prompts: kind stuck spouse vulnerable worry journal conversations worry crisis worthy ribbon oracle rival

December 8, 2021January 25, 2022 ~ LA Fogle ~ Leave a comment

November 19, 2021 to December 4, 2021

from the full moon in Scorpio to the new moon in Sagittarius

Jake choked off his last shred of objectivity with piercing confidence and rode off into some kind of loner sunset, with only the curtains to hold his hand. Our shared wonder dismissed as magical thinking, wheeled away for correction, argued away as naive—just to argue.

stuck
Kill or be killed, child.
180 shots per intended minute.
Unregistered plastic bag.
Probable conclusion without a scratch.
Presumed protection with intent
to mutilate. Murdered property.
Insurrection.
Hip-hop cowboy, good gang, posse.
Annie, Get Your Gun and a permit.
Marissa, the wall has rights.
Stand your ground unless stuck
interpreting the lunatic
interpreting the reason
interpreting the law

The wandering albatross bow,
widen their wings and scream
at the sky; they circle, preen
and snap at their spouse
in a mating dance for life.

Three million miles
of soaring the skies,
ever to return
to the island
of their love
and birth.

Vulnerable, the reliant pilot hides in a pride of clouds/
seen, the sun comes out/ the complex speaks to the complex/
lowers a bridge open to valuation, closed to faulted criticism/
subject and object scatter, hide in the mirroring sky/
light faces the page, not the eyes

Thanks giving:
Let the worry fall away
from your clear eyes,
For the world turns
and we are in it;
Should joy escape your mind,
allow release to recommit
compliments of reprieve
from lifelessness.

I am your cherisher
thankful for each
delicate moment.

Wake and tell us what’s good, love, as the daylight
reaches your mind. Promise to snuggle in deeper,
cross the heart on your chest and hope to die.
Code your secrets in my journal
where I can read between the lines.

“I had conversations, but the upper hand of the masher, phlegm, and baffled stranger would not salute. And the agro. Everything I said was ammo. So I gave him ammo. All of it.”

Cere opened the lid to find furry teal blotches moldering the tops of the apricots.

“Worry eats at your thoughts. I needed to be done with it.”

“Recognize crisis mode. Deflection is a way to cope, but it’s pretext. We eventually have to move past it to understand the dissatisfaction that leads to a major life change.”

“Huh. I’ll think about that,” Greg said. “You’re not mad?”

“I’m working on a new perspective,” she said, taping up the last box. The movers would be arriving any time now. “Ultimately, I’m on your side and hope we get to share a better future. Call me after you’ve answered your own call.”

You are shiny,
like teeth bared
through organic
murmuration.

Is it the love shown
or the love deserved
that makes us worthy?

Two lorn brood
recuperate
in innate pattern,
flockwise;
their calls imitate
a wildish belonging.

ribbon

If I were a ribbon,
I’d curl around your finger
to remind you
that I am always
there. In spills of ink,
siftings of sand, traces,
and twisted strands of hair
Snug between the wanton
hand of death steepling in prayer.

If I were your ribbon.

oracle

She placed her hand on the young king’s chest and closed her eyes: He floated in a river of blood, tethered to a casketful filled with paper money.
Fire cremated the land into black ghosts pillowing the lusty blaze. Through the roar, he heard his name as a boy dipped a toe in from the shore.

The oracle opened her eyes and locked gaze with the young king. “You have enough for now. Do not invade. Take a vacation with your son.”

In returning warmth
that refuses to leave
the season,
mistle breaks,
disturbs a winter silence.
Leave your contortions
where misery can find its
mirthless tune. I’m here
in life’s harmoniacal quietus,
a rival of the snow, parched
as the ground, threshing
its mortal boon.

Stream – Morning Pages 12/07/21

December 7, 2021December 8, 2021 ~ LA Fogle ~ Leave a comment

Mourning Wake of Advertence, December 7th

I was told I have a sharp and unforgiving memory on 2/1/21 at 2:36pm. How do you respond to that? Must have been there were things that needed forgiven, but I lacked information. I loved them; we visited maybe monthly and exchanged meaningful birthday gifts for years. I sent messages every few weeks to brighten the day, pop in as if to say, our friendship means a lot to me.

I stopped reaching out after asking why was met with a parent-child type of scolding that had nothing to do with me or what a bad tiddler I must be. Once I stopped instigating contact, contact stopped; that’d become my tenure and I decided to…take a hint? Uncertainty can lead to compulsion and the answer of not thinking about it is just a jab at weak intellect, usually by someone who definitely has not solved how to keep unresolved intelligence from the subconscious.

Du Champ called eye candy art that didn’t engage the mind “retinal.” I dig it. That relationship became pretty retinal. It took the time to reveal me then junked me for emergent popularity. Feeling disrespected by someone you think you’re close to is upsetting. I felt like that dog that gets tricked into chasing an imaginary throw, except the ball was stupidity and the problem was that I didn’t chase it. I felt abnormal, like I could not conceal my analysis to the point where it wouldn’t be suspect. Suffering for existence in the wrong crowd needed identified and rectified. But I learned from the loss that I belong where I can let my mind flow without leaking concern into making others comfortable by staying quiet on the playground. And by honing this practice, unhampered, I decide the connotation of the word incisive. My tone might even soften in this freedom into choosing the word insightful.

