reed and thistle

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 20:06:00 +0000

4:00 PM, A Day In December

Afternoon under a diluted sun,
of clumped banks, lowered clouds,
a remnant bird nest smattered
unstable. A period tatters between
the ongoing fresh sentences written
as barren branches held by the sky.

Meander then with the shades of gray,
the tinged over surface of faint light,
the way things remain actual by space
unheld. Such is also the method of
invisible wind carrying on as oblique
pressure facilitating the fluid avarice

of ruthless change. What was once
true, requires to be deluded, and
an instep comes with imagination,
where your liver of pity is kneaded
between the vice grip of warm hands.
If adequately paced-- what can reach

the ends of miscalculated horizons.
You know a destination is achieved
when rupture exceeds the low quake
of the sonic, sending it all directionless
with divided equality, where humorous
solutions weigh busy in other places.

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 03:46:00 +0000

Colorless

Sifting through the air on the sides of midnight
the first snow fall for the season is falling
with pieces of the world that no longer belong
to itself returning back to the foreground
in what is the full night’s effusion of stars
and planets in the countless persistence of dark
as being shaped by these white flecks of nothing
that radiate visibly upon the unseen ground
and accumulate without anything else not also
included within the capture of their own light.

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:08:00 +0000

Notes No. 4

It was partially realized
that leaves could not cover
entirety beneath the sky,

so dissatisfied, the inevitable
descends upward, uncurtained
with only half of the afternoon

when with affable enough
air to refrain from myself,
watching myself, now there

along with this self, upon
a worn thought which can’t
be held beyond what it can.

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:22:00 +0000

Not an Edification for Winter Months!

“Wings of greenwood” Only that,
when the world is not so green,

when we rely upon turns of bygone
ochre resplendent with collapsing brown,

the dossier renews itself with dust
from notes held against borrowed light,

deciphered in the thought as feathers
which fly broadly over the tundra.

The multi-sided all white, it swallows
the bird further in flight. An entrance

of a self of another sense, and consumed
in the cloud unsettled with moisture

with full aspects of a thousand eyes,
waiting, blind again, until released

back down upon this countless earth.
Resultant diminishment from selection

but brought on equal with accumulation,
they interpose their woven textures

that wind while our buildings collapse
from precipitation in clogged gutters.

The setting of a place. The coming home
after the obviousness of where to go. Only

then, reliable as a faulty hinge, our broken
forms of a child, “catch me when I fall”.

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:08:00 +0000

Courtship In The Taste of You

These events will culminate in a wallop,
either way. But first a phone number spelled
out in sotto voce sequence, whispering
swift urgent letters of numbers arranged
within the narrow aggrandizements,
as all like our selves, reined into

one might say, chimed into, a duet
with some distant space between that
falters in the necessity of a time line.
A gasp for the now here instead, as rain
cascades durative traffic, concentrated
and upon itself, spooling all the insoluble

where can exist appreciation for vast
rehearsals in this wayside. Like storm
chasers, lovers, how both are moved
by the dark in the sky. Without a reason,
beyond a course ruff with black walnuts,
personally entwined in truancies of nature

from what eddies, sways, dances at night
amidst the mixed chatter of calacas.
We can hear their past ongoing voices,
and remove us then to pieces. How hard.
The hard parts left in back cupboards,
dry portions from the previous owners.

So time to go, don’t you think? That’s
what the radio can sing in the morning--
resplendent for a moment while hobnobbing
with the indoor gazanias; later a sigh as
punctilio squanders in the temporal garden
under a lone star, hung tired, burning as

above the toe end of an abandoned peninsula,
solitary as currents of blackwater rivers
amidst company during shiny café dinners
while ghosts in the streets blindly traverse.
Defiantly, the meal disclosed, pleasant, even
while there’s slybooting in the alley shadows

reminding us that mendacious distinctions
ferment these complexities. Like in the wine
I forgot to mention, paired up with cooked
drama in the serving portions. Garnish over
on the left side. Cheers. How about it then.
It’s easy to be skeptical with something

that’s all too easy. This is not, sort of is.
Supposing there and not even understood as
presence grows escargot and additively the coils
spiral the shell. What is mollified is tasted
in a basket for these rewards, laid out clear
enough as momentum goes forward anyway.

