Color Atrium – Rejected Poems And Contest Losers

Color Atrium 

by Alexander Noel Miller

 

 

 

 

Black Maple Tree

When I met Her

She was a maple tree.

I think, slowly,

Their fungal words ate away at Her leaves,

Soon She was not everywhere,

But almost nowhere,

Hiding Her infection.

They stayed clear

Of The Black Maple Tree,

Leaves eaten up and dark…

“Strange syrup”,

They said

Would come from that tree.

I think when I met her, I liked the strange taste.

And while everyone came and went

To see the maple trees,

I sat, and stayed,

Under The Black, Maple Tree—

Still beautiful, strange, and sweet…

Because She looked something like Me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Curse of The A.m. scutellata

 

Bees in the same colony even say it—

“High yellow. Not enough black.”

Keep working.

Shame is heavy, slow-dripping, like honey,

Sweet shame, Me dying a slow, sweet death everyday—

Common as wind on chimes.

“What do you call yourself?” says one of Them.

“Just a drop and you’re one of Us,” says the Other.

They think I’ll sting, or take over.

There’ll be no coup.

“I’m just a bee, like you,” I say.

Father from the West,

Mother—Africanized, ‘Killer Bee’.

Someone in my family was strong and fit—

Their wings worked hard, good foragers,

And their legs sored rouge in Fields of flowers…

What’s wrong with Me and my shade?

 

 

 

 

 

Darwin’s Favourite

I float around

Looking for a tree to rest my tired wings.

Flying can be great, free.

But lately, spent

Most my days, still, inoculated

With fear.

My color stands out against light trees.

Birds eat me. They prey on me.

I have no place here.

It’s not safe. I’m watched day-to-day.

There are others, the normal ones,

Untouched, Flying, free to float about.

The forest is good to

Them.

When will the factories come?

The smoke, the soot,

Get into the trees… peppered moth,

So the birds won’t see Me.

 

 

Edifice

 

You want it all right now.

Things are never born as they will be

Attitude and the hammer give a man shape.

 

The nails driven into his heart

Along the way, before You, Woman, and after You,

Inches—Apart—Arbitrary.

The stone slab of this Man,

Apt and stingy with tears, will break

At some point.

But his shoes are firm,

Unwavering, stacking and exchanging

New Soles for better ones.

The growth to come

Can be in the Blueprint,

No overnight puzzle.

I am renovated and constantly

Love Mass

Love Mass by Alexander Miller

 

Lovesick feeling when I listen to some songs. I think about the few…maybe one woman I have ever loved. Then I wonder what love is. Then I think about whether I loved her truly or not, without fear and reticence. Then I think I did not because I held back as I always do, and that’s not brave. Some songs have that power, that mysticism that make me believe in God and perhaps faith makes my skin shake, ghostly and ghastly about how it all makes me feel. No one can really save you.

–is that right?

I have no clue about saving people. My trend has been women in need of saving: feeling incomplete and looking for me to shower compliments, furnish them with an unearned and distinguished love. Why me? Love’s Deity presses into my forehead, and I can’t remember many women that have made me feel cerebral before my ego trashes them, and throws them in the waste basket of women I’ve written off. I still think of her. I cannot settle. I have loved her, that loves not me.

Absence

long since pen and page flirt,

disease develops from travel,

the novel is left without a lover

and the author divorces the pen.

for the romance of the rail

and a new home for days

No home, desiring constant movement

returning to the dirty Bitch that bustles,

The Bitch other denizens talk of seeing,

Coming to see, saving money to do it,

Stopping and taking pictures of Her.

That Bitch is my muse.

And she is a bitch; filthy unlike other bitches.

I will never call it Home.

She’s be my muse for now.

And maybe I’ll re-marry and be merry.

Les Amis by Alexander Miller

The Rail,

and pushing along

trains over planes

fortune brings long hair and hips

next to Me.

The other guy moves

The deep voice is meters away.

Silence…uniforms interrupt…intermittence

over borders, words, one or two tiptoe

off the top and off the escape of bottom lip.

uniforms dissipate; no canines this time.

