Little Glass Pen

Something Special :)

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Thu, 14 May 2009 05:58:00 +0000

Dear All,
I have been very quiet lately as life has thrown some interesting lessons my way.. however while I have been looking the other way my words have been found their way to be havened in a most perfect manner by beautiful editor and publisher Amanda Oaks of Verve Bath Press.
For your own copy of the hundred printed to have and to hold, please follow these links...
Verve Bath Press
Verve Bath at Etsy
The second will also link you to Amanda's blog which always leaves me smiling widely!
Enjoy!
with love
A.Joy
x

Drawn Resting

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 10:40:00 +0000

charcoal rasps
vespers
as I try to draw
from memory

a beach near Ise
with soft rocks
that turn to powder
at touch

a gentle slippage
of ritual and
desecration

All The Way Home

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 10:41:00 +0000

i

Beginnings deteriorate
Even the second knock sounds
an imitation

The scraping of shoes on the mat
the soil trapped in the tread
The space once travelled
which then feels known
arches back like a snare

There is a particular silence
only found under the feet
of a traveller at rest

As windows of hotels sing back
at the motors of aeroplanes

ii

To stretch your arms
around both sides of his body
Pull him close to your chest
rock the squalling flesh
into a curved hush like
a horizon

iii

These soft annunciations
breathed into frontiers
of hard flesh

dewclaw words coiling
beside a tangle of legs
agape in silence
at the look of things

The pigment darkens
as skin covets its own
articulation

iv

In summer
made pretty by smell
of frangipanis

There are these mornings
where heat deadens everything
where
you don’t remember your own name
until you hear it

What if you lay with a stranger?
What if you fell asleep and woke
beside him?
Recognised your shape in the sheets
your colour against the white

Could you coyly
become a sound?

v

Geometric alphabet
with its sharp edges
offers no security for the memory
It cannot keep the devout
gushing of the mouth

greedily taking in what it can
hold of the voice
what it can retain of what was seen
bristling in the water

This point
which cant be reached
can be called separation
no matter the distance

Blue Alice

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 03:47:00 +0000

absurdity of trying
to grip a fish
with needle fins
as it flaps gills
gulps choking air

hook mouth
to a memory
silence swells
to a freak wave
a wall of water

the smallness
of a body sucked
ten metres under
water beneath
a ledge of rock

Forearm

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:42:00 +0000

to thought

swollen bulb
to
thumbprint

mouth to valve

words that barely
fit in
the throat

i
drop to
your

pillowcase

Making Room

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 04:11:00 +0000

describing you
to myself

i pour hot

in silence
an ampoule

cooled glass

a moment
before desire

Seminal

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 04:45:00 +0000

Deep in the throat
they laugh-
hungry little bodies
with their pointing bones
fastened with buttons
hooking eyes

He has seen her
alone
through her window
turning her body in
the mirror

This is a gift
(she tells him)
Takes his wrist

Fingertips focus
in childlike
desire

It may take
root
grow inside
leave accompanied
by words and sounds
Thoughtless

In her parents’ bed
Red mouth agape
she listens to his
whispers

He lies
beside her
slightly
Off-centre

Counterpart

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 11:13:00 +0000

When I watch you choose your face in the morning.
When you hold the silk voice to your unshaven cheek.
Muffle questions with the scarf of your full throat.
I want to bite your tiny glass fingers,
snag the fibres of your lungs
in my clenched cat teeth
with indifference.

It stays like this,
holds to the refrain.
Strains to open and wriggle free
then leans back into itself.
A perfect disciple.

This is how we queue to touch you.
In the middle of your chest
dousing for certainties-
through the ribs,
through the pink flesh,
through the mouth.

Sensed Through Opaque Windows

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 08:06:00 +0000

It’s hard to understand architecture
when my past is sea and desert.

It could be that these things are not
simultaneous.
When you kiss me and the inside of your mouth is the colour of mulla mulla, it makes my feet burn. Then, I am standing on the red earth in the middle of the day and a girl’s voice shouts “you look deadly sis”.
Beside you now in this rectangle of flowers, in the pocket of my black jersey dress, my fingers find forgotten cherry pits (I ate them to wash those last words out of my mouth)

These pieces of memories I haven’t known
lie lightly.

Undone by the closeness of the ocean, forgetting returns in pieces. With the skin of my body resting on the skin of your body. We form small patches of darkness between us-
As smoke, leaving, the fire aspires to a more spacious form.

Todays encased
in yesterdays
Tiny birds in eggshells

Tithing

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 04:14:00 +0000

Smaller

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 08:20:00 +0000

Absence Spans

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 09:12:00 +0000

Orb Weavers

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:29:00 +0000

Loss

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:44:00 +0000

In the tuart roots
five metres underground
the chamber moaned
as the air dried out

In Hand

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:52:00 +0000

A.Joy

Access

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Sat, 31 May 2008 05:49:00 +0000

I keep nothing here,
in this room.

No furniture, no pictures.

I like to look out
through the window,

imagine all the bodies
within my body,

which may or may not
exist.

Strake

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Mon, 19 May 2008 09:25:00 +0000

Because you
came here dressed as a man,
in a shirt.

Because things keep slipping.
Shifting distinctions.
Hiding your desire for
alike.

Left adrift
you venture your throat
to a word that tightens
around the sounds you might
produce.

You surrender to your own story,
told. Mothlike
hands wide, slow
flapping,
in and
out.

An imprint held.
Curved like a bone.
Leading edge to foil.

To reveal where thoughts are
sinking.

A last glimpse,

until
it bores its way out.

