jared mulhair

i won’t sing the deep thing from a corner. who would take me for their favorite riptide? this could be so jubilant, dear arteries, but you love a swivel—and they wonder how a body turns that grayer form of gorgeous. as if wonder was the ember and not the sum of deaths before it.

i may dissolve today.

it all depends
on how my salt behaves—

the way it cakes across your skin.

my ricochet of crystal
off your fickle chemistry within.

i only want to alter you

till i become the salt of you
& the mist upon your flesh

is the bliss in which i swim.

#vss365

remember
to disappear
every so often

thank you Stefano!!

yes!

whatever happened to giving angry young men in the shadows a guitar, a copy of nirvana’s nevermind and a single solitary joint

toss into concepts
awareness like a pebble
scattering pigeons

#vss365

he fled the algorithm once it began to bramble & fell in with the ministry of mist—their valley of swanlight, bodies only plasma, good earth a gamble. days filled with the silky business of vapor, shawling the land in its own soft karma. floating murmurs into armor.

#vss365

over the moon to have my ekphrastic poem land amid such brilliance!

a little mist cupped
inside each apple blossom
who knows what future

no news is good
news like a wind
pipe in a noose—

like a letter from
a lost friend you
won’t look for

without a friend
who knows what
you’ll do upon

the gray discovery
your first friend
was never lost

but just hovering
in a feverworld
in an anything

you were not.

#vss365

perchance we meet again! 🌝

recipe for creation—
take something broad like rot

roll the word over your tongue
& off your chin & down your belly

find a quiet stone
who has never felt you die

set a limit like your narrow veins
or maybe fifty words

then against your apprehension
commit treason

i’ll only wax long enough to slow the old song down. call yourself human, your home sphere is blue & softer than you ever hoped. earth has been a nurturing surrogate & when we evaporate, may we learn to lift her on our elevator made out of sunpowder. flame our leaving as a bloom.

a patch
of dandelion clocks
in the grass
a woman wishing
for more time

#tanka #TankaThursday

we went as a dare. packs abrim with waves of bottled sound, fins to swim the loam as our hips still had none. tent irrelevant. we saw the site in a far yawn of blackfern—moon cracked just enough to let us in. all the wings & legs at awkward angles. we never felt the web.

#vss365

Small things.
Tiny sparks.
Fireflies in the thick of it,
pulsing against the night.
#poetry #poem #art #digitalart

soft rain—
silence falls
from leaf to leaf

it really was just you against the grass. your body eclipsing a patch that will never know sun the same way after. something about destiny or decay—i don’t recall the dream but love your brows no less. the way you gazed up then left. swiftly left me with a nothing underneath.

take the feedback how you can—hop the fence after the last fetti has fluttered & slink across the bloody turf to stuff its crumpled scraps into your muddy parka. take it & run fast to your refuge. open with abandon. read the remaining omens & return your mind to diamond.

#vss365

umbrella lungs and kites and things
keep her up at nite;
eyeblink waves and squalls of bees
find her in a hover over fields;
the jackalilies delicious missionary tall
blackboot tight

all this made sense on paper
until the stars kicked the sky
bled winking, knowing how but
not quite why

#vss365

I wander off like a butterfly net then you wander in like an exploratory surgery. If you're not waiting out my collection and I'm not escaping your findings is there a chance we're working together? It might explain our hobbies being connected by fate's nervous two stomach system.

What if we met at the bench to complain about our bodies and the quality of seed mix

sunlight in young leaves
threading through the green and gold
one fat bumblebee

take the feedback how you can—hop the fence after the last fetti has fluttered & slink across the bloody turf to stuff its crumpled scraps into your muddy parka. take it & run fast to your refuge. open with abandon. read the remaining omens & return your mind to diamond.

#vss365

We cast our night
Upon the ground
Our bright faces shine
As we walk
Beside the trees
As evening carries us home
Casting our night
Upon the ground
Shape of us
Stretching out
As we walk
Beside the trees
Carrying us home

i’m not usually one to share. i mean i swallow light for good. the world is where i frolic with the quiet as my collar. not that i don’t love you—in my omens you flower all over me, family & alleyghost enjoined. i’m not usually one to die. but today i left the honey to the hive.

under this cloudlight
all the remembered Aprils
impossibly blue