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Poetry
From Breaking the Sacred
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| Yearning Poem I am stretched forward here itching like a flower drugged by the sun waiting for those familiar insect tremblings to begin. the black bee legs trudging through nectar fields she counting each convulsion as he works. How I long to be stirred like this how I ache to have my roots pulled by moving earth and to hold my face skyward, dazzled, refreshed. |
She for nell angelo She hears that sound from under the dove's wings tender squeaks released by its movements and instantly wishes she hadn't heard it. That sound is too vulnerable, too quickly rushes her quivering heart which can take no more of pain today even the dove's smudged brown and pinched face startled is too beautiful, reminds her of an innocence that is not possible to bear. |
Analogy The hunger starts low under the crumbly surface, a fine grained pebble splits its skin, moistdark pressing from all sides. It shifts and turns, burning from the unseen center, a wormpale tendril pushing out into the smokywet, each day lengthening, reaching for that sensed surface, that not yet seen potential. The hunger in it not a knowable thing just a desire to keep going, to finger its way at warmth, rising, rising from the nugget of possibility to the shocking air and strong hold of sun. |
| The End I let go and hand her over- my secret, one person bargain. I make them think I am crazy so they'll leave me alone, ride off on my motorcycle with only a small bag of clothes and some poems. My marriage over, chances to see my daughter minimal. I spend the first day at a friend's house chain- smoking her mother's cigarettes, anxious and yet relieved that I don't have to go back, not able to miss them yet. I think of the places I can apply for a job, knowing it will be blue-printing or running a xerox machine for less than I can live on. My dreams that night are of domestic proportions- he yelling, she crying in her teddy-bear pj’s and me standing there, seeing them as if through a plate-glass window, my heart breaking in its bone encasement, my words falling into space, a huge door of dark oak slamming on my life again. |
The Dread "The Anxiety of Fate and Death is most basic, most universal and inescapable. All attempts to argue it away are futile...everybody is aware of the complete loss of self which biological extinction implies." --Paul Tillich from The Courage To Be. You are a stone held against its teeth-- you are fodder, scooped up, slapped by a humid tongue, its great, gripping jaws. Your head is wool-thick. Slowly you start to remember...you can barely taste it, a feeling...no...a sense of being handled like produce-- gripped by massive hands, no escape from the mouth closing around the core of you. Fear. You remember feeling something, like the edges of your mind curling at the prospect of spending the rest of your life captive to it, but what do you really know? Why be afraid of what isn’t seen, touched, or proven? For that matter, why trust yourself to god? What can anyone else give you but their own version of things? (including him). And no matter what, you will live. Stuck. What do you know but the common dread of being alive and controlling nothing, with ideas of oblivion, and meaninglessness becoming central. Once you form the thoughts, once you accept it’s impossible to know your outcome, the dread never diminishes. You are aware of the endless, dark layers of this thing, which like the years of your life, steadily pick your bones clean. |
Poems Copyright ©1999 by Elizabeth Florio
from her book, Breaking the Sacred. 60 pages, perfect bound,
laminated cover.
Cover art by Elizabeth Florio. Available from Angelflesh Press in Grand Rapids, MI or from
the author here..
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