Magnets Open All the Same

Collected Poems and Songs

Sam Harrelson
2002-2005
 Phineas speared the two with his sharp blade,
Sending them to hell to hold forever
Their blunt desire and the dull release of life.
6-8

Leave my life with your oyster heart.

take back your bleeding virgin eyes where
the blood rolls from and pools at your grassy
feet.

I don’t know why your belly stinks

But your hands warm my shivering naked eyeball.
5-23 See You on Tuesday

I walked into his deep cave of a room, lit

by a dull yellow bulb perched on a broken stem –
a flower already dead with its sterility
poking on top, reversed in its nature –
and all wrong.

The room smelled like piss and he just laid

there with his mouth hidden in the creases of his
prickly whiskered face somewhere between his nose
and bone-wrong curled up chin.

The bulge under the yellow sheet ended at his hips

and everything below was already dead.
A foot poked out from under the cover and his toe nail
half hung to his shriveled up toe –
and all wrong.

I walked towards him, smelling the empty bottle

on the table beside him, feeling the plywood
bending under my younger feet – and all wrong.
he grabbed a tube and jabbed it into his shriveled
manhood and the piss came out –
he didn’t look.

He smoked the stale cigarette while he drained himself

then he spoke to me, but I didn’t hear him over the
loudness of his yellow piss running into the bottle.

I sat down in his wheel chair beside his bed and he told me
how to cook a red breast.
Tree of life and candy bugs eat bright Allah lanterns.

Light shining through the windows point forward to the

cracked cup sink of eternal cream plaster and still
life artwork.

Ropes reach down and impale us to climb up

to the terrestrial sphere of the crystalline

-
/
.
/
/
0
?
>
,
<>
*

carpet cleaners perching on balconied ledges peering down

into our celestial sphere.
 Locality

You puzzled me with refraction,

(the bending of your hair in light)

causing me to look the wrong way

for your root cause.

You spoke to me from heaven

(and I looked down).

You answered me in riddles and caused me to drive onto the

rocks.
Schizophrenia = house or home

A word of advice: don’t listen to the voices from your

murky oversexed perception of what may be reality.

Choke on a plum instead and kiss the heart of the one who
loves you.

Smile at the great green deep and imagine a world of

fencepost holes

and

trodden men

down oaken lanes that end in

tall white columns.
death bombs – 6/89

death bombs explode

on your cherry red lips
bleeding with the disaster
that was your self confidence,

malignant with the odor of your self hatred –

cut it off

and live forever

(never).
 Apple frog bites

First tastes to the lips enjoy the freedom that is soon

overcome by the scorched devil in hell’s mouth gaping wide
to enjoy the feast on which you dined last night.

The cleft in you (where I indulge myself in the fantasies

of death)

The middle of earth (soft) (sweet) (damp) with the

creativity of a copper axe and an obsidian blade, demanding
obedience to a feathered hand dripping blood on the sun ray
of anxiety and ancestry.

The palatable fissure of your ossuary where you hide your

secret frequencies and

attract the suffering souls searching for the beach head.

Standing up or creation

Your two legs –

Stolid timbers

Soft with buttery air folds in the front –

Orifices communicating mysteries and new
traditions.

Broken and brown from the old by recovered muscles wounded

at the fruit tree.

The offering from

the tree fell to
the ground, giving
rise to our inner
demon kissing and
guileless blame.

My length enters you, grown from the newborn knowledge of

God and mamman. You cry out, your voice damp with salty
smiles and an acid handshake.

Two tall walking buildings, eating on hind legs eyes wide

in perspective looking through sand-

Remaking the world.

Wafer Breath

Please kiss me then cry.

Tell me about the tongue

in your life and how it
feels to swallow The Finish.

Bubble afterwards in the warm

salt breeze of spent life

And ask me how it felt to die.

Please thunder and then shake,

disarming your robes of
sacrificed cookie flesh made alive to eat.

Finish with me in the sour

white tunic enshrouding our dying perfumed rubber cake

bodies.
-peniel-

Mystical moist night air

points me to the cavern
on the green hill
under the shadow of the birch tree.

Hearing myself speak,

I turn to wrestle the Jabbok
on a river of self penance and blame.

You touch my hip and I quake.

You spit in my eye and I see

You burn my lips with coal and I taste.

You clasp my head and I hear.

Just then you left me here –

on this dewy wet street sweet spot grass

and I cry at having been maimed by my identity.

