Morning Sun by Lee Endres

Bone-deep cold, inside and outside, standing at the window, smoke rising from the glass towers, South of the River backdrop, a big camera lens, a song on repeat, goosebumps and no giggles, look straight into the lens, thinking about the words dissolved the urge to giggle, one take- a few of them- shadows falling where they fall, the drop would be lethal if they fell from the wall where they sat in the night and I stood in the light and this is what they made and I look at it and wonder- who is she?

An article I wrote {on linguistics & etymology with some poetic license taken}

Why We Need To Invent New Words

I hope you read and enjoy it!

Girl Born Of Crystal

Enough now, about all the boys and men whose hearts you stole,
how flowers sprouted from their chests before you swallowed them whole.
Tell me about ghosts trapped in amber, about how you can take flight
driving down an empty road with your eyes closed, at night.
I want to hear about summer lightnings recorded on cassettes,
and personal but dangerous mythologies, and winsome regrets,
and if you ever sleep to dream, if they hurt more than waking
 because either way you’re driving, your voice is still shaking.
You were a girl born of crystals, you grew into a shell.
I think you could love, or kill, but you hide it all so well.
Red and blue lights like a prayer ending, an exit night gave you.
You are calling ‘catch me’- will they find you or will they save you?
Aren’t you going to live forever? Aren’t you named after a hero?
Aren’t you a modern Joan of Arc, a Titan, Michelangelo?
Swerving into traffic, smiling more with every turn.
Tell me you are racing for someone, not imagining how to burn.
I want to ask what happened to you, but I’m not strong enough to face
what I can’t predict to hear, or to see you fall from grace.
I’ll tell you that I love you, to remind you that it’s there
yet I wonder if it’s love itself that put hatred in your stare.
Don’t tell me with such pride that you never stick around
and how he loved you more, and it razed her to the ground.
I know that girl, I am that girl, and you’ll move on and forget her.
She’ll hear the echoes forever- I’m like you, but I do it better.

Mistflowers, mile-a-minute, minionette vines and mugwort

There’s nothing wrong with mistflower or mile-a-minute
or minionette vine or mugwort, she didn’t think,
but she knew something was wrong when she began
to blossom into hysteria. A garden overgrown,
bones of a home she’d outgrown, and she could have,
she should have, known- the careless ghosts, the
unbreakable chair, the absence of frantic arcs, swallowed
by morning and never magic. She knew one thing certain,
but it was like the weeds that she didn’t mind so much
taking over her garden, tying knots she’d never untangle-
or she could spend a summer trying, and still, the mugwort
and mignonette vine, would keep growing, mile-a-minute,
then she’d be trapped with night-time regrets hiding
between the folds of her pillows, shaped just like the roses
she could have spent the summer watching, open, close.
What she had known, she kept hidden in the garden
that grew bone-deep behind her eyes, the place in the brain
where dreams are manufactured in that little cabinet
that looks like a seahorse. She knew that she could have,
should have, been there, when she felt the promise of
something magic, a feeling she didn’t realise one day
she’d be unable to recall, and with the feeling went the promise.
She had dreams of traffic accidents, she saw houses rotting
from the inside out, and everything she watched at night
was a spectacle, clearer cut and more colourful than waking.
It made her wonder whether she existed mostly in sleep.
That was a thought she could live with. Because then perhaps
the promise wasn’t real, or if it was, her reality was apart,
and his, perhaps, always had been. Still, even if that were true,
she heard a voice in her dream the night that she heard
about the suicide of her neighbour. It was her own voice,
she thought, but from another place- it was a voice that knew
and was not afraid to know, or to tell her. You could have,
you should have, let him see you, before you gave up on magic.

Maybe you know

Maybe you know the feeling- maybe it's with a boy
or not a boy. You're alone and then something
roars past and suddenly you can't get out of here,
and the roof is burning, or the floor is opening
and you can't get out of here. You are crying
over that mistake that didn't feel hideous until
you were already burned. The one where you
didn't turn away fast enough. The radio is on
somewhere and nobody is listening, and in your head,
a bicycle gets stolen from behind someone's shed,
and it's halloween, and he's kissing you in the dark,
and dragging you to that lake, back home, and now
you are laughing, trying to understand, and trying
to figure out why you thought you could understand,
and this is stupid, this is so so stupid, and it's
the roman empire, and the northern lights, and
and it's the ship that finally made it across
the widest of oceans, and it's so far beyond you.

Untitled.

Waiting for long hours, a promised paradise
with aching feet put
to soft-pillow sand,
serenity seems far out of reach.

Now we sit at home across from the fireplace,
not speaking,
remembering-

we went to the sea and expected
what was never really there.

Clear water, gentle sun,
hands entwined and worries gone.
While ocean spray cleansed
or at least, made us forget-

but dead things get buried on the shore
cracked, imperfect shells,
a fish, gasping,
blood rusting the water.

I cry on the way home.
You cry on the way home
I cry before I go to bed.
I cry and I watch you sleep.

Years ago this would not have been so hard.
We would have smiled just as
our mother had wanted.

I would’ve watched the fireworks, you know.

In a dream I returned to an island once called home
I danced, I swam, I prayed to
a god in which I don't believe
and an uncovered history was poised over me.

I am awake and I cannot hear the ocean.
I cannot sense your eyes anymore,
as you promised, watching me from
the terrace, or that happiness
I meant in everything I have said.
Please don't tell me that I made it up
all inside my head.