Christine Austin Cole

She tumbled from the sky that night
White washed and too familiar
Holding cotton candy dreams
In her hand
...

I left a poem on the side of the highway last night.

With every exhale, words, like litter, escaped me
To flee-float out and about and along,
...

To a claustrophobic, the confessional
was penance enough, she thought -
an upended coffin filled with rotting sins
and little more.
...

I may be Art
in the way that he was, she was
in the way that you,
most certainly, are –
...

“To be honest, ” she said as if
lying would be nothing new,
“I seriously thought about
not telling you.”
...

[We won’t survive this as we began it…]

We’ll be dust or diamonds,
remnants of the selves we were;
...

…. somewhere, he is standing with a brush in
one hand and another trapped between his teeth,
oblivious to the drops of paint that have fallen on his
collar, on the floor beside him, on the top of his
...

Dare I breathe even?
Would you hear, perhaps
Even the quietest of inhales
And exhales, were I to do so?
...

“…Pessoaic, ” he said
and my heart fluttered.

~
...

[For the record... even I find the choice and extent of the metaphor here really rather odd, and kind of intriguing]
...

For better or worse
We become accustomed
To our lives.
...

'Everything that happens where we live happens in us. Everything that ceases in what we see ceases in us. Everything that has been, if we saw it when it was, was taken from us when it went away. The office boy left today.'
~Fernando Pessoa
...

They’re fighting again -
disrespect and indifference woven into their raised voices,
fury and famish lighting their four eyes, their two and two.
There is no sanctuary that exists between them now,
...

In that moment
When awareness collided
With recollection -
The thunderous sound of dust
...

The dirt embedded beneath my fingernails -
so perfectly, so fully now,
[I could grow things there
but for the lack of sunlight]–
...

It occurs to me now
That all that remains unseen,
Unheard, unfelt, unknown to us
Does not do so for its elusiveness -
...

I’m well aware that they are laying poems
out on slabs these days – dissecting them –
dropping their heart, their mind, their guts
into little dishes and putting their cells under
...

I am every bit a dragonfly today
feeding on fleeting days,
the crisp fall air
turning my stomach,
...

I want a poem that I can live in without
the barking dogs of dissatisfaction and
disillusion disrupting the otherwise peaceful
afternoon of it. I want to create that other-place
...

'For spring had entered the capital
Walking on gigantic feet.
The smell of witch hazel indoors
Changed to narcissus in the street.'
...