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:22:00 +0000

Notes No. 3

Whatever might lay in fertile
shade around the comportment-
which loses if the flower blooms,

laughably, but not scrutinized.
Up from recklessness. The moment
after then taken from my hands

curtailing the old man’s regret,
“where angels fear to tread”,
stoked new for somber height.

Not an intent to be initiated by you,
a choice by me, then beyond me, open
within a flight that is no longer mine.

Subscribing it over to fate, to you
like that. Insistence now in what
follows outward; may continue inward.

The grandest striving, a collapse
into the smallest beneath
the spectrographic core of this

universe, where can lie refrain
in swelled reverberative motion
to conclude and surely will continue.

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:54:00 +0000

Stark Evening

Cloudless at sundown, taking a sky clear from the gravity

of colors, a wryly cold agape in the comprehensive deepening

blue, broad extent of streets, sidewalks, motionless within

our leveled consolations that run peripheral to encountered hours

we previously prepared with prominence, only later with scant

acknowledgment not even held to ourselves, a pale transference

and left there lying in the open hand that let go to a wind

simply taking now a few more leaves with it to display possibilities

of absence, as full as the empty field that hosts the flights

of house sparrows while foraged over with wood smoke rising

from a gothic bramble elaborated in a fire that benedicts echo

within the stone, of intonate channel, ceremonious, while moon

still wanes to sliver, chimes hairline cracks in the astral signs

of bells, once embedded flowers, later scattered as mere curves

of the former petals beyond any capturing of time, reveling absolute

upon an infinite course, while beseeching our every wonderment.

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:35:00 +0000

Atop a Cataract

To stand opaque in a calf deep river
.....level with a sun diffusing in its own sundown
pondering reclaims the ingrained solitude
.....in a brief stance while roiled nature passes
bound up in twisted muscle melange
.....course over bone about volatile organs
held while time surpasses ancestral
.....years that segment unfastened elements
surrounding in a lift-white spindrift cloud
.....errant like constant mist from the tumult
sky that is recondite with a fathomless
.....edge drop of splendid useless water and light
basis that began symbiotic evolution
.....promulgating the entry for more friction
after a spring forth of blue colors
.....absorbed red spectrums into lengthening hues
to an eventual ocean not seen only a scene
.....disquiet while negated by falling bravery
across the overhanging incident of night
.....collected in a plungepool of solidified stones

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 01:56:00 +0000

Call it Fayetteville

...........................While onward westward,
the objects of this world found in a neighborhood
slender from their beginning casts and molding shadows,
while insouciant night backs into the silhouettes
that have spread off the clear air, now bluely darkening.

.....................The street parsed with rectangular
bedroom window lights, projected upon fences brushed
with the remaining minutes and reflect whitewash of day’s
majolica, a mummed glisten of the earlier motions
tempered down, now below some updrafts of lofty stars.

................................The rows of houses, stilled,
have been guarded by impenetrable thickets of customs,
something of a sighing that quietly guides the tone, like
an etching of a lone village chiseled out from a dark forest
and permeated with ambulated secrets in a depicted fog.

.................................And now the scene framed upon drywall,
safely backed into nostalgia for the discrete indiscretions,
declaring even some other with a brilliant seriousness,
above the careful sleepers, within hallways of somnambulists,
faint scraps of light captured to outline histrionic paths.

