Pearl Pirie
romantic painster, louder, I
can’t even hear you bleed
bungee
jumping school drop-
out, spine rhymes with itself
muscles too taut to spit cusses
ground-kissed
*
tourniquet,
turn a quaint what? tune a kit, tuna kid, done
orchids,
(lie alkaline), dumb as orchards (Palestine)
doom
NASCAR, gloomier child, Rumi eyeshot
(there is
a field) roomie’s eyesore, hot om, ye sorrel
homesick
oral, (there must be a prayer for this) om
throne a
sorrow (meet you there), thorned a Zorro.
*
-can you
wake up this word?
- look up
or wake up?
I usually
wake up a word by tickling its left serifs
*
the
hottest part of me is the tangent of our combined heat
— the
point of your shoulder against my temple
the
temple, that part of my head, my idiolect’s headwaters
that
icebox robot of bone that runs on its tin feet towards
the odg,
a god, a dog, or sense of odd, and winds me back to our
shared
ticks. if it’s an idiolect we
share, is it a dialect? a bialect?
*
a
bi-election this separation into the unnaturalness of having—wait,
eight
limbs? does that mean we are
an
octopus finally? ou une autobus? we idle and sidle and sit.
*
the
coldest part of me is the C of your ear as it rests on my scalp.
soft
sounds of hair is ocean is ohh.
where are
you warmest? can I riffle deep under your shirt?
is
it here? may I ask? will you answer me that?
or will I
have to find out for myself?
we are
countries apart in the politesse of public.
the land
under the land has no lines that match anything
we
devise. Palestine or lines of pants or panty lines.
tan
lines, police lines. threat and thread and red and unread
and
always one more means
to an and
and an and.
*
there are
real things to do, if
we are
insistent on peace. if we
act
instead of throw money, patience
and
petittions at. there are people
to feed,
talk to, carry heavies for.
if are
well-healed before well-heeled
we must
each horn and powder
one’s own
arrow of anemone
(out
beyond ideas of wrongdoing)
break
bread and eat, share.
sense is
ours for the remaking.
present,
accounted for, is everyone
with
family who die more reliably
than rain
that lifts itself in petticoats
diagonals
of dandelions in dialogue
the whole
width of The Possible
(when the
soul lies down in that grass)
turn a
cat loose on the birds
and two
kills a week, half for sport
half left
in indifference. the grief
of heart
family of loss of gloss of
eyes
turned etiquette away, quiet
the
midnight mental paintings.
tête-à-tête
quite suppressed.
insert
bird, birds and sloppy generals
(out
beyond the ideas rightdoing)
no, don’t
invoke Hitchcock again.
unfinger
your eyes and see. not
hand-me-down
movie clichés
to
replace observations. are you
at the
end of your trope yet? yet?
*
to
beehive to behave to behove,
(there is
a field) stone unturned,
left
unpaved, a corn row owns
and forms
itself from what it has
sown in
sequence in sun sequins.
what was
allowed, farm-sown?
let us
dye. aloo palak arm-thrown.
one world
of surface, depths of
convoluted
believing anything.
(the
world is too full to talk about.)
*
silk
curls tumble over suit man.
the light
polishes his bald spot.
I want a
pen to write hearts on it
(as if
that will fix everything).
*
strum feathers by the fountains,
so foreign for the brahman
the sparrow myna, shady. what’s
fated for ermine or tending to debris.
you’re the hallways and the
tables that I stream to, folding light
that I bliss for, swell and well,
goodnight, oil-barrel myna, tangled nude.
strumming hairs of my guitar on a
nippy slippery weekday
a schlock with ardour. I see
dense bones lift for my chains.
conscious and adhered as those
sheened eyes of sparrow myna
she's berating me with the ladle
from a dove
of the lonely strawman, her
plucked down.
sparrow myna, squawking radio,
barrelled myna, can't you see
you’re the hallways and the
tables, are the rooms and walls and light
the space I miss, hood your eyes,
sparrow myna, that’s my news.
sparrow myna, I love you.
*
Pearl Pirie's lastest collection is the pet radish, shrunken (BookThug, 2015). She is a host of Literary Landscape on ckcufm.com and president of KaDo, a group for eastern varieties of writing including haiku and tanka.www.pearlpirie.com
