Going to the River – M.A. Morris

I am extremely honored to be featured on Braveandreckless.com

braveandrecklessblog's avatarBrave & Reckless

She was standing at the ready
To make me say I am wrong.
Like some saint,
I had to pluck out my eyes
To see, to see
The contortionist
She could be with words.

I laid hands upon myself
And am cured of blindness,
Cured of deafness,
And now she hates me.
Since I said,
“Get behind me, Serpent!
That dance of manipulation
No longer mesmerizes me!”

At least my head is not upon a platter,
Being served to her.

Now, I am going to the river.
Doesn’t matter where it is.
Doesn’t matter how far I must walk.
I’ll wear my shoes out
And walk my feet bloody and raw.
I am gonna dunk myself in that river,
Not her stagnate lake.
I won’t care if it’s frozen over.
I’ll dig through the ice with just my fingers.
I’ll baptize myself in icy chunks
Of slush if I must.

View original post 127 more words

Freedom from Everything I Never Told You – M.A. Morris

I am honored to have this poem featured on Braveandreckless.com

braveandrecklessblog's avatarBrave & Reckless

Believe me,
You don’t want to know
Everything I never told you.
No, you don’t want to know.
You’d never admit to it all anyway.
How you slowly drove me a little insane.
A little gaslight there. A little gaslight here.
A bit of manipulation and a little playing with words.
The metronome of your words—

I’ve always liked this
I’ve always liked that
Are you happy?
Are you happy with me?
Are you happy?
Are you happy with me?
Why don’t you act happy?
Why don’t you smile?
Why don’t you act happy?
Why don’t you smile?

Then you listed all the reasons for my unhappiness
And none concerned you or
You and me together or
All the reasons why I walked on eggshells
Around your daily prescribed as needed
Questions about my happiness,
My happiness with you, why I didn’t smile like a fool
Every single time I…

View original post 380 more words

Wings

A wish to follow the sun
And always know its light
Was a childhood dream.
I never wanted to know night.

Terrors happened without light,
So began my craving
For warmth and light.

The natural world and its order
Cannot satisfy such cravings.
One must learn to live without light.
An adult adjustment, a drooping in the spine
Of spirit, a caving inward happens
When childhood cravings must give way
To the knife sharp edge of the adult
World order, how one learns to avoid
The blade of reality, curl inward.

Others hammered out cages
That seemed to fit for me.
Told me to shut up and be happy.
Each wire in the cage a reason
For my unhappiness
With which the one who wielded
The hammer had nothing to do so it was claimed
Or
Each wire a welded bond of a reason
Why I should be happy
If I shut up and smiled
A pretty smile
and wept tears of happiness
Upon my fiery, welding savior.

For years, I kept silent.
Silence made for a peaceful cage,
So I had learned.

Then it happened.
My silence gathered round me,
Head to toe,
Wrapping me in darkness and warmth.
At first, panic.
Nothing good ever happened in darkness.
But I felt them start to form.
Slowly, painfully.
So painfully.
A pain I had never felt before,
Starting in my mouth,
Traveling down my throat,
Seeping out either side of my spine
Between my shoulder blades.
Giving birth had been less painful
Than this, as if new bone and tissue
Formed and moved and settled in.

After a few years,
the chrysalis of silence split open.
I spoke as my new sprouted wings dried,
“You were the wires of the cage meant
To keep me from the warmth I crave,
Meant to keep me from the stirrings of my blood.
Meant to keep me from the sun.”

I am caged no longer now.
I migrate with the sun
And all things those with cages
Sought to keep me from,
Things that stir the blood,
Things that feed on
The warmth of the sun
Are mine to alight upon.

Darkness and Flame

one of my own images

Let me walk into the darkest sunrise,
Then let me crawl into the brightest sunset.
Fading into each as all my weaknesses,
All my wrongs, all my sins, all my flaws
Boil to the surface, burn,
Turning black and crusting over me.

Let me emerge,
Then from the cracking, heaping ash,
Surely not as perfect,
But as something better,
Like iron tempered into steel.

Yet if emerging
As a thing tempered
I cannot be,
Let me be content to simply fade
Into darkness and flame,
Consumed by each in turn
Until nothing remained
And I become
The darkness and the flame.

Every Thing

Changed, evolved.

Everything

Used to be a verdant green

Of fresh, newborn spring.

Evolved into a chilly thing,

Brown, dried husks,

A few barely clinging

To a tree in late autumn,

Early winter.

Seems something, someone

Sucked the hope out,

Fed on it as if it were life’s blood,

And everything is drained, a leftover hull

Of what once was.  But everything goes on.

As if all is the same and nothing

Is gone.

Washed

ptownchamber.com

At sunrise over water,
Remembering a dream
Of finding ecstasy
Within tears,
Things neither given
Nor felt in years,
Linked by all the fears
To form decades of a life
Lived like a stranger
In my own skin.

I have stood
Since the dawn
At this ocean’s edge
Waiting, waiting.
And now at noon
The rain begins.
Fierce pelting blows
Washing me clean
Of all I know
Or dare to dream.

For living continues
Within my own skin

Winter

Blurred edges of a winter morning

A dawn leached of color

Where silence and stillness walk

Holding hands

A moment captured waking

Lasts

As warmth fades

And coldness settles in

To stay.

Geometry

The simple trajectory of an arrow,
If only life could be lived
With such a blessed geometry of purpose–
Shot from past
through present
to futures unseen–
Lightening movement with everything left behind–
Even the slight distortion of an arc,
Should it occur.
No ricochet, no intersections.
No confusion of parallelograms.
Or contusion causing angles of a triangle.
Or the endlessness dizzy repetition of a circle,
Continually turning back upon itself.
Just the cleanness of a beginning
And an end.

Quotable Poe Week Five-M. A. Morris

I am honored to have my story, “How the Stories End,” on https://hereticsloversmadmen.com as part of Quotable Poe Week Five.

Kindra M. Austin's avatarHeretics, Lovers, and Madmen

How the Stories End

No one would understand why I’m here, so I’m sure you don’t either—at least you don’t yet.  But I promise you will.  I’m going to tell you a story and then you’ll understand.  There is a method, as they say, to this madness.  Oh, and you will have the opportunity to help with the ending to the story I am about to tell you.

Let’s see—our story begins with a child, a child whose favorite Saturday morning were when her mother would sit beside her on the floor and watch cartoons.  Her mother would wrap an arm around her then our child would snuggle in real close.  It was one of their mother-daughter rituals, played out when the mother didn’t have too much housework to do.  What you must understand is that the most delightful part of this ritual was the mother laughing and giggling right…

View original post 2,288 more words

The Woman in Black – M.A. Morris

I am honored to be published on Brave and Reckless.

braveandrecklessblog's avatarBrave & Reckless

She dressed in black
Since the age of twenty-three.
She covered all her insides with
The blackest sack cloth.
She made sure to let in no light.
She wanted it dark, pitch black inside.

Outside, people thought she wore jewels
Of many different colors,
Sparking and brilliant they said she was.
They didn’t see the black she always wore.
For many years,
She hid the black cloth well
For the sake of those she loved.

But on her story goes,
Those she loved drained her,
Drained her dry as they say.
That’s when the black cloth began
To creep out her navel and down her thighs,
Lowering itself to cover every inch of her
From waist to ankle.
Everyone thought she wore black slacks,
But she knew better.
She knew it was the black from inside.
Those she loved never bothered
To deposit what they’d withdrawn,
So soon, the black…

View original post 119 more words