I’ve made a neighbor with an accent.

“where’s your pillow?”

both away from nos maisons.

she says I’m the one with the accent

from across the Atlantic.

My teeth show and my stomach dances.

No letters in 2013,

only emails.

We’ll sit beside again.

Carflowercat by Alexander Miller

For a departing friend:

The Bentley

Light and tough,

Sly maybe, hard to look in the headlights.

Favors, and friends we are,

The Bentley and I.

Lunches, drinks, dinner

Like most friends…

but she’s not like most flowers

Her petals feel different

On my fingers.

The Bentley.

Her leather: smooth, milky, tasty.

My nose smiles and nostrils do their touching,

No more about cars.

Palms and hearts; beating.

And we rest our foreheads against one another’s.

Like lovers, not friends.

No words zig-zag through air.

Just parallel gazes, setting into invisible grooves.

Air allows that.

Two cats just rubbing,

Feeling fur.

And nothing need be said.

For the owner of dreams

Will separate us soon.

Roam the asphalt world and roads;

No more Bentley to adore.

City by Alexander Miller

Every mission in a day,

It’s what it’s like. Everyone has their own.

The woman dashing for a seat on the E train;

The woman with a red nose and open mouth cradling her baby to her chest;

The Jewish man that doesn’t trade his seat for anyone.

Black man: step away…

The Sikh target for 6am eyes, eyes now awake at the sight of the cloth.

God could not have built this steel city,

Iron, and welding, and wood behind walls,

No one even knows how it all comes together;

Sit it an office and point, and click.

The man suspended, giving even bit of mitochondria

And sugar, the shake of a deltoid

Washing a pane of glass.

I think of Crane, the looming steel skeletons,

And what board rooms of wood suits and ties, anatomists

Decided to put them together.

This train I’m on. It’s not free. And you can smell it

Passing the man with his hand out.

The train could blow any second of any day.

I’ll walk.

A bullet could travel through cranial fragments,

And I, seal-like on the sidewalk.

I’ll take the bus.

A bus explodes in Queens, 24 dead.

I can’t stay home.

The Real

The Real by Alexander Miller

 

Everything is on the Net now.

Don’t have to leave my computer to see people

If I don’t want to.

I’ll play with my parts

Until I shoot off all that’s Real and fluid

And moving. The whiteness, the blankness and banality

I need to get rid of.

That’s entertainment, Real entertainment.

Don’t even need a woman anymore

Clicks away, in high-def, bubble butt and tits.

Tease yourself and feel your heart in your chest,

Watching, not even real.

No, I need the Real.

I need to go out, into the January air

To get slapped in the face for lying,

And make up shortly after,

Pounding away at her pelvis

And her nails digging in my back dimples.

That’s Real.

And to travel all that way,

Touching those bars on the train

Where others touched.

Rouge Work on Barrow

A short prose poem I wrote–

ROUGE WORK ON BARROW

The concrete is hot and my steps on those uneven slabs of Manhattan street sides and melancholy are frequented by the casual and overworked mules, and an elongated cigarette hangs off a dry bottom lip, or wrenched between both. Fire up and blow. They blow the smoke into the air. They blow the stains on the apron or the crew neck, the stains on their hands and faces. They spit and swear to themselves in the sun, feeling hot relief. I pass them, and they’re thankful they’re not Me, casual and headed for leisure and chaos, a sweat at a local gym. And they puff and blow again on Barrow Street, headed towards Bleecker, one foot out on the curb, crushing the ants because They can.

The smoke is different when you look at it in the night; thick and stiff, seeming less airy, lingering in the face and drifting upward to bleak and black skies.

Floating away into the air and staring back at you. Slow. A lover saying goodbye.

Stained shirts and tired, sweaty hands hang with faint pulses. And those smiles, like Mine, are heard above others alike, and hands slap knees and fall on shoulders. Fun. That break is over, and the hands need to get back to sweating and more stains need to fall on that shirt and I need to look at that face as it builds more when I ask for another glass of wine. Barrow Street is alive when the smoke takes floating feet to the air and the lover leaves again.