Where can the spectrally skybound go if the artists, musicians, and poets need the plainspoken; if they need a prescribed normalcy blanketing the arena. It feels like an exclusion that comes from slippery dreams; dreams not lost but slipping, wherein former dreamers frame the optimist as naive. While the non-optimistic spectrally skybound quickly go nose down when other artists engage in lazy bonding with herders of feelgood art that keeps all at an average level of consciousness. Feelgood goes for the pain and chaos seekers as well—it is not enough to act out primal frustrations for a different emotional bump. Both stylistic choices contain what in the species allows for an average. And here are the extra words to clarify what lazy bonding means: when people use negativity, disguised even as concern, to show others how another is to be treated in a postured hierarchy. It is blackball showmanship without connection and a counterfeit bond of happiness. It takes no responsibility for the energy it creates and the distance of the subject exploring the situation when their entrance is illumined by gaslight.

Don’t overthink it.

The answer to not overthink it, takes a similar amount of responsibility for figuring out nothing. And certainly not figuring out the causes of depression, nature’s gift for resolve that comes in forms of rumination—rumination that does not lay waste in blame or scapegoating. Nor does resolution lie in any kind of fight song, no matter how good that makes one feel for a moment before drowning solution.

I say to you, artists:
If they’re dumbed down, you’re dumbed down; bring your brain cells inside this winter for a nice book.

I say to you, thinkers:
If you’re dumbing it down for people then you’re selling yourself, not being yourself.

I say to you, lovers:
Children of emotional neglect usually have insecure attachment styles and do well in relationships with secure attachment styles. Also, they have to be careful not to lean on others in regards to their trauma as they are more susceptible to transference because of their unmet needs.

I say to you, visionaries:
Chase the ecstatic; just don’t do it through influencers.

I say to you, divinity:
Lordy lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot get jiggy with.

Human relationships are not navels. Gaze at these navels.

You do you and there will be applause; not thunderous live-in-front-of-a-studio-audience applause, but claps like sporadic thunder as mistle gives way to torrents of rain. If you want the droves to sleep or leave you be, talk about the government auctioning off white space and whittling away our spectrum. They’ll hear those words and think it’s perhaps conspiracy and run from the burden of thinking. Bank on it. Obtain a line of credit from said bank that lets you pay back $3.00 a day for whatever will make you good enough at 24% interest–maybe just a little tuck so some walking unibrow can grace ye with an inappropriate comment on physical worth, check the teeth for probabilities. Status elevated by what it owns and offers. Enjoy those possessions, death is still coming, until thinkers solve the body.

The Hero’s Gurney

December 4, 2021December 4, 2021 ~ LA Fogle ~ Leave a comment

It was such a turn-on to have my subconscious hacked, being alluded to often but never directly addressed. You’d weave me in your fictive formula of taking bits from various people, flipping the POV like an atomized burger chef—or perhaps it was remiss unconsciousness steering—then I’d accuse you of witchcraft and here we are. I’m sorry about the knock at your door.

Knock knock knock!

“We know you’re in there! Come out with your pants up!”

But Jake, let’s call him Jake, had never done anything before with his pants up so that request fell on deaf ears, I guess. Jake did manage to get his pirate shirt on and one boot. He bounced and skirted across the floor on a single leg like a pogo stick while trying to put on the other boot. But he had that pogo shoe on backwards, you see—the wrong foot in the wrong shoe—, so with every hop on his left foot, he veered right. Until he bumped right into the windowsill amidst all of the confusion. The single fragile boot fell to the floor as Jake clawed desperately at the window frame. His hip had hit the sill, his weight thrown toward the open pane. She wanted to call out to him but that would suggest she’d been there.

Jake was a self-narrating fool, you see, so she couldn’t admit there was anything there or that would make her the objectified extra. She deliberated over whether this was fair. He hadn’t done anything but try to slip a bit of love to her. It’s just that the ending was clear. He’d ride off into a cardboard sunset, go be a hero somewhere new for a spell. Except he wasn’t a hero, was he? She’d have to write her own history. And while carefully deliberating, poor Jake had only the curtains to hold his hand. Out the window he fell with a final salute. Goodbye Jake, we’re proud of you. I just hope that everyone knew you were set on changing your ways.