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:41:00 +0000

Colorful Strife

If an attitude finds its way across
on a foam of emotion without reckoning,
so much then some might try to nail
it upon a wall with a flock of daylight,
or crucify, under a citation declaring,

“this is too much”. It is. And so quit.
The double side of the coin awaits
your entry when snapped into a toss,
when elevated nickle excavates
back into the dullness of a mandala,

as proportion isn’t found on the ground,
at least not anymore than it exists in a
planet’s axial spin. And your bearings
from a sexton and compass? Digression
of what cannot ever be fully decided

while you stand in the situations that will
only ever be halfway acknowledged.
But that’s the ticket. A portal allowing
even the heaviest of weights to proceed
with the feathering into their thin duplicates

until each original falls from the remains.
Again, the return of the flittering birds
or the flow of the blood into red curtains,
as we begin to maneuver about within self
declarative authority as well as the drama

of speech. Heightened and locked, they linger
both with the allergens of dusty tomes,
while peeking from the pages the ghostly
multitude of faces, expressions embodied
in print with as much meaning as yourself,

as we tend to find ourselves in there, each
voiced creation in the fluctuating mixtures
of day and night. The yards turn into seas.
Winds churn the paths. Countries without
national flags. Rewards of colorful strife.

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:36:00 +0000

Notes No. 2

The pallid shutting of a night rain,
it twists with the cotton threads and
the hard panned wind, as insomnia

up into the new daylight appearance
rising first in only a more useless
cloud bank of down sodden charcoal.

Dust marred in the hand. Continuance
of matters beneath the hidden fresh
open slats of sky. An opaque balm

from the historic and future condensed
with the pause of waiting, the unlined
space of what’s then there between

and where always returned. A bridged quest
or ruffly sketched, sifting into accumulations
of curves that go protectively backward

while also the pulsing pull of the rivers,
within the fleet streams and handled
again with the delicacy of beginning.

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 20:06:00 +0000

Notes No. 1

The new sun is only able
to clear a partial afternoon,
and heard in the lines that

would extend to roughage
of the other planes, as a
sitting in what is falling

again from the trapdoors
which couldn’t have landed
anywhere. Past conclusion,

as a consent barely found
in a place as contrast was, is
in all the creasing of passing

clouds and misstated conjecture
found as a plethora of vision
from the children. The horses

that are configured for
a sky of meadow unsought
and displayed with origami,

over and over as these
that dawdle fidelity. Not
a course of years. A timber

broken from what presently
matters then, like when her
voice became lined with silver.

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 17:13:00 +0000

Slow at Work Today

Hesitant articulations, afternoon, a slow rise
in cascade of the before mentioned lilt
found in this creaky chair. Alternate arm rest.

This is not yet polarity of much of anything.
It is me sitting with some sounds imaginary.

Herds momentarily free of predators.
Flocks without bragging rights to flight.
The mating ends of the meadow are stalled
in the viciousness of dry grass. Uncalled,
on occasion, I can find myself in all
that may be heard in the silent bottom.

The urbane mirage, posits that only have been.
There is more than this flat sleep.

.................................................I recall once
swimming from a beach shore and after enough
distance, the water fell below its own hush
while air rumbled with the churning sand dunes
behind to pressure the strength of my limbs.

So perhaps the day is Wednesday. Perhaps
summer is flying by and the small village
to the south awaits struggles of the new crickets.

Prague in May? Said to be, the most beautiful
city in the world. Perhaps it will find a way
on a bridge with a continuation ok enough
to form. And maybe not. But the force of something
always winds with coming unrest. Flushed composure,
a new trouble brought over. The migrated torrents
hidden and inlaid from mandates of our old fables.

Now these hung upon the pale sun’s blinding swirl
awash with the postponement of gravid blindness.
Now with the lapsing surfaces for an interior.

Between before and after-- birds in the masonry,
fluttering grain brown feathers and portioning
unstable events across a calm field of water,

and one can surmise the little stories that will be
told with all these occurring minutes, the sowing
of glass and the boredom flickering from fervid
words in the tavern that have a place in presence
both here and beyond a yard named description.

