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[paperleaves]

immersed in a paralytic agent, it seems,
the pores of your once taut, bronzed skin
wrestle softly and quietly in amniotic dew,
a breached apparition, held succinct by sleek feather parasols,
swaddled in atavistic yelps and
swollen grimaces
there are footsteps in the tabernacle, baby,
I think we've caged him for too long--
I'll be reading the liturgy at your
laicization, my hands dripping with
blood, milk, and honey,
while
the impossible orator glances, over broken shoulders, sandals snapping on marble
as he whisks himself down dark hallways, monitoring his worth
in the detergent speckles of God's chalice, and you,
you, all the while, bathed in robes of
teeth and grains of glass,
lay in a stagnant pool of your own self-wonder
encapsulated by bedposts
and silk canopies

[MorpheusSandman]

Picking my favorite pieces of yours becomes an increasing exercise in futility, Paper. I don't know what insightful criticism I can offer besides an enthusiastic "I love it". For me you just constantly strike the right balance of poetic language, themes, a certain obscurity that makes the reader work and yet the pieces have an intimacy, emotion, and tenderness and a complete lack of pretension. It's art that makes the reader work hard but works just as hard as the reader to provide an aesthetic and emotional experience.

For this piece I love how the lone "while" seems to split the piece in two. The first half evoking gestation imagery and the second leaping to an emergence into a world that a baby can't understand but can revel in the mystery of "bedposts and silk canapies". I've read poetry that's evoked my childhood, but what's amazing is that this reaches even farther back to infancy; especially with those last few lines. Just superb.

[Bar22do]

Paper! so hard to add anything after Morpheus masterful appreciation! I can only counterpoint his voice and utter a short "wow" (borrowed from you), and then still the moment and remain still in the "pool of wonder" your Art is - - never encapsulated, ever reaching further out, pushing away the limits... is not Love your driving force! superb indeed - love Bar

[PrinceMyshkin]

Every one of your poems is a leap into the aether (or is it the abyss?) with a parachute that may or might not open but - the hovering, the rising and falling is, it seems to me, well worth the risk.

[paperleaves]

Wow! Thank you all for the amazing responses--they are like poetry in themselves.
I appreciate that you all were able to read through and consistently feel what it is that I feel when I'm writing these pieces.


love
Kate

[firefangled]

Paper, you build your poems with such unique phrasing and sounds. You make impossible turns that even when I don't get them completely for meaning, I feel them in my gut.

I quote the following as a supreme example:


you, all the while, bathed in robes of
teeth and grains of glass,
lay in a stagnant pool of your own self-wonder
encapsulated by bedposts
and silk canopies

What an image this provokes!

[paperleaves]

Thank you, firefangled! :)


love
Kate

[hack]

It is beautiful Paper.
Thank you
Hack

[~Sophia~]

Sorry to be so late to the party. I just want to say... oh yah! (especially to the lines firefangled quoted). I'm a bit awed and out of superlatives so I'll just throw my hat in the ring with everyone else! Bravo!