Dean, S7

Bring Me The Head of A Northern Saint

A dead man whose hands
crane up for the sun
like the twigs of some broken tree:
that is my lot, now. These
are the still-moving feet of
an exhumed corpse, incorrupt, gut-
rotten. These are his hands, my
hands, God's hands. I am
the hammer gone bust
on the anvil. They once thought me
diamond, till rock ran me through.

Feet, and the earth beneath them.
Simple things, these. Not
for the dead does the planet revolve:
not for the dead risen out of their
graves for a rattlesnake's rapture.

Whiskey is wasted like gold
in a dead man's stomach, but hurt
cannot touch what is only a wound.

Rot and the Dead Man: a song
for lovers. Send me
my maggots, till only
the clean air remains
where I stood -- putrefaction's
last judgment.

You all probably follow theysaid and the great poetry that gets posted there on occasion, so this is probably redundant, but I at least thought it would be worth collecting here :)

The title says it all.

Where the Hero Contemplates Forgiveness

Before you there was your father who carried a hammer
& fixed things. Each night like a dark broom swept him

into bed & he dreamed of you, a slowly focusing photograph
of messy hair settled atop a red tricycle,

two buck teeth in dinosaur pajamas you sailed
across the living room floor like Magellan having spotted

the isle of beautiful women.
Later you too would circumnavigate

the thorny bramble of loss’ island on foot, sometimes
with a cat named Tybalt & your friends who don’t eat meat

except when they’re eating meat. This is the trick: make a rule
& break it. Run towards love & don’t come back,

like the blind circus starlet leaps from a platform & loses
her sequined gown,

you are an equally blind train chugging on. This is to say something
about on track & how you were put together right

in Michigan where the steam engines rollick
into morning, a flock of blackbirds dip & tumble while somewhere

your father sits up in bed. You ink a burning orange sky onto an arm.
Hitch the worn desert pony of your life to a post.

-- Wendy Xu

Not sure I've seen any blackout poetry here before, so I hope this is allowed. This just screamed Show to me and I had to share it:


source

Dean a la S7

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

We Wear The Mask, Paul Laurence Dunbar

a little post 5x22, Dean dreams about Sam, or post 7x02, dreaming about Castiel.

Fiat Lux

In Memory of Joseph Marino

Call it a leak in last night’s dream,
where you jump in to save the dog
drowning in a street of water,
only to find yourself pulled under
where the force of sleep opens your eye.
And as you lie awake a moment,
housed in rain, it is a friend
and not a dog you think of, or both,
the way sun is both the gift
of sight and what burns our sight away.
If light is spirit, says the sun,
dark is meat. Each alone is blindness.
Moreover, the invisible mercies
tell you, when two occupy one
space, a certain weight of being
divides itself between them.
Such is grief’s logic, the geometry
of prayer. Take my friend.
When his body arrived at the altar,
they sprinkled him with faith
in a dead ancestral language.
His father’s faith. Not his.
He who gave his flesh to his flesh
and so departed. Some nights still
I am looking for the dog.
Or is it the dog who is looking.
Here boy, I call, which is not his name. Here.

-- Bruce Bond

Dean ;_;

The Obligation to Be Happy

It is more onerous
than the rites of beauty
or housework, harder than love.
But you expect it of me casually,
the way you expect the sun
to come up, not in spite of rain
or clouds but because of them.

And so I smile, as if my own fidelity
to sadness were a hidden vice—
that downward tug on my mouth,
my old suspicion that health
and love are brief irrelevancies,
no more than laughter in the warm dark
strangled at dawn.

Happiness. I try to hoist it
on my narrow shoulders again—
a knapsack heavy with gold coins.
I stumble around the house,
bump into things.
Only Midas himself
would understand.

- Linda Pastan

Dean, 2x02, thinking about his father.

A Bitterness

I believe you did not have a happy life.
I believe you were cheated.
I believe your best friends were loneliness
and misery.
I believe your busiest enemies were anger
and depression.
I believe joy was a game you could never
play without stumbling.
I believe comfort, though you craved it, was forever a stranger.
I believe music had to be melancholy or not at all.
I believe no trinket, no precious metal, shone so bright as your
bitterness.
I believe you lay down at last none the wiser and unassuaged.
Oh, cold and dreamless under wild, amoral, reckless, peaceful flowers of
the hillsides.

- Mary Oliver

I was young once. I dug holes
near a canal and almost drowned.
I filled notebooks with words
as carefully as a hunter loads his shotgun.
I had a father also, and I came second to an addiction.
I spent a summer swallowing seeds
and nothing ever grew in my stomach.
Every woman I kissed,
I kissed as if I loved her.
My left and right hands were rivals.
After I hit puberty, I was kicked out of my parents’ house
at least twice a year. No matter when you receive this
there was music playing now.
Your grandfather isn’t
my father. I chose to do something with my life
that I knew I could fail at.
I spent my whole life walking
and hid such colorful wings.

