dad,
do bugs live in your skin?

©2021 LAFogle / Lesley Ann Fogle

Friend

~ LA Fogle ~ Leave a comment

for Lois

friends photo

With you I don’t kill time till time kills me
And I would miss you because you’d never leave
That is the highest value, consigned like family;
my sibling I was not instructed to love

It’s so easy, this vulnerable intimacy;
no cling to agro youth as we take our seat

Ours is a permanent love seldom on display
in growing observation that does not take
away the benefit of the doubt; we benefactors
heal together plotting the wondrous day

And don’t insult the witch:
This is not naivete;
It is a pact with heaven through hell
We question unafraid

The sickle moon

~ LA Fogle ~ Leave a comment

The sickle moon, with ice chip tips
clears away the day

In amber tunes of the low sun
retiring to its unseen bed;
The knowledge that it never sleeps
unnecessary for dreams
as we rest soundly in dependable return

The sickle moon rests in waxed shade
partly phased inpathic privacy

We too allow the mind its mysteries;
That lunary healer of all things sensory
works in wordless timeless sympathy,
within sleep’s reactive silence,

its filtry ministry

~ LAFogle

crescent moon dusk photo
Sickle Moon poem image

first posted on Twitter September 2021

Sister Knot

~ LA Fogle ~ Leave a comment

for Nikola

Shh, don’t say a word
on the harvest of the Great Confirmation Bias

All moves, construed, take cover
Links to the center of a silver chain frame
Dark brocade hair lays layered and wound

The Sister Knots fit pretty
at the temple, wrist, or throat

Their mother wore it first
A hand-me-down; heirloom
in dignified terms

The girls learned to fight
over it: tears, fists, appearances

Its victimized cut-off
reenacted on damaged friends