 VOICES

Your perforated body speaks loud

into
my head,
my brain hitting the hard wall
of ill-intention and poor
reception.

It is here when I know you don’t really exist –

except in my salt dreams –
and

I touch your bruised fruit rib side.

Voodoo Universe

I manage time but still loose heart,

my brain vertigo hemorrhage of gravitons and gluons.

Hands whirl on a silver circle on the office wall,

timing the heart beats until Golgotha.

I smell the stench of veneer and hide in the cave of your

atlantis.

Yet I cannot stop the goose skin death ticking of apollo’s

paycheck.

Time itself is measured in sticky melted wax drawn on a

wall with a smelly grin.

Yet, I always will wonder if your music will stop breaking

tone and find the pitch to sit on my wallowed mellowed soul.
You Gave It to Me

I thought it was the moon, but

it was a lamplight.
I thought you were behind me,
but that was a movement.
I thought I was saved, but
that was the radio.
I thought your voice broke, but
that time it was my spine.

I thought I knew who you were, but

I was wrong.
I thought I dreamed about you, but
it was a shiny serpent on a stick.
I thought I experienced the supernatural, but
it was a massive ringing in my ears.
I thought you would say incredible, but
you shrugged in hollow joy.

I thought you would eat the apple

and you did –

then you gave it to me.

 CRACK

Crack, you hard rock and cleft

for no one,
but the cucumber prime pickeled chosen.

Crack, you feeling less smell of your busy orgasmed organs

that we live around.

Crack, you brahma bull monkey headed stone

that we dedicate our apple red seed against.

Crack, you cup of cold rain that we blow kisses to

when we pray soft and sweet.

Crack, you flaming green door

of smelly doom that reminds us all
here of your impotency.
springtime rhyme of bright light and yelling children
holding close to orange green prophecies of smell and taste.
coming home

Worn shin and penny smells –

you greet me at the stove.
Words exchanged less than
one might think
for coming home.

Your happiness is measured

in the strong direction
of the money you hand to me.

The differences are what I realize

as I sit there on the throne
you built for me
with oily brown grey hands.

On the stove waits the fattened calf,

almost done for the buffet and again
I’ve arrived
home
just in time.

You never smile but ask how the pearls

thrown are come along.
smiling

Smile, like that, for me

one more time.

Tell me the truth.

Do you know the truth? (I do)

Smile and say you do too. (You really don’t)

You don’t smile or know the truth

because you are still there –

sucking your thumb in the teat air

of your mother’s placenta

that you stole from her womb filled with your own blood –

(not hers)

and fingers.

(At least you didn’t steal her soul!)

Smile, and pretend you know me, then slap me in the face
with your hot hand.
 remember?

What was I thinking when you smiled?

I wish I’d remember.

You waved the magic wand hand on your

arm and I disappeared into the bath
with lamb and the (cock).

Requiting death I appeared to you

and we broiled fish on some beach

head with a mango grove and not
enough to suffice.
 candybugs or brains

Candybugs and cataract water –

spilling into one small moment
large brains and puzzles
saturate with the distraction
of a ticking daydream vigor.

Reflectful moments of reprise

with apes following int the gorge,
the essential small moments
that perform the needed function
of a holy spirit in our brain.
(spill)

Spill into me on the sofa,

rest your poetry on me.
Parking garage love seeps between us
and the cushions
Dripping past the fibers of cotton and
ornamented tissue paper.

Whisper into my ear the sweetness which you pour

on my concrete pylon
Holding yourself up steady
with an obtuse right angle.

Kiss me on the lips

and remind me you too are now rigid.

Listen to my ground level

for the short death
As I spill into your flat plane.
hands and knees

Kneeling down, holding the cup

Mary asked Why
Listening to her, the son beheld
his hands and knees
And released himself into
the death of infinity
Embracing the cold shudder
soon after filled with regret
The knowledge of knowing
and dying at once
Experience of the two
before who bloomed and died
His release wet with love
dripping on the lips of all
Encrusted in the thick veneer
on the face of Mary
(and us all)
Mockingbirds singing lullabies
of freewill
Asking us still
to kneel
And accept our present
without being sure of eternity

Remember, there is
no room to spit
(when you’re on your hands and knees).
Throwing Bricks

You, so beautiful with confident assurance,

turning the acoustic up even higher – and turning me on.

You ask if that’s all I need today – and I want to say no –

I’ve been looking for you.