A summons, a funnel past the chapel, where
and when the plots reveal the tickets I refuse
be refunded, as how an unborn antiquity
can’t collect a final cost before the being here.

As the clock shakes hands with the peripatetic,
the phantom allure with a snake's hunger
only brought into an emptiness that sheds
the something that will continue with change.

My elbows wearing a bit further down now
like worn shoe soles. Soon past a point already
and time to get out and head back home,
knowing what I feel like doing tonight.

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:20:00 +0000

Spring Water

When I find myself
back someplace where I was
once, those are memories
that arrive within the presence

they always have been.
Not who I am.
What has been experienced.
The stone fountain within

the plaza beginning to make
more sense than the river
for kids to play. Safer,
clean ankles and feet,

as I am there as well
from a bench that is
not fully bolted, wobbles
on a current of what passes.

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:53:00 +0000

The Third Leg is in The Mast

.....................................................“The number three is not a
.....................................................natural expression of wholeness…”
.....................................................--C. G. Jung

heeling into sails
with bracket angles
of late lasting sun
the boat untangles
upon the crinkle
water under pale
glass hull unmoored while
directed as planes
the fibers of a
fourth wind according
rhythms shorn threaded
like preen oil feathers
repel sprit water
of sideward drift tense
in momentum pro-
pulsion direct dis-
placement arrival
arrow sort of like
Zeno bouncing pin-
ball shoreline later
ready then dock walk
skippered not wrangled
with two legs upon
the chopped and uneven land

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 23:35:00 +0000

Petal Tongue Stars And Flowers

As I persist with the further additions
and subtractions-- with these

there is meekness and fertile cark
out the sides of worm filled gobs.

Which is possibly fine if to accept
patiently the creeping sun to display

an adornment of scant crepe blossoms.
Grown risks, the morph of the frowzy

putridness and the bloated and sullen
compost live edged with past necrotic

supplements. Available and irrespective,
for a thrown aerobic toss of dimension

halved with unknown purpose into
a cortege of pout marl, a moist seepage

with terra shift assemblies between
beginnings, endings, spacious spools

dripped with humid glint from eons
of star dust, where initial desire was

aggressively accountable within these
not so definitive materials, hybridizing

ceaselessly in unconscious mire. Active
into new realms on whispered tongues

of warnings, elegies, hopes, the promise
of homage thickly pasted, with bristle,

stuck hair of grotto example, for eminent
glissades of the not so hidden force

in the moon’s severed paleness,
it’s concurrent tide-pull upon oceanic

ground flowers opening and shutting
amidst revolving travails risen over

on exigent stalks that bend petal-beams
northward, stabilized to an astronomic

constancy amidst the ongoing tackle of
metabolic relations within their roots.

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:19:00 +0000

Breakfast Nook

This morning runs on to assorted
endings at the bottom of clay coffee,
as they do, and clouds not to stay
in always a parting somewhere
between the time I woke up
and here, sounds from the street

now audible, undone tousle
for unremembered Wednesday.
Explanation in going lost details
to surmise vacancy in what is meant
to be intuited today, the conveyer
between conditions and memory.

To be helpless to that end, carried upon
blank effort, worth imposed random
and abstractions with raw lumber
aggraded for birds’ nests only later
absent, abandoned, split slow
seconds, fixtures in current wind.

“How late did you go last night?”
Longer than I anticipated. A holdout
for the brightest colors to stretch
a dulcet inverse of pool accented
with the cold fuel of salamander.
When sun rises, where do they go?

