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What I find


by Darryl Price


is every word is a small step taken
away from you that arcs back to me like

a mamba's mouth. I'm not going around
in place so much as running in circles. 

You can see my devilry here. You are
the truth here and that makes me the lie. You're

new morning. I'm much, much more sleep. You're birds.
I'm bats. You awaken while I cry in

my sleepwalking state. Every single word.
No matter what I write. You're laughter. I'm

floorboards. I want to be all of the stars
for once. You've already got that situation covered. 

I'll take the white wafting flowers that
blow down by the lake like summer's curtains.

No, you'll have every petal, every drop
of lake, even the differing winds. Well

then I place this poem high on branches
of pine among a hundred branches of

pine. But no. Clouds are your closed eyelashes.
I know that when you open them again

I'll fall away into a nothingness.
Your skin's what I'll breathe if I breathe at all.








Bonus poems:



How to Murder a Butterfly Tree


by Darryl Price


Round up
the men!











Bonus poem:



Just Before They Break Our Hearts Again by Darryl Price

I'd like to say something. I know it's lonely. It's enough to make you want to walk into the dumb hungry teeming ocean waves and shake hands with Virginia Woolf. It's lonely as fuck. We're not better 

than this. That's a beautiful lie they want us to sign to prove they weren't complete assholes. They were. But that doesn't mean it's plain to see, now or then.
If we're too proud to admit anything 

it's that we gave our love completely. It's everyone's darkest secret, our emperor's clothes. I know it's lonely. Not going back down there either. It's too dark for that anyway. I don't want you to hurt like

me. I'd like to say something, but I've got nothing that doesn't sound like an old song desperate for one more lovely moonlit mouth full of haunted kisses. If they
told us about the miles I wasn't 

listening. I believed in finding the one who was lost in this world without me. I'd like to say something, but I'm not sure my current heart is not a 
complete fake. Something sadly missing a beat 

replacing the hanging one. It doesn't get any better just because it gets easier to swallow. It's hard for me to say what my closed eyes wished for. Dreaming is 
just a photograph I don't remember making. 

Is it still okay to say I miss you? Every day the road was harsh. You were 
my candle in the dark. My expressionistic freedom seems to have cost only everything in wasted time. Guess I'm good.     





Young Lovers(first draft version)

Have to slug it out
with the whole world. Everyone says

they are for that love but they lie. No one wants

to believe anyone else could find it, what they could not.

Just not possible. No one could try harder than me.Yeah well 

you'll see when love flushes you down. You won't see it coming. It's

not something you can plant
and grow just because you have

 

the land. Strangely enough it
can sprout up just about anywhere and

from anything. It can come out of a look given on

a passing piece of sun glass. You never know. In the meantime

we pretend to have it in our pockets like a good

old sturdy plastic comb. All we have to do is simply

reach for it. The lie
perpetuates itself .Everyone agrees it works, but secretly they don't believe it.

 

But young lovers are shunned,
disbelieved, and finally dismissed. They are

treated as children in danger of becoming swallowed by waves too

huge to imagine. How could these kind eyed strangers have found

the beautiful fountains and not shared its location with all of 

us? It's selfish. Self serving at best. So unfair. Lucky bums need

their priorities set straight. Oh
we'll see to it for them, won't we?  




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