Member Poem

Lying against this bed of pines and shriveled stones,
I have come to the conclusion
that life is inevitably sweet and divine yet treacherously pure.

Events dancing like broken shells and bits of soot and brown
falling against the ground, welding into place.
Skies drifting about like mangled tongues
stripped and devoured
thrown against and through,
a verdant ritual of utmost beauty and grace.

Birds with beaks as glass pitchers
holding beds of water as stimulative as they are simulated.

Yet who am I to spew such categorizing diction?

I am but a yearning heart sprawled over like a corpse
hanging from a bridge, hands nailed to the concrete
yet breathing scarlet-blazed cause and not boiled reason.

I am but a stringed mass,
A pale pendulous body wandering about, wondering.
An individual with thoughts of stillness,
feeling trapped and caged,
lying here alone as one: a composite whole, a singular projection,
distant from others by lunges and clouds of colorless, virgin terrain.

Yet we all bleed the same, don't we?
I am anything but the needle in a stack of grain.
We all embody this ambiguity, this frailty, this solitude.
This intimacy.

We are all somewhat of able-bodied streams of ire.
Prussian blue shades of boisterous life.
Lax and lustrous shades of death.
Shrewd and wine-like shades of time.
An aging pack of tinted blotches.
A withered, elegant frame.
And a painting of skies and flames waltzing about,
filling each others missing pieces
like a liquid so generously takes the shape of its container.