Kisses Too Soft (A Poem)

This is one I wrote earlier on in the semester.  I'm gonna have to start writing some new ones to post for next week!  Poetry's such a weird thing to write - I can force myself to write poems, and they can be decent, but it's a harder thing to will myself to do lately, harder than forcing myself to write fiction.  Not that I'm lacking in poetic ideas, I just don't feel ready to write them, like there's some key poem I've yet to read that will reveal all that I need to know for my own style.  I'll admit, I did have a good day a few weeks ago, but it was daytime, involved a coffee high, and reading tons of random poems by William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore.  


Anyways, this is a poem I got the idea for in my poetry class while we were writing other poems.  The professor was hurling abstract questions at us, as foundations to build poems out of, but this wasn't in answer to any of them.  All I had was the beginning and end lines really.  It's still in need of heavy revision - just now I changed some line breaks and cut out some words, but just something about this doesn't feel complete to me yet, and at this point I'm not sure if that's out of perfectionism or if there really is something missing.  So let me know what you think, please leave comments and criticisms, and hopefully I'll have something new/better next week!
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Kisses Too Soft
by Matthew Stalbaum

the space between our lips is too
great even when we kiss space
enough for a breath a word
an unexpected whisper
to throw off the moment from its
precarious point

space enough for a thought
to breathlessly breeze along

lips broken and the vain
delusion is gone

can i press&press closer?

to find the space
where air no longer breaths
bodies melt and meld and blend
singularity ceases into solidarity

and bones splinter like jigsaws

The leaves were golden. (A Poem)

The first thing I'll say is, yes, the lines are supposed to be spaced apart like that.  This is a poem for my poetry class (which I didn't get to have workshopped because the teacher called in sick), where the assignment was to write a sentence for as long as possible in verse form.  I didn't write it until the Sunday before class because I wanted to write something that would use the structure of a single sentence to its fullest advantage - I thought about making a list of sorts, going on and on with more and more clauses, and I thought about doing something that led from a particular beginning to its inevitable end, using the sentence as a sort of inescapable string (that idea was going to start with the word "Life" and end with "Death").  Finally, I decided to something different than either of these, to just start with a simple image, and to keep building it up, adding more and more details, painting more and more of a scene.  

Personally, I like this poem.  I've been getting interesting in William Carlos Williams lately, and very simple, imagist poetry.  The themes that ended up coming out of this were actually a happy surprise - perhaps subconsciously I was looking for them, but I didn't expect them to play out this way.  This intro is growing way too long for such a small poem, so I'll end it with my usual request for comments and criticisms.  I hope you enjoy reading it!
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The leaves were golden.
by Matthew Stalbaum

The leaves were golden orange

and red (inlaid with the thin brown skeleton

that pokes out to be a stem), hanging from the branch

in bristling bushels, like tufts of hair,

waiting and wanting to be

let go (by the tree, by themselves), to fall

into piles, into a new scene,

a different clustering, a mosaic

of sorts, of other oranges, other reds,

perhaps some last, lost green leaf

too stubborn to change, but fallen anyway,



while the squirrels and the robins ran

back and forth across the branch,

beckoning out with a quick trill

of notes, the steps and spins of a dance,

waiting on or wanting another to join them

before the leaves are fallen, colored cruelly

in brown, and the branches are brittle and stark.

Without Glasses (A Poem)

For some reason I'm finding myself really tired at night these days - probably from my body randomly waking me up at early hours of the morning and keeping me up, which leads me to consume huge amounts of coffee.  It's all a bad cycle.  My creative output lately has been kinda stagnant, but hopefully I'll have some time between the semester ending and potential jobs beginning when I can really work on some of the poem ideas I have written down.

As for this one, I've always wanted to write a poem about glasses.  I mean, how could I not want to?  They're such a great metaphor for clarity and all of that - which is why I didn't write any poems on glasses until this one.  I didn't want to write an obvious poem - like the shower poem I wrote a few months ago, I wanted to look at glasses in an interesting way.  I can't remember how, it might've been while randomly walking down the street or in the midst of a caffeine high (those are really good moments for poetry), I had the question in the middle of the poem: "should glasses even be worn at all?"  I gotta work on this a lot more, someday I'll probably just post a bunch of poem revisions here.  I hope you enjoy reading this draft though, and please leave any criticisms you have.  Au revoir!
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Without Glasses
by Matthew Stalbaum


plotted and framed, the edges
are clear & solid & jagged
around the corners and beneath the curves,
until i begin to wonder

if glasses should be worn at all, or rather
the world be left to haze, incomplete
boundaries, numbness of sense
and the door blends with the window
as person with sky, until

a closer look finds
the outline that might have been
lost forever, though

i am convinced of a blurring
between worlds; without
glasses, my hand melts into the ink
myself lost in the sky, where one
begins where does one end?

Secret Bodies (A Poem)

There's not much to say about this poem really, other than what it is.  I'm not too happy with it yet, but I like the idea of individuals as secrets, so you can expect to see other iterations of this idea, along with reworkings of this poem, because I'd definitely like to edit this.  So I won't belabor anything by rambling on and on.  Please leave comments if you enjoy it or hate it, I like hearing bad news (well, I don't, but I need to hear bad news, so bring it on!).  Thanks for reading!
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Secret Bodies
by Matthew Stalbaum

we are shared as a secret
in which not all is told
except just enough

to light the edges
of our skin despite
a persistant darkness

that stretches its shadows
in long, smoky tendrils
that never soak through

the solidity of skin.
i cannot lift them but
they are as visible breath

which does nothing to hide
your silent scars or my
untold bruises