My friend Pippa at True Love Tattoo did this for me today. I didn’t even see the design until a few minutes before I got it done, all I told her was that I wanted bees, and she suggested strawberry flowers. I trust her a lot, obviously. I love it.
Pippa and I have been friends for nearly twelve years now, but this is the first time she’s tattooed me. I think we will extend this into the rest of my forearm, eventually.
A vibrator powered by bees, one stings your clitoris as you orgasm. You bite down on a capsule of honey you’d hidden under your tongue.
More than the beetles turned russet,
sunset, dragging their shield, more than
the crickets who think it’s evening all afternoon,
it’s the bees I love this time of year.
Sated, maybe drunk, who’ve lapped at the hips
of too many flowers for one summer but
still must go on hunting, one secret
closing, another ensuing, picking
lock after lock, rapping the glass,
getting stuck in a puddle of dish soap,
almost winter, almost dark, reading far past
the last paragraph into the back blank page,
acknowledgments, and history of type.
(via ecstasis)
It is the smallest idea born in the interior will,
that has no fury nor ignorance,
no intruder but stranger, no scaffold of a plea,
no mote of the hungry, no pitchfork of instinct,
no ladder of pity, no carriage of lust,
no wavering foot on concrete, no parish of bees,
no mountains of coal, no limestone and ash,
no lie poured down the stairs of a house among them,
and this is the will of maker and offspring,
no boot in the hallway indicating more exit
than arrival, more straying than strategy, no more struggle
than contained in my body now, as I wander the rooms,
tearing curtains apart from their windows
separating material from light.
(Source: poets.org)
A pink dozen sunshine trapezoids—
It’s good to be breathing
says an array of rosemary shrubs.
A field of illicit rocks, shrapnel, bees, germs unknown.
Hands held. Back seats checked for sleeping.
I have made a Tuesday monument
of a baby’s toothbrush lying on the sidewalk alone.
The far lake no one knows about, bitching its ripples.
In this case it
doesn’t matter what other people need
in measures of solitude; You
need a few years, a few more years
alone. And it’s such a popular
slur to hurl: You will always be alone.
I’ve been told that—
(Eight years ago.)
(And knowing slowly as I go how to hold a garden here.)
(Source: poets.org)
1 i will put a bee under your bed
2 every day for a year
3 so you do not perceive the increase
4 of bees under your bed
5 and become unconsciously accustomed to their activity
6 which at its culmination
a. (364 bees)
7 will be substantial
8 you will lay down over a large, undulating field
9 of meticulous noise
a. their dark purr will comfort you
b. you will require their delicate sludge to sleep
10 until i sneak
a. secretly
11 into your bed
12 and take away the bees
13 then you will sense a disturbance in your slumber
a. the solitude of the night will pierce your mind
like a piercing mind-knife of solitude
14 and you will cry and sweat
15 and produce other sad fluids in the night
16 and roam the earth in distress
17 until,
a. one day
18 we finally meet
19 and i say
20 i am the man you’ve been searching for
21 all your life
22 and you say who the hell do you think you are
a. you are distressed, i forgive you
23 and i say
24 i’m the man
25 with all the bees under his bed
(via rabbit-light)
I have been a bee-keeper for six thousand years
And for the past hundred years an electrician.
Once I retire I shall keep bees again.
Something should hum for me, oh hum for me,
Hum and hum and hum
Just for me.
(Source: poetryinternational.org)
The sidewalk will end in the belly of a girl.
A Chevrolet will stamp her abdomen
with stars, and we will watch her
wilt, motionless. Today
rain comes.
Fills the streets with yellow
fish. Smells from the market swim
down boulevards, gather on corners
with guitars and saxophones and fire
barrels wishing another day of rain.
Trees rejoice, limbs free
from overcoats, roots shaking
their chains. People stop
to watch water turn to steam and rise
angelic from the sewers. Tomorrow
beneath the city, the girl’s golden hair.