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

November 18, 2021January 25, 2022 ~ LA Fogle ~ Leave a comment

November 4, 2021 to November 18, 2021

from the new moon to the full moon in Scorpio

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 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

prompts: trust signifies cafe innocence intimacy accidentalist hurt foreshadow sleepwalk

November 1, 2021January 25, 2022 ~ 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

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

October 19, 2021November 8, 2021 ~ 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?

prompts: venture contemporaneous carved priors brash favorable alarm history fret rivulet aim crepuscular stutters shadows cemetery

October 3, 2021November 8, 2021 ~ LA Fogle ~ Leave a comment

September 20, 2021 to October 3, 2021

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

venture
It was a foggy night. The smug was heavy in the air. Cere preferred the fog to the gas. If she had to venture a guess, she’d say this circle of hell was a repeating popularity pageant with the grand prize being the flashiest coffin lined with gold velvet cash-stuffed bedding and large enough to store the winner’s favorite toys and suckling gizmos. Cere had her money on Headuptheassicus, which was the nickname she gave Becky Green, the meanest and most popular demon at Hellmont High.

contemporaneous
As the sunlight shortens in autumn,
the moon’s contemporaneous rise
extends the bright moonlight
for several nights;
a hard turn through the zodiac,
the Earth responds softly
while the summer crops
are harvested in light

carved
These words, little doses
of dopamine, spill
onto the page encoding
feelings that range
beyond identification,
carved and contained
in the ink of description;
in the play of depiction.

priors
Do we wring life from its spine—every drop?
Jump over the haters or stop
I see a vault line:
faults and blame, bias and shame;
priors reenacted,
posturing exacted
in the primal part
of the brain.

How long goes
the era of suggestion?
Get ready to jump

brash
Her art made you think; it wasn’t explosively brash or cutting but just the tip of the tine limned through your mind exposing heavy artifacts you’d filed away, postponed as bigger problems you were helpless to solve. But obstructed by the feign of ignorance as doing nothing tips the balance of conscience toward inhumanity.

favorable, alarm
Above the clouds at our feet
If Love were a Titan, were
to step up on the highest
mountain, emerge
from the foam
neath the favorable
mythic moon;
silence
the alarm
of humors
balancing biles of thinner air
We are the very atmosphere
How easily these bodies
breathe as it carries us home

history
It was the biggest “FU” ever recorded in the annals of history. Its echoes shrank the Great Barrier Reef down to a chew-sized crouton. The sheer profundity reduced black hole theories to petty overthinking.

fret
Maena and I called him Gambusi because he looked like a worn one we’d found at a yard sale. The top fold of his rutted brow seesawed with each eye—the near-sighted one for glaring up close and the other for glaring at a distance—like a loose fret indented when a finger slides over it so that a higher harmonic rang with his every word, like the echo of a knife being sharpened, like the hint of screech when that same finger hovers close to a flame. Gambusi was wound tight—warped neck, too; his chin evolved back and down, locked, with no movement in that direction, just the side-to-side head shakes of “no.”

rivulet
Blue Kill rivulet,
I follow you to the fork
on the banks where
my baby walked before

The water picks up speed
just before the tributary,
rejoins the mighty
between this widening shore

aim
Said a man with his best aim:

“I’ll throw my hat in the land of milk and honey”

When the material veil had been lifted
his mind ran like fire ants

crepuscular
The sun retires and shadows lighten,
the wistful glow of our golden hour fades
Specks of light turn on like fireflies
while the deer, fox, and bat play
in the crepuscular twilight;
their cool blue silhouettes
evanesce from human sight

stutters
It lands casual
gradual macabre concern
then a want to share
pain all day
all day
‪Stutters
of ingrained emotion
till you confide your
deepest stains

Then it neatly packs
both stories
and flies away
flies away

shadows
“While others accept impermanence, we do not conclude such bleak ways of thinking. Our bleakness is in the ode to death but not in its permanence.” A dark shape fell across Maena’s face adding punctuation in that we did not dwell on shadows as harbingers of the sun’s end.

cemetery
If you, Death, were
at my cemetery,
I’d let the friction
of your inevitability
set fire to our effigies
as scapegoats for envy

While the devil
repossesses our
earthly talents
that shake off
in the final dance.

prompts: clock shocks dock rock jock

September 5, 2021November 8, 2021 ~ LA Fogle ~ Leave a comment

August 30, 2021 to September 5, 2021

shocks
His words and deeded shocks, the paradox,
send reckless current rippling through my brain;
firing patterns change to shield-like shapes
sealing intel from his mission of pain.
He’ll write of your imagined devastation
anyway

dock
On the dock of Bear Lake, Michigan, my weightless stick legs bobbing in the teal opaque water; I sat watching my father, almost young again, fish from a pontoon with his best remaining friend.

remant
Ursula’s kingdom was a glittery tree,
a remnant of the Aracariaeae
Too prickly to climb but lovely to see
it’s refusal to be extinct.

rock
The bones stood tall but water is water to rock
Cracks where stacks of slab lay with land
One cosmic shift in the whole honorarium,
the very idea, could buckle and fall. A lean-to
Devotees return to the land
The serotonin from this soil
the very reason to build here

Jock
Jock Camon grew from the bloody fists of Vales in its dirt sun-burned streets where trees once wailed under the axes of men with immediate need for wood. A doorway, stiles and rails of pink chipped paint unfitted in the frame; a plywood panel where a window had been.