"Sam!"
"Dean!"
Really though. This is so Sam/Dean it's ridiculous. Seems rather Season 5-y and Dean POV to me, but it could be either of them any time.

Saying Your Names

Chemical names, bird names, names of fire
and flight and snow, baby names, paint names,
delicate names like bones in the body,
Rumplestiltskin names that are always changing,
names that no one’s ever able to figure out.
Names of spells and names of hexes, names
cursed quietly under the breath, or called out
loudly to fill the yard, calling you inside again,
calling you home. Nicknames and pet names
and baroque French monikers, written in
shorthand, written in longhand, scrawled
illegibly in brown ink on the backs of yellowing
photographs, or embossed on envelopes lined
with gold. Names called out across the water,
names I called you behind your back,
sour and delicious, secret and unrepeatable,
the names of flowers that open only once,
shouted from balconies, shouted from rooftops,
or muffled by pillows, or whispered in sleep,
or caught in the throat like a lump of meat.
I try, I do. I try and try. A happy ending?
Sure enough — Hello darling, welcome home.
I’ll call you darling, hold you tight. We are
not traitors but the lights go out. It’s dark.
Sweetheart, is that you? There are no tears,
no pictures of him squarely. A seaside framed
in glass, and boats, those little boats with
sails aflutter, shining lights upon the water,
lights that splinter when they hit the pier.
His voice on tape, his name on the envelope,
the soft sound of a body falling off a bridge
behind you, the body hardly even makes
a sound. The waters of the dead, a clear road,
every lover in the form of stars, the road
blocked. All night I stretched my arms across
him, rivers of blood, the dark woods, singing
with all my skin and bone Please keep him safe.
Let him lay his head on my chest and we will be
like sailors, swimming in the sound of it, dashed
to pieces. Makes a cathedral, him pressing against
me, his lips at my neck, and yes, I do believe
his mouth is heaven, his kisses falling over me
like stars. Names of heat and names of light,
names of collision in the dark, on the side of the
bus, in the bark of the tree, in ballpoint pen
on jeans and hands and the backs of matchbooks
that then get lost. Names like pain cries, names
like tombstones, names forgotten and reinvented,
names forbidden or overused. Your name like
a song I sing to myself, your name like a box
where I keep my love, your name like a nest
in the tree of love, your name like a boat in the
sea of love — O now we’re in the sea of love!
Your name like detergent in the washing machine.
Your name like two X’s like punched-in eyes,
like a drunk cartoon passed out in the gutter,
your name with two X’s to mark the spots,
to hold the place, to keep the treasure from
becoming ever lost. I’m saying your name
in the grocery store, I’m saying your name on
the bridge at dawn. Your name like an animal
covered with frost, your name like a music that’s
been transposed, a suit of fur, a coat of mud,
a kick in the pants, a lungful of glass, the sails
in wind and the slap of waves on the hull
of a boat that’s sinking to the sound of mermaids
singing songs of love, and the tug of a simple
profound sadness when it sounds so far away.
Here is a map with a your name for a capital,
here is an arrow to prove a point: we laugh
and it pits the world against us, we laugh,
and we’ve got nothing left to lose, and our hearts
turn red, and the river rises like a barn on fire.
I came to tell you, we’ll swim in the water, we’ll
swim like something sparkling underneath
the waves. Our bodies shivering, and the sound
of our breathing, and the shore so far away.
I’ll use my body like a ladder, climbing
to the thing behind it, saying farewell to flesh,
farewell to everything caught underfoot
and flattened. Names of poisons, names of
handguns, names of places we’ve been
together, names of people we’d be together,
Names of endurance, names of devotion,
street names and place names and all the names
of our dark heaven crackling in their pan.
It’s a bed of straw, darling. It sure as shit is.
If there was one thing I could save from the fire,
he said, the broken arms of the sycamore,
the eucalyptus still trying to climb out of the yard —
your breath on my neck like a music that holds
my hands down, kisses as they burn their way
along my spine — or rain, our bodies wet,
clothes clinging arm to elbow, clothes clinging
nipple to groin — I’ll be right here. I’m waiting.
Say hallelujah, say goodnight, say it over
the canned music and your feet won’t stumble,
his face getting larger, the rest blurring
on every side. And angels, about twelve angels,
angels knocking on your head right now, hello
hello, a flash in the sky, would you like to
meet him there, in Heaven? Imagine a room,
a sudden glow. Here is my hand, my heart,
my throat, my wrist. Here are the illuminated
cities at the center of me, and here is the center
of me, which is a lake, which is a well that we
can drink from, but I can’t go through with it.
I just don’t want to die anymore.

-- Richard Siken