quaintobsessions

[quaintobsessions]

Let Me Rest

Sweet fields of ghost flowers, how I want to repose. Not in a crypt, quite, but in whatever darkness will have me -

yours, perhaps, though you laugh it off. It gave me pause, I admit it, that wishing, wandering remark

out of the blue and into the warm dark.

Let me sprawl without needing to sing for my dinner or mend any more fences and hearts.

Just blame me if nothing comes of today, if guests stand in front of a locked door

not a stitch made least of all the bed; tell them fixing is done for the month.

~

No more force and crackpot codes and cups of tea gone cold,

no sycophancy and panic sprees, answers that make no sense

and contempt, so much contempt from the ones that purport to win a wasteland of suffering.

No more language losing itself as people devolve into boors for what? To save their own skin?

I refuse to let any of it in. I just need peace. I just need peace.

Don't bring me any more riddles. I like your gentle nudges, I promise, but please bring me home instead.

[quaintobsessions]

Mihail Zablodski

The Fatigue (2022)

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Maria Oakey Dewing. (1845-1927)

[quaintobsessions]

Heat clings to the horizon

and I go back in time past where two sisters scale rocks at the ocean's edge to set free ashes and sink my heart.

Mist wafts in from the water, a full face of lucid tears. Can I ache for that purity of immediate loss – its strange elation,

its release from waiting, from fear of a road forking where neither path is right? Can I miss the drizzle drenching the valleys,

hanging on wild fuchsias, on bruised grass? I go back in time and find your words there, and I know why

the sun yearns for the night.

--------------------------------------------

for @wrentalks' @picklemafia prompt heatwave

[quaintobsessions]

Antonio Muñoz Degrain (1840-1924) - Nymphs Bathing

[quaintobsessions]

Through the Cracks

I grew up in a small walled courtyard filled in with concrete save for a single bed at the back where my mother attempted to grow daisies in shadow.

Whoever lives there now likely had the concrete dug up where I waded in the plastic pool at dusk on summer nights getting the hem of my dress wet pretending

I was elsewhere and angels might be watching me as I was dreaming and singing alone

turning my face up to the moon a pale daisy my mother forgot she grew with her own body

and left unnurtured and unlit between the pages of a book each night.

[quaintobsessions]

At dusk...

Bristol, Vermont

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＠Morning garden.

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The Sea of Nectar

I've always been here. On the night side of existence, I'm still the same –

a body in orbit changed by light and shadow cast on skin.

I'm more tender than I seem, riven with silvery topography that appears as scars because

I protect at my own expense.

The shifting colours of your sphere renew me. In your eyes I make sense.

I am constant. I draw and draw and the waters, once rising, fall.

When your eyes don't chart me, I sorrow.

I am constant, and court the void only when the angle for insight fails me.

I feel as if someone has to be the hunter, here

and it's not me for though I am lonely, my heart is always full.

[quaintobsessions]

Spikes of Purple Penstemon

(c) riverwindphotography

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everything new slowly becomes familiar

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Untitled © Peter Solarz

[quaintobsessions]

Dark and Deep in Your Heart

The rippling pulsation of a sickly moon on water, disturbed, this insistent questioning whether

even in the bruising crush of crises corners of each other's yearnings

are kept safe from intrusions other than ours.

Candles lit when night falls at last reflect on the scarred oaken table and in bowls of light roses in a house haemorrhaging brick dust

from the memory of bombs on the brink of further war.

Are we new and newly apprehensive or have we, jaded, lost the ability to worry

about anything but our own cracked hearts

gouged deeper? I don't sleep much. I listen for your voice,

the first red-violet swathe of dawn breaking,

and the silent noise of the cowed, careless world is deafening.

This falling outward as if we've forgotten

how to be angels incarnate

as if we must have the anguish of ruins to feel the elation of rain scattered on our faces,

of letting nature run triumphant as aftermath –

world without end world without end

there must be better ways

to know in our bones we are alive.

[quaintobsessions]

[quaintobsessions]

Léon Bonvin - Moonlight Scene, Houses in Background, 1864

[quaintobsessions]

Amongst us...

Bristol, Vermont