Patti Masterman Poems

Methylene blue,
You paint a pretty picture:
Is it really true
Your stains get slowed by stricture?
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Describe your hobbies in short paragraphs
Describe your goals in one
Label yourself appropriately
And never ask for help.
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I want to be a dark tree in the shadows,
In a yard where nobody goes;
To be forgotten, just like starlight
In the ship's hold, far below.
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Outside, in a cloudless sky
I try to decode scattered wakes
In cuneiform, made by noiseless airplanes-
At right angles to each other, unfurling curls of silvery rickrack
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Why do I love to love you so-
Star of the screen; silver delusion
Incorporeal phantasm- is life that empty
That only your perpetual dramas
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forest speaking green
of the damp blossoms blooming
tomorrow's full of color
roughened bark of many boughs
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On a sunlit desert day
Like the other thousands of days
Within the faceless sameness of mud-colored houses
One indistinguishable from the next
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I sometimes hear things
That remind me of your last breaths-
Fast and continuous, like a sprinter
Trying to finish a course before running down:
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I used to write such precise, edited comments
With a tight rein on myself- I knew once that
Little bit of control went- the sky was the limit
Of my errant ways and obscure references.
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There's a fire burning in my soul,
There's a place I never could go;
There's a sight, I never could see:
Some other place, where she sleeps free.
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