Decay and stripes of manufacture
Like slender cigarettes in a field as leaves
Smoke in the veins slithering
The mind stalking now in the grass
Tag: Smoke
Your House Lit
Your house lit in eclipse and fire and computer and couch and smoke.
Trees on the Other
Trees on the other
Side of the lake like smoke from
A raging fire.
October Poem 25: The Specter of the Nue
Thin wisps of black smoke lay low in the fields.
They disperse almost as quickly as they
Formed. Their haze in the tall grass that has gone
To seed. The smoke gathers thickest in the
Brown grasses that eventually die back
To black spots of earth bare like life in the
Old house with the odd shingles hanging loose
From long years of wind. She couldn’t help him
Or leave him now. But she can watch from her
Perch in the branches of the unkempt wood
Abutting the old property. She could
Float through the weeds and up out of the ground.
She could watch and choke him with her fumes. Cursed
To make him suffer for the love she holds.
August Poem 43: Blowing Smoke
Take a deep breath. Deeper. Take their smoke in
Your lungs. Become them. Become carriers
Who could be rendered with sparks and smoke long
As scraggly brush blown off the burn pile. Long
Of the yellowed cotton filters. Burned out.
And the butts everywhere. Burned out. Scattered
With these used up people. Dotted. Frayed by
Their time in the dryer. Hand around the
Black lake. Willing all find their way carried
Brains like piles of clean clothes. Thoughtless heaps.
They smell of diffuse cigarette smoke. Like
Mental peanut butter. In line for the
Illness. Blacks your fingertips with each touch.
With the paper gone. Dissolved. Washed away.
August Poem 36: Ragnarok
Catastrophes. Revealing stripes of the
Manufactured Gods. Hidden like slender
Cigarettes held to their lips. The old Gods
Growing in a field as leaves. Let their smoke
Linger in their veins. Wrapping. Smothering.
And hiding between religions. Hiding.
The snakes and spiders and rats and rocks and
Pits. They balance the feeble human mind.
But it doesn’t make sense to remember
Where Gods have not been poisoned. Where you saw
Them last. Stalking you. But you don’t want to
Chance their bite. The Gods had been exceptions.
Wrong. Tied. But that didn’t stop them. Or you’d
See them now in the grass. Decomposing.
August Poem 33: Words in White
It was bound to happen. And one night it
Did. The scratch, click, and thump of the hammers
Pulling nails. The excess holes. The drywall
Was pocked with them. However, this was an
Entertainment. The same cigarette. This
Anecdote. This pulling across and out
The utility knife to serpentine
Over the guide line. Know its purpose. Like
The poison smoke. We lift and snap hoping
For the line we had scored out without my
Other buddy. We had stopped. Wasn’t it
Word burn? And I push away my readers.
Even if I felt meaningless words out
A black and red end squeezed. Roll them in white.
August Poem 10: Rise and Fade
They of the long death.
Those bringing the death carpet.
The sulfur people.
They are the strange ones.
Ash and bone and polished shards
Woven in fabric.
They wear their beliefs
Like the gathers of their lands
Taken from the earth.
Chanting they swing. Their
Noxious censors billowing.
Staining the skies black.
Stagnant as Latin,
Sattva Casetti was dead.
Eighty-four and smoke.
The chugging machine
Of subtextually.
Her birthday or near.
We experienced
Fulfilling of prophecy
Ending the Red Death.
Covering bodies
In ash and fragrant spices
That burn and consume.
Smokes that rise and fade
Lifting the spirit, the dead
Giving safe passage.
July Poem 23: The Chugging Machine
Were lit, it would curl out in a ripping
Unevenly achieved moksha forth from.
And even broadly the universe would
As the dog that stands in a hill of ants.
Sparks, smoke, scraggly brush. The chugging machine.
Jokes at work without getting fired for
Black and red ripped ends. Smoke it as if it
Were angry fire that ants unblinkingly
Allow. Homemade sausage native of weeds
Punctuated by work as numb plants that
Swarm up my leg stinging me around pine,
Oak, and sweetgum giving way to red fields.
But when sparks and ash spewed thump-thump-thump from,
Brahman was the sound sparks and ash don’t say.
July Poem 22: Dirty Dotted Chunks of Information
It was too harsh. Books banished, weeded, and
Smoke escaped one’s free words. Sad strands of smoke
Rose from the diffuse cherry. And the smoke sucked
Fields of weeds. A big bunch of these bad boys
Swept their own ink. They had smoked it like weed
Out the end of bad taste. The color of
Your teeth after you smoke twelve packs of Cools.
He was sure the weeds had needed a cut.
From early wood fire, and plants. Wet clay hills were
Suspended. The peels were hard to keep lit
When they held planes as fat as forest fires.
Gang violence replaced mineralized Mitch
For us. The bright color of fire ants tell
Dirty dotted chunks of information.
therichardbraxton 