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 06:06:00 +0000

In latter versions
it was told somewhat
differently

Her following always
the direction in which
her toes pointed

Her disinterest in
recognition leading
to the still belly

Le prochain
Write something
(don’t write something)

When Sounds Leave

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 03:23:00 +0000

When you hear them pack their bags
Their large feet shrinking away through the door
Their hands on the gate

There are
the spaces they leave

Just there
the poem places a last glance back at the window imprinted with ghost thuds of birds
Tiny carcasses already dropped to the purring mouths of quiet cats with long transparent whiskers to move soundlessly through the night
green eyed

Here the sounds wobble as another marches by loudly
measuring a distance with the certainty of numbers noted down
Where their edges are lost in the overlapping

A sharp urgency flounders
behind a dull puckered
These are not sounds
these are words
interrupted by the sharp announcement of the doorbell rising to be heard past the furniture as if unexpected
Hands clench
small pawed in cotton skirted courtesy
Follow the words trailing
As a shrill wind fills the silence left wide open behind them
Heavy lidded you return to the page which shivered blankly beneath a note written then placed in a pocket
A moment stained with the mottled impossibility
of containing an ending in the telling
remains

Not Enough To Fold

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 01:17:00 +0000

Forgotten like air
without movement

The simple dream
of people talking

Animate with hunger
for the unexpected

While the woman
I used to be
sleeps

What Have You

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 08:23:00 +0000

A lean beast
in a recurring dream
feeding on sound

It wasn’t here
Never even passing
close

It touched me in the way
a lover’s words do
when they talk in their sleep

When their tongues don’t
move

Hulled seeds of truths
Sluggish buds

Before the trap of morning-
the questions of daylight-
the tallying of proof
with dusk closing
around each certainty

Scalloped into my thoughts
by soft arched words
a gentle query arranges itself
in the emptiness of my mouth

The pulse behind my eyes
measures quiet in vowels
quickly swallowed

Silence Suivant

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 06:39:00 +0000

Days spent without the dumb certainty of language
The reprieve found in stepping on rock after rock
Moving amongst the evidence of living things and trees
Alongside things running somewhere
Wild pigs have foraged here

Such are the clear moments of small things
Snags of blackberry thorns on a long slow hike
The impossibility of drawing a deep breath
in an abandoned mineshaft
Not even the wind finds us here
Undersides of ancient things stubbornly static
and what collects there
Distillations of surfaces
Channelled into the depths
where we see with our hands

We inherit this;
Vast underbellies of others’ understandings
Clouded thoughts in small crowded houses
Tiny tables shortened by too much Pastis
Closer
Closer until everything touches
Forces the air out
We leave too
the cramped room
the tiny village
the road
Further

Inadequate maps without spaces
show nothing
Give nothing
Cartographers of places untouched by the sun
Hold maps in their memory to draw later
I watch where you place your foot
I follow
Today the curl of hair on your collar
and your square back
Sure footed on an ancient trail reclaimed by green
Following ghosts of Romans
and English tourists
Cradled in the valley we walk long in silence

The clarity of a river full of fish
Sudden leap of a toad
First blossoms brave the freezing air
against a forest of brilliant green regrowth
I watch our shadows pass over the water
birdcall anouncements precede us

Stories speak more loudly here
Voices move
years after the sound has left them
We breathe them in
Silence expands
falls softly into the river and the soil
crackles under our feet
then scatters

Stop Over

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:24:00 +0000

This never blue sky

holds me close to the green earth

a butterfly day

Three Part Tale Spin

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 09:22:00 +0000

(i)

I’m thinking of a night full of birds
A confusion of wingbeats and soft
collisions that feel like heartbreak

Crowds are gathering on the hill
in their pink masks
to watch the sky which dwarfs us all
It’s the colour of the desert
Stealing our shadows in funnels of dust

(ii)

They’re there to see a poem unfolding
Where words haven’t arrived
A small underscoring of half-slept moments
Of forgetting weakness

Here we are again
Away from them
and your hands are in my hair
My face is in your chest
You smell of cigarettes and solitude
Your voice is close to my ear
in a form I know but don’t understand
This is no story you’re telling
in bare-knuckled braille
It has a narrative I cant follow
back to your mouth

This is the easy eye of beauty
Silence of the planets and falling starlings
in a cosmic tailspin of absurdity

The black stones under my feet are still warm
from when the sun burnt them
in the middle of the day
I wonder where I left my shoes

(iii)

Naked of meanings your face eludes me
Still the words aren’t coming
The patterns are there
lightening then darkening
The sounds amplify
bird cries swell thick
higher now
with throats full of clouds
Caught as they rise
No truth we’ve been
offered corresponds to this
These are feats of the imagination
To feathered applause and closed eyes

My skin is my mind
These are my dreams
they bring it all closer
Sink it in

Crawl up under my sheets
under a blanket of memory
warp and weft of surfaces of things
Woven threads of messages received
from every cell touched, held, imagined
Hold it, touch it again to remember
whisper into it
into the scars
into the dull ache
like a bridge from some place not located in my body

Or write it and I’ll read it to my hands
with my fingertips in a soft slow scrawl

(red)

amanda@littleglasspen.com (Amanda Joy) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 11:02:00 +0000

Little glass pen that I chew on,
wound my expression with
wet closeness of cut lips.
To answer him
with sticky kisses.

Undo the corset of
diminishing faith,
unsigned, unsighed,
unsounded air, that
fills my mouth with gifts.
Sealed and forgotten in pink bows;

the colour of hearts which are
not organs behind our ribs.
Not the liquid which passes
through carrying the
mineral of my will,
beating my submission,
keeping my feelings
and thoughts
pumping together

in a bloody rush of
a tongued faltering that
braves fire.
Lick the cinders
from my white skin,

desires relics are
slipping the leash with disguised teeth,
to announce the beginning is over.