Outside, the purest of hard gems. Makes
that contrast worth it. Of passing sheen
yellow upon the magenta lavender
greens, ellipsoidal way of remaining
center, seeing from a floating caricature
as maybe in a glass-cut vase filled

with cave water upon an eggshell mantle.
Difficulties when limited to ourselves
and to develop a perspective developing
from it. A platform worthy of place,
observatory, not above all the matters
venturing from previously gone habitats

while the tagged resolute implants
are not to survive, instead to see rise
edema of day and diminished night
both corticated with thin conclusions,
backed with a galaxy of cauldron
brim with chance, stirring plurality

to continue only then ever slightly
different, with infinite omniscient
colorful experience that makes me
more than a spectator, admixed
being and foliated lattice with lamina;
brittle absorptions, moons and suns.

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 01:08:00 +0000

How A Poetry Is Still Written In Summer

after the colors of sunrise to a shade too thick for middling grey,
the elixir of illumination only above blackened clouds sanguine
with the over-ripened regard of pothered fruit, too dense for layers
with vacant space and open aired oxygenation, a moldy sponge
saturate with abysms, expectant erosion, where the personal
attunement is something of a murk in bowls of yesterday served
with faded goblets of cranberry juice that quench the penny gnats
aside rain’s arrival, gummous and below the leanness of light,
when you can’t dominate, not even washed out, taken with a sultan
jigger discomfort that is you as a million of infinitudes
opposite to that one starry alpine path of the ascendant-descendant
to do so, the infinite spread of an oily picturesque setting
of ground valleys wrung on separate laughter, untoward emergence
not wholly muffled, contra rapture, still a squatter in the nocturnal
underbrush or tucked sullen in gills of overly brown fungus
gnawed coarse by tongued goats emboldened with bristled hinds
of fogged hillsides the powerful make quaint with rundown cottages,
to sit there, on the porch, all being shade, sour lemonade, and thunder

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Wed, 20 May 2009 01:55:00 +0000

A Later Spring

Of the hard questions already asked
implicit to the turning of experience,
related answers don‘t appear. Maybe
at best, diversions past sides of rock
silence, and towards nothing about
the isochronal seasons? Song birds
that can sound wonderful louche bundles
of cherry blossoms with the petals falling
to where the fey fragrance decomposes
beneath a weight on the sun, a night rain,
infusing the grist of the soil while we are
moving onward, hesitations far behind.

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Sun, 17 May 2009 14:07:00 +0000

Past an Unfortunate

There was a cause. There are always causes.
They roam on past earth but stay in our bile
and can drown us with our assumptions.
Would that be the same as dying in a dream?

We spin from the chrysalis not to do so.
Not on wings of color, more from confusion
that pieces availability into a crude form
shined over with delirious pronouncement.

Symmetric flies on dust pollen as its own.
Retouched for any fact, a separation only more
fully cognizable. A lot of good that will do.
If I want something from the corner store, I go

there not walking backwards. Time machines
were invented for the ambitious. It is presence
that obliges a mellifluous glow at the crucial
intersection in a nature, absorbing the plot

upon the conspectus, absent crocus admitting
occasion’s weather to wash out the disgruntled
thoughts of a mind rung unsettled enough. It is
past time. We know how to maintain the isolate

of our station, stretched for completed encounters
not there. Dusk always resounding deep shades,
then back gratuitously with textures of tomorrow,
like the gathering of grass and weeds and losses

that sift in surrounding ephemera, played loose
after yesterday’s throttle completed the scene.
Standing where next I find myself, with only
as much guard as the thickness of dress cloth,

thinning breezes, I’ll soon complain of the cold
to begin to start it all over, littered in a new lot
with clarity of glass from a broken bottle, heard
muffled late last night when tossed into the sky.

