[x]

PositiveLeft to me, your worst historian,
to pick up, in a daze, some depth of diction
I never found while you had lived

and I can only now pretend that words are capsules
of sanguinity, that they’ll unmask the symbologies
of sound that bore your binaries to their realms
like sacred dreams of Hypnos.
Regret’s a simple word.

I always thought of "A Separate Peace", and in those scenes
you were this Mozart in the rough, a perfect chord, one
which I would meekly channel through cracks of light
shown through the fist of my own interference,
steady indifference.

VineyardLike a grape,
I squeezed until you
popped;
trodden at heart,
I smeared you on my lips
before tossing your skin aside,
warpaint glistening—

Your tenderness
hooked me and I fought;
your sweetness
roughed my palms,
begged for vengeance,
made me callous—

Nice
is a word
I can't mold around my tongue,
but you drew the summer wine
from our union:

you the sugar,
I the alcohol—

This love-hate
isn't what they said it should be—
it won't sweeten with time;
the bite of vinegar
bitters everything.

Bad Mouth Habitsi.
I carry God around in my lip like he's chew,
spitting his name out in poems like potholes,
I make everything a simile
for the hold he has on me.

ii.
When it comes to men,
I've the appetite of a Roman housewife,
I take, I taste, I tear,
swallow and then then toss up
for the next course.

iii.
I don't kiss anyone so dearly
as the glass pipe bridged between lips
and fist.

iv.
Jameson, you're an Irish Lad,
a young ram of bucking proportions,
I let you rattle around my mouth
til I herd you in
and down.

v.
Sometimes there's nothing so sweet
as the jack-hammer of angry words
or the steel trap clamp of silence.

I exercise m

The Satori of Easter WaspsHornets don't regret.
I can tell, the way they're trawling the egghunt like little Zen zygotes
looking for eves to cobble another nest of wombs
from the damp distillery.
They haven't cared for a million lives.

All finalities, both my thrifty dreams
and those lofty tea clouds, when black and white would never do,
when I had time to colour in their shells with crazy pinwheels
and hide them in ivy, they all parade through Grandma Becky's
backyard garden.

From bamboo rakes turning out the sky
to the little spring torii that opens back to Earth,
children run and rummage through a giant toybox in the shade.
This is it, all of it: the slender

flowerstoo long
i’ve held watch
over slovens in my chrysalis
rooting in my diaries,
in toilets
and in traffic.

i dream of razing their genitals.
if not for this ugly sycophant . . .

no,

if not for limestone
swept
into mud
how would i know
what instincts have been rewarded?

if i hadn’t made things
sacrosanct,
tree lines as noble architects,
a face, some godly panic

then i’d just see a headless corpse
some cat had torn
from shallow burrows
instead of this:

an Algernon

as still
and as holy
as
the flowers
that you left.

expansionmy life fattens like a pupil in the dark
like a bloom on the tips of a fusillade.

i foil its collapse at 10 in the morning
with an omelette and some gravity.

what i have done with your miracle?

the giant gray moth
comatose in the garage
is waiting for a sign, for fluorescence.

when light does come
it flourishes
it is home
it is god
it is flight
and she flies

and i’m looking for wire cutters
in a chest full of stars.

toiletit’s understood.
i rob you of your grace.

we must be selfsame
at four a.m.
with a collar for our bones
with crickets in our window air
with angry sawteeth
smothering in a cauldron.

i never had a lover.
be a basket for my worthless heap.

Twenty: For ZeanShe and I sleep face to face
in the shape of a photograph
of yesterday from tomorrow

in different rooms in homes
full of strangers;

I forget what their names were.

Absent Without LeaveAvailability leads to worthlessness
LSD shine, headlights bounce in twilight
Snow covered rooftops, plastic signs
Brick buildings with the outline of each brick
amplified

Sturdiness leads to worthiness
LED flicker, tailights blurred in darkness
Sardine can people shout, laugh, wave in waves
Dreams flow in and out of reality's realm
undignified

Anticipation is it's own reward
Soul-carrying crows know the values of three
Stars flicker on and swirl like pinwheels
The captain has called to abandon ship
next week

Everythings crushed, changed, destroyed
Warped, born again in the neon moon
that hangs over the halfway-house where people
in tatte

VineyardLike a grape,
I squeezed until
you popped;
trodden at heart,
I smeared you on my lips
before tossing your skin aside,
warpaint glistening—

Your tenderness
hooked me and I fought;
your sweetness
roughed my palms,
begged for vengeance,
made me callous—

Nice
is a word
I can't mold around my tongue,
but you drew the summer wine
from our union:

you the sugar,
I the alcohol—

This love-hate
isn't what they said it should be—
it won't sweeten with time;
the bite of vinegar
bitters everything.

AcquittalWon't you leave me? I will love you
more than if you stay, transfixed

to the point of reference, our bodies
melding a sad, soft sublime, the back

spine of a little universe blown out
like a crafter's hot glass, the growing

moment, the wonder, the expansion
before a chill.

In Search of PunctuationThe exhausted traveler hung his
      ampersand
on its hook, dragging his eyes across
   and through the curves
looking for any signs of sharpness
or flatland meadows; somewhere
  he might rest.
He found nothing but
undulations
rhythmic swells and
the faint hands of an impresario
crafting the journeyrock
   below his feet.
"No matter,
I suppose." But his cellular
structure was ringing
in his ears,
demanding audience &

glass in the tidegradac, croatia; summer.

it is a town climbed up from the sea:
a salt hymn, an exhalation, a brightly calcified
spray. the houses here are overgrown
as wildflowers, paths like tiny winding veins
sprung alive between them. from my balcony i watch
the sun crest slowly into afternoon,
and mothers lead their children
down stone slopes, arterial pull
to the water. by the shore,
vendors sell bottles of olive oil, salt,
sage, gathering up anything with the taste
of what mystery inhabits the air—brimming over
the glass lips, a curving kind of joy,
the whole earth, a bowl of it.

at night, my uncle drinks beer
and i drink wine. he watches
the

spectresred unfurls
like silk scarves
underwater:

adrenaline,
steady fingers,
mute fascination:

curious and sharp,
glinting in flickers,
unfurled.

