Poetry

Adrien Olichon photo

By

John Maurer

Atomically Anatomic

God can’t find us here under the covers

The impossible possibilities are still impossible

Melodies sound mathematical mumbling your voice from my mouth

My sweetness, My darling, My lover,

My girl, My good girl, My paramour,

My inamorata, My goddess, My goodness

Oh, my goodness

The heart is the unloaded chambers

The unplayed fields where mines

Are repurposed from car batteries

Where soldiers are repurposed from children

Where children are repurposed into mothers

Mothers repurposed into slaves

Slaves repurposed back

And purpose becomes hazy with the boiling resin

And you become hazy with the passing days

The passing days since I saw your face and loved it

Before I saw your face and said:

‘This is my favorite in the whole world’

Before I too often got carried away by the breeze

Drinking tea or getting up the courage

Writing poetry or pretending and not knowing the difference

The writing is the nervous tick I can’t stop

The disease I’m hoping kills me

Like French croissants to French people

Or American values to American people

Drink ourselves ugly by the start of an empty glass

See the lagging pocket watch from the fearful spires

And tumble into the fiction-science that only turns gears in stories

These spaces between spaces

Between the pauses in conversations I don’t have anymore

Are only tolerable if I can throw pi in the faces of others

And if I can have my cake and we can cut it together too

Crumbling Pearls

The universe is just infinity getting more infinite

Leave the stove on and drink the tea from the kettle

My claws are too pointed to relocate a pinky

While eating a finger sandwich

Especially when the finger in that sandwich is a pinky

Are my knees folding inwards? Am I moving backwards?

Backwards moving I am

Should I sleep under the tongue of a pelican?

Cannot come out of my shell; not yet would I look

Dazzling on a necklace

I think the globe is a pearl

Spinning like an evening gown

Maybe we gave her too much Cabernet

Take a never-ending walk off God’s lips

Your hand can slip, like his tongue

And find it woven with mine

We can go nowhere, the only place I have ever felt at home

John Maurer

John Maurer is a 23-year-old writer that writes fiction, poetry, and everything in-between, but his work always strives to portray that what is true is beautiful.  He has been previously published in Claudius Speaks, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Thought Catalog, and others.

Twitter: @JohnPMaurer