Category: alt lit

5.14.18

Careful, love. Cold shade
is creeping, seeping
through the seams between
the minutes and the hours.
And the carnivorous flowers
on the rim… We must stay hidden.
We must not falter, nor be flustered
by the early springtime luster
bringing up the rear.
I hold your treasured hymn
within my ear.
The clock strikes out.

7/3/17

There we got me good,
blissed out and flinching,
and our avenging angel squeals
through a mouth full of poison.
Glimmering like a gilded fingernail.
My whole project entails malice
in some form or another.
I intend to smother my pinnacle
in crab mustard, if ya feel me.
Well then the real me, yeah, that one,
bursts in with a bluster, flustered and flaming
and naming all those interior states
I’ve tried so hard to keep nameless.
What a shameless spectacle
of superfluous need!
He drops his screed like an anvil
on my chest and rests easy
for six hours in a bed made of cobwebs,
while I lay struggling to breathe
beneath the weight of his words.

-r. miller

6/2/17

Sequence interrupt.
The value is the limit,
the limit is the floor.

Why we even bother/false brother/
caustic line/spoken blood.
There’s something
obstructing the view,
fault or eternity,
the scent of whatever.

Two clasped hands, concealing…
A litany/weather cluster/verisimilitude.

Draw this water from the well
and partake.

Dry your voice, and sing.

-r. miller

5/29/17

Roaming, unsure
and this is where,
it slides into focus.
Soft in the lavender array.
Presently were we there
will be unnoticing,
these gestures
construed as instruction.
And so floss, marble
and ivory implications.
For I disrupt
what rupture raises,
and I steam plastic.
I go in gasps.

-r. miller

5/24/17

Later on, it transpires,
and how else shall I greet it?
This gulch, in recent memory,
was eaten up by ghosts.

Somewhere flickers,
heat smudged and dry-weary.
One eye remains clear,
the other goes bleary

when the fog regales us
with miscellaneous details.
Let the molly do the talking, we’ll see.
Too much losing for but one evening.

Dopamine in a minor key.
This could be just the distress
we’ve been looking forward
to overlooking.

-r. miller

5/23/17

Now I can feel my momentum moving on.
I can feel them speaking through the wires.

I can feel the lists of every feeling closing in on me.
I can feel the fluttering of countless seas.

I can feel my heart pickling in its own darkness.
I can feel my neck beneath my collar.

I can feel the rapture in the rupture.
I can feel her dreaming of stones.

I can feel the blistering infinitude, breathing against my ear.
I can feel the passion of sinners and the cruelty of saints.

I can feel the cuddle of corruption.
I can feel weird or ethereal, but not much else.

-r. miller

5/10/17

We went to withers,
gathering what salts
and leather masks.
The tasks we packed
in baskets. Then
shoveled out.
It was a winter burst
bled into bother,
coddled like Christmas,
and accidentally more trite.
Night stuck to the ducts.
But we did this clever,
cleaving to a cloven hoof.
Sent every last roof
into a razing! And
when the hazing
harkened to our
surreptitious spelling,
we cut the quick
and blinked back the bells.

-r. miller

Jaded for a time,
something of a monument
pierces fiercely soupy clouds.
Once a clodhopper, now a lucid youth
surviving his 20’s for the fourth or fifth time.
Just remember what they say
about asparagus… Soon after wavering,
the soiled masses will come
to grease my grin and fleece me
where I least need fleecing.
The deceitful show tunes never carried me
where I wanted, so now it’s off to bed.
It takes guts and mustard to get ahead.
I’ll take two.

-r. miller

4/28/17

Like a burning dirigible,
she comes guns in tow
to sticker me with shock.
She says her name is Emily,
but I know it’s actually
Elizabeth or Sara or Britt.
That’s the short of it.
And she smiles, half-mockingly,
half-rhetorically, asks me
how exactly I’m getting on
with my vices and iced glasses.
She’s a spectacle, she is.
She deviates with distinction.
Her lurking, lyrical gaze
bestows form to my folly.
And as she turns on her breath,
she lays her fingers upon me,
unpins her gown,
and grows ripe in the sun.

-r. miller