You look just like my heaven with your blonde hair falling
long on your ruffled egg shirt holding the shoulders.

You turn to find the ring and I cringe, for inside I know
that regardless of the nines, this is my new life.

You look into my eyes as I buy the rope and I know that the
only thing you’ll ever sell me is my heart –

now
entwined
in some
exotic
knot not
acceptabl
e.
do not talk.

Animal trials in mice resound

and the spoon jumps over the moon.

Sausage cries from lost loves

echo in my heart.

The swinging door flings open

and there you stand –

Ready to take me somewhere

I do not wish to go.

With Prometheus liver I cry out

and you open your jaw

“Don’t speak” I say, the victim,

the deed done and you satisfied.

You leave me there, we both

speechless in orange tinted regret.
 human compounds

Study the elements in me

and you will find your answer.

Study the bonds between us

and you will be confounded.

Inside out, I’m the same as you,

but outside I’m so far away.

Reservations made between my heart and the next destination

conflict with the reservations I have for you in my heart.

You don’t know how I work,

It is amazing you understand anything at all.
You pretend to know the answers,
but cannot find the key –

Study your eyes and decide how you look at me

before you study my soul and decide to judge me.
Grotto

Lines long
around the square.

“Ye who are mighty take heed!”

Smiling baptisms and white linens argue –

first heavy – against the marble.

“Eat me!”

you once said then died.

And here we are, eyes and face shiny asking for your bread

while stars fall on our heads.

 orthodox

Right belief – here you stand

Calling after me, I shun shy away.

I look for Grace – where is she?

Where is the substance?

Where is the baby boom dogma of engaging tendency to do

smiles?

to die?
to rectify?

Restrictions, change and reservations progress you into

a second stance leaving the flock.

Maybe the next seldomness will rightly alter the alter and
set things aright.
Elaboration on Something Personal yet Perhaps True

Elaborate on the Twelfth Night

and Alabama me back to the Thames.

Your doublet and twenties pants tempt –

they even mock but I act –

I act intensive for the audience –

driving them back to monster truck mud (and fair hopes)

and cats on tin roofs
Interpreting different parts.

Taken to a place enchanting them for sixteen years (like a

dream in July).
Crucified All The Same

I am so bored with you.

I am so bigger than you.
I look for brunette hair brown.
I only see in your face the frown.

I smell Jasmine and flowers

I hear only scowl and disdain.
I touch your deep dark hair
I only feel your thin blood blonde there.
I smile and I feel
I cannot always be the one you blame.

I laugh and grab the golden cup

I drink it all up.

I have to deal with you

I wish I did not have to.
I wish you were brown.
I wish you away your frown.

I know I want you to run away

I know you want today.
I know you will judge me.
I will take the blame – (crucified all the same).
 -Magnets Open First-

You open with a bursting house

your baby owning a very nice
home.

Do not feel guilty feel like an earthquake.

Feel empty – Make money.

Let Apollo give us all the more time

and enjoy the seventy third in the duel.

Do not use your coffee pot, it doesn’t work on the 38th!

Baby’s Breath

Your back had a spark in its eye.

it had a career.

Could I? I didn’t ask. You know the question.

I wish I could find the answer.

Just repatriate and call me blue.

Why does it take this to think of you?

It’s all the same.

Beat against metal pots while teething on her breast.

Listen to speak and when to not,

knowing when its best.

Friends will lie and she will die,

the leaf will always fall.

Do not believe your children yells

when they don’t believe in them at all.

Eat the apple, kiss the tree, and don’t stop to think
about the careful notion of melody-
or the way the room does stink.

Hear the bird for its song

and the baby for its breath.

Speak in hushed mellow tones and follow her to the death

(she will know what to teach you, my dear son).

Concrete

Curves in nature cannot bend

to your unrelenting lines.
I feel your concrete stare
and the tufa stone of your soul
Water my garden with your mix of hardening soup –

Calf skin forgiveness doesn’t

seep into your plastic
gutters.

Red toe nails flashing lip biting bright screaming through

horns billowing black cherry smoke with rich fruit of calf
muscles.

My concrete inspiration point.

Bleed on me.
Scratch that skin.
Eat my crust.
Commit the first eternal sin.

Know that with your arm the forgiveness

of frog-bellied might
and give me cricket tenderness.

Don’t ask for a devil-

just give me hell-
live in your belly and revel.