Her brain will bloom an apple tree.
Her belly will swell with bees.
(Source: damonmclaughlin.com)
I’ve decided I’m going to get bees tattooed on the inside of my left wrist. Bees are part of my poetic mythology (some collected bees) and I’m not sure why it didn’t occur to me sooner. Cam pointed me to this Mitch Clem comic which I immediately fell in love with.
With a click, morning news pours heavy into the bedroom,
embedding itself with anchors’ voices too syncopated and smooth
for the tangled math of troop buildups, the surge of death tolls
tallied daily now. Forgive me, distant wars and local heroes,
but I cannot listen. I can only sneak down to the boardwalk
and pick unlikely hyacinths on fire in rising light, can only
place them lance-like in last night’s water glass as if this
one act could save a life or erase the reports of whole colonies
of bees lost on the wrong roads between our phone signals.
If apocalypse ever shows up, let us then eat only ashen bread
and bone-dry tubers. For now, I refuse to let another
second tick by, wasted, while he is waiting for me at the table
with dishes of fresh blueberries swaddled in cream.
I turn off the TV, throw open every window so we can taste
the faintly salted breeze filtering in from Humboldt Bay
and trembling the violet petals of these hyacinths I am now
holding out to him, until their pollen scatters violently
golden before us, this dust and air we are somehow
still breathing together.
(via rabbit-light)
(Source: versedaily.org)
1.
how to be music
how to harvest honey
in the heart
2.
being alive makes me nervous
3.
Radiant time differences. Equatorial shimmering. Come across.
4.
it’s not hard to be somewhere else when you’re not anywhere
5.
cough up Illuminati in the sink
6.
no matter how I ask, you only give me the uneasy answers
“I see no end of it, but the turning
upside down of the entire world”
- Erasmus
We are in the middle of a bloody, heartrending revolution
Called America, called the Protestant reformation, called Western man,
Called individual consciousness, meaning I need a refrigerator and a car
And milk and meat for the kids so, I can discover that I don’t need a car
Or a refrigerator, or meat, or even milk, just rice and a place with
no wind to sleep next to someone
Two someones keeping warm in the winter learning to weave
To pot and to putter, learning to steal honey from bees,
wearing the bedclothes by day, sleeping under
(or in) them at night; hording bits of glass, colored stones, and
stringing beads
How long before we come to that blessed definable state
Known as buddhahood, primitive man, people in a landscape
together like trees, the second childhood of man I don’t know if I will make it somehow nearer by saying all this
out loud, for christs sake, that Stevenson was killed, that Shastri
was killed
both having dined with Marietta Tree
the wife of a higher-up in the CIA
both out of their own countries mysteriously dead, as how many others
as Marilyn Monroe, wept over in so many tabloids
done in for sleeping with Jack Kennedy - this isn’t a poem - full of
cold prosaic fact
thirteen done in the Oswald plot: Jack Ruby’s cancer that disappeared
in autopsy
the last of a long line - and they’re waiting to get Tim Leary
Bob Dylan
Allen Ginsberg
LeRoi Jones - as, who killed Malcolm X? They give themselves away
with TV programs on the Third Reich, and I wonder if I’ll live to sit in
Peking or Hanoi
see TV programs on LBJ’s Reich: our great SS analysed, our money exposed,
the plot to keep Africa
genocide in Southeast Asia now in progress Laos Vietnam Thailand Cambodia
O soft-spoken Sukamo
O great stone Buddhas with sad negroid lips torn down by us by the red
guard all one force
one leveling mad mechanism, grinding it down to earth and swamp to sea
to powder till Mozart is something a few men can whistle
or play on a homemade flute and we bow to each other
telling old tales half remembered gathering shells
learning again “all beings are from the very beginning Buddhas”
or glowing and dying radiation and plague we come to that final great
love illumination
“FROM THE VERY FIRST NOTHING IS.”
(Source: fernsandmoss)
