your love is like sniffing glue in abandoned playgrounds
your love is like running thru hell with
naked feet
your love is solving complicated math with broken fingers
and broken toes
400 million trillion blackholes in this universe
all of them in denver
all your accidents end
in denver, you’ve got asphalt and postcards in your pocket
you’ve got lilacs in your hair
your love is playing with snakes
you burn your candle from both ends and the middle
you burn your candle like you hate candles
your love is like a puddle of gasoline
you can swallow your heart and start over
your bullet holes are filled with black noise
you can play a blue guitar
a heartbeat and a bruise, a heartbeat and a bruise
you can play a green tambourine
you can play a goddess in a tight sweater and jeans on a mission
from heaven to find reason and ruin in a single drop of rain
you can play dumb
heartbeat and a bruise, heartbeat and a bruise
love is a blue guitar you drag around by the neck
400 million trillion broken hearts in denver
all of them yours
you play dirty pool and you’ve got dice up your sleave
your laughter is clattering and witchy and itching all the right spots
but your soup is cold
no one knows where you came from
your star name is papier-mache angel
your earth name is catastrophe spiral
fate is a chimera
you are prodigy of chimera
your eyes are haunted gloomy kamikazes
you drink kamikazes
you throw kamikazes at everything that gives you pain
your love is throwing side-eye at the world
your love is a one-eyed horse in a snowstorm
your love is like rust falling off a truck parked on the side of the road
next to a junkyard
your love is like looking for a black cat in a dark room that
ran away years ago chasing blackbirds into blackholes in the
darkness of denver
you love is something
unspeakable
mythological
non-sequitur
more than
and less than
and other than
true
posted for shay’s word garden word list
posted for the sunday muse
jalopy dreams 
Hokey damn smokes, Bullwinkle. This is a tour de force. There are SO MANY amazing lines. “You burn your candle like you hate candles.” “Your love is a one-eyed horse in a snowstorm.” And about five thousand others. Wow. It’s a genius move, what you did with “all of them in Denver.” Having lived in Denver for 6 weeks when I was 20, it just made it very immediate for me. I want to roll this poem up and stab a particular person through the heart with it and see if it starts smoking. I step aside for this poem. I want to scream this poem. I want to marry it and then leave it. Lord, mister, i want to go read it again.
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I second everything Shay said (except the part about living in Denver because I have never lived there). There are so many amazing lines, from your love is like sniffing glue all the way to the end. This poem demands re-reading.
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thank you, glad you liked this, i was fun to write
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thank you shay, that means a lot to me. sorry about your experience in denver, its not all bad though. so glad you liked this
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I would die happy if I could write just one line of the caliber of every line in this, phillip. I can’t even begin to count the times you knocked me over with your metaphors, cut into my complacency and everydayness with the broken glass of these devastating comparisons from the first line on straight through. “you burn your candle like you hate candles” (!!) And you wrap it up around a steel fist at the end for that final hit. Not just one of your best, but one of *the* best poems I’ve read in a long time. And now I don’t ever want to go to Denver again.
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i feel kind of bad, i’m making denver sound awful, denver’s ok, i like it. thank you joy, coming from you that means a lot!
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Nah, I’m thinking Denver is just a metaphor, one you’ve used to devastating effect, a big city with arid landscapes, a modern industrial wasteland as parts of all big cities are. Oxidia, not Olympia. But cities are how most of us live, and all of them have redeeming qualities. I was just speaking rhetorically. I never want to go back to Chicago, either, tho I miss the Art Institute. ;_)
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so true. i knew what you meant, i just feel like i sometimes only show the negative side of denver, i’m working on an aurora (next door to denver) poem right now, aurora really needs some love
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WOW! This poem is an amazement of rich comparisons and fantastic lines. I so admire your talent in writing it. Remarkable. I am blown away.
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Is she really worth it? I’ve only been to Denver once so I can not say anything about that, but I looked up Oxida, and with a name like that, and all this intense imagery, you have quite a character here
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“Is she really worth it?”, well i guess that depends on how long and how well you’ve known her, also, she isn’t real, she’s a character from a wallace stevens poem and i thought i’d flesh her out a little bit. glad you enjoyed this
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So many individual lines in this draw me into little side paths and then lead me right back into the amazing, blazing poem.
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thank you, glad you liked
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I love her so much and want her number for a play date. 🙂
I giggled through the whole thing. What a masterwork. I don’t believe for a second she doesn’t love you though. That head? Good Lord. Of course she does. I love movies like this—about some crazy smart woman “playing dirty pool,” whatever that might be a metaphor for.
I might sling you some favorite lines later, but I’d probably have to quote most everything. ❤
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heh, i’ll let her know you’re looking for a girls night out. thank you, glad you liked this
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I’m researching Oxidia now—and the Stevens poem you referenced.
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you may not find much online, and it’s from the poem “the man with the blue guitar”
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I love that this could be about you talking to yourself in a mirror, a parent, a sibling, your city itself, basically any character from Shameless—my point being, on the surface it’s about a girl who’s done some damage, but it’s also so much more than that.
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agreed, that’s why i like writing poems like this, lots of different ways to go, lots of room for imagination
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I basked in the amazing images of the poem. “you can play a blue guitar / a heartbeat and a bruise, a heartbeat and a bruise “…the lines will stay with me.
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You snuck in on me at the Muse! LOL…I absolutely LOVE every spectacular line Phillip! This is love nailed down to the eye balls awesome!!
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Hot damn, this is great. “your love is like sniffing glue in abandoned playgrounds” goes in the lexicon of best all-time first lines. And I’d have to quote the rest of it too. Maybe with you there, Denver is less lonely for its heroes. As to the 400 million trillion blackholes, I think just push that manhole cover back in place at the corner of Colfax and Logan, and you should be OK, at least for a while.
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yes, indeed, denver is lonesome for her heroes, so good of you to remember. and that manhole of colfax and logan has always been a problem, but if you plug it up, blackholes just bust up again one block over, its like playing whack-a-mole. thank qbit, glad you enjoyed this
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STUNNING write, Phillip.
“you burn your candle like you hate candles ”
“a heartbeat and a bruise, a heartbeat and a bruise ”
“your laughter is clattering and witchy and itching all the right spots ”
Too many good lines to quote. A pleasure to read.
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woh I am glad to find this website through google.
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