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Fri, 08 May 2009 00:52:00 +0000

Over

A lift can start with words covering a page,
end with the pass of white clouds

filled in below with what were
solemn trumpets of hummingbirds,

these in dreams tastefully mottled
where between are your thoughts

to hand over and not hold conclusive
to all that’s otherwise angled, trying

to rest collections against the fence
before the wreck of a storm. Rest is

in the impetus of a silent nurse, passing
a hand over the ruffed skeptical brow

not yet blent with the touch of a thousand
colors. The tones of their wings dipped

in nectar coruscate this all elsewhere, in
currents that sweep the tables from houses

and leave the lonely sitting with bare laps
open, and so fly from chairs into a morning

of the oncoming night. A faltered traffic,
cool air swallowed down with warm sodium,

the footprints and shoes left for improbable
fathoms daring height with bizarre turns

while pack dogs snout tin cans of garbage
around about the solid done blocks of streets;

that actually is similar to flight, noting what
won’t be placed on your back or, at this point,

not in the railed gut either. Bareness of levity,
crescent sights, crucibles only filled with ghosts

of some future memories of desires echoed
within those small wounds of the home.

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 00:49:00 +0000

At the hour
stretched long dusk

the blue-gray air

hobnobbed with new
green spotted pollen

opened tree buds

and around the lone
red cardinal,

dark eye in the rain.

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:34:00 +0000

Vague half-credence of a coincidence,
working some dream that we place
into another quick phenomena--

just as I looked up, birthed from the side
of a Red Maple and with an omen of shadow
upon the chipped plats of ground,
a Great Blue Heron god flying over.

The temptation is to give it meaning,
as help to grasp what comes after
the air spicing beak,
the long throttle of neck,
the combs of light feathers
from a body stretched outward
with bones unrecessed along
flights of private horizons….

That is the something, while below
are the swift plays of chance that include
the plundering of the holes of ghosts

writhing in this surround that was/is here,
somewhere. Called attention. Which includes
also insignificance, new ruffles of lilies,

from the stamina of a winged migrations
or the quiet muddy lake bottom
depths at the height of hibernation.

Conditions don’t meet up as they were meant,
instead rive and merge within the innate
behaviors, such as how we might form
from the muck brown of our imagination.

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 20:07:00 +0000

Answer from Her Question

“is that where all of the want-
in what is to be canistered?”
A question a few days before
unsiding herself from the specimen,

and now she has stepped
in circulatory. The certain ware
of centuries against flack stones
and passing of blood and gowns.

Defeat, an old story to the stars.
Glints in blue totter of the shore.
What’s held in secret in the dark
undressed as a shadow born

out of the wave, “A portrait
collapses in the choking fog,
but another in the life of the air.
What sinks, flies, or the blind

algae hovers, not definitively,
not unlike plummets and sunlight,
warped resides and brought to wade
bobbing in shallows somewhere

within the brink of an eye's limit.
Yesterday's sailor and a lopsided
globe, too slippery to place atop
merchant rocks from the harbor.

The bilateral horizons along lines
industrial, both cause and effect,
now hundreds of years later. Swarmed
water, grey from sittings of exhaust

mixed with fossil acid. Dry-cleaned
with business beside some body shops.
The aspic coporal claims downward
to itself- my calcite of a half shell."

fivebranch@hotmail.com (Brian) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:11:00 +0000

At the Belmont

Cross-bar insignia, engraved invitation,
attendees requested and willingly bring
with impacted heels hard on the crust
of the grid of traffic and into elevators
with polished mirrors, oak insulating
the static lair between their bodies
and breathing a low pressure beyond
the locked clasps of the briefcase.

The cards played at night
in the banquet room, and it was
a straight flush of clubs
when the decision actualized
while the strapless lady turned her way,
dropping the diamonds from her
velvet purse down the air shaft,
unbreakable, while scattering,
cantering chime of irked hard cut
echos in a formidable architecture.

The trusses and then the diaphragm
to flux a moment for conclusion.
She had walked in ready to betray
in service to her much older love,
carking bets of an unknown
percentage on the felt topped table.

Ongoing consequence, continual ante
from the personality in the variance
of relationships. Colonnaded halls
that resolve in a weary denouement.
The gargoyles above the entrance.
They mouth a cold lakeside carried in
to the bus stop in a grey wind tussling
about the indissoluble, careless
as the grin from the tooth chipped curb.