WyattWhite-knuckled as water
hemlock hanging
onto Queen Anne's
lace perception,

you waver like a screen door, rusty
springs all choked, twisted
inside you. Roughhewn son

of bluegrass summer, flutter forth
on rotten wood heels. Eye
the thin-thin creek so nervous,
while poison wires you

ripe to run.

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Bitlets 56How can we look like we've seen ghosts
when we don't believe in seeing them
and then never question the assumed
idolatry behind these idioms?

Bellwether CurveThe handwritten footnotes
on either of my palms reads:
'our mouths are exits;
our ears are entrances.'

Dog-mark the pages
and highlight the words;
this lesson is rigged
and I have yet to learn
the grading curve
on a heart.

When we speak together
we listen separate
for where each other
is on the learning curve
and lean with the gradation
when we're inclined
to let ourselves
not know better.

Let's connect the dots
and plot the angle between us
before the curve gets too steep
and I find myself stuck
where x and y meet.

Bitlets 55Nothing good ever happens in a forest preserve that is then broadcasted on the local news.

Bitlets 54Ambulances on the road are as mischievous
as children on the playground—
"Red light!"

"Green light!"

Bitets 53An everyday criminal
depends on you and your
sleep, work and medicine—

a psychiatrist relies on their
money, crooks and heroine.

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Approaches and Departures

by ^NicSwaner, Jan 16, 2013, 10:27:46 PM
Literature / Poetry / Human Nature / Free Verse

Hear toxic-nebulae read it here.

When the roads took to themselves
my breath arrived from Appalachia
to Sonora before North American
westerlies and wanderlust cradle-
carried my exhalations eastward.

The southern Baptist rural sprawl,
contagious to Canadian and Pacific
railways, had approached from crosses
confiscated several centuries earlier.

Fiberglass steeples routinely fed
a broadcast of fiber optimal sermons

depart from me;

the distinction between an arrival
and an approach is who leaves who.

Approaches and Departuresby ^NicSwaner

Literature / Poetry / Human Nature / Free Verse

"The sounds of doors in a home are a language unto themselves.
I could never collect all that is spoken in openings and closings."
— Paul S. Bellwoar

Mr. Bellwoar was a great mentor to me in my high school years and I felt it only right to pay tribute to him with this poem, as these lines inspired it. After weeks of messing with words, the concept finally formed, and within a day or three of revising and rewriting I now have this poem to show for it.

Read by the wonderful *toxic-nebulae here on soundcloud.

Words to Know

Appalachia - A region of the eastern United States including the Appalachian Mountains.
Sonora - Pertaining to or designating the arid division of the Austral zone, including the warmer parts of the western United States and central Mexico (most known as the Sonoran desert with its famous Saguaro cacti).
Southern Baptist -A member of a large convention of Baptist churches established in the US (they're very typical here).
Urban Sprawl - The uncontrolled expansion of urban areas.
Canadian Pacific - A railroad company that owns a fair share of railroad "trackage" throughout North America.
Confiscation Cross - When Christian Europeans laid claim to land here in the US back in the 1500-1600's they would erect what came to be known as "confiscation crosses", so called because they confiscated the natives' land.
Fiber Optic Cable - a cable made of optical fibers that can transmit large amounts of information at the speed of light.

Approaches and Departures © 2013 Nic Swaner

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*toxic-nebulae Apr 24, 2013 Student Writer

~MariaTala Mar 11, 2013

_{This is beautiful. I like poetry most when it is about distance and how it closes from the moment of conception to when it finds the reader.}

*bloodawni Feb 15, 2013 Hobbyist General Artist

Oh, this is simply lovely, and that ending really 'makes' it, what a perfect closer.

*SurrealCachinnation Feb 12, 2013 Student Writer

I have borrowed the wonderful title of your piece for an AWESOME project by =SilverInkblot that uses titles of existing deviations to form the lines of a Found Poem. The idea is to ay attention to titles, which can make or break a piece, and to give exposure to as many deviants as possible.

If you'd like to see my poem, you can find it here: [link]
And you can read about the project here: [link]

*SadisticIceCream Jan 29, 2013 Writer

I love how you've really twisted these words together; :devtaoofchaos: is right, the result is very musical, and that made this wonderful to read.

`thetaoofchaos Jan 19, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

That first strophe is quite marvelous, very musical and satisfying.

*aldwarke Jan 19, 2013

Congratulations on the feature. I think you are saying that the 'sprawl' is beside the railways but I may be misinterpreting. Just so I get it right, when you write contagious do you mean contiguous? Though you know best.

^NicSwaner Jan 29, 2013 Student Writer

The intention of contagious within that stanza was meant to convey that the spread of churches and religion was aided by trains.

I apologize for the very belated reply. I've been meaning to get to your comment, and I hope that a late response is better than none.

*aldwarke Jan 30, 2013

Ah, I get it. Very good too. It's a great metaphor and, in reality, the things you mention would have been spread that way too.Think of the misions and gospel meetings. No problem with the delay. Better late from you than never.

*SMAdams Jan 19, 2013 Student Writer

Wonderful work!

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