Just Stop
I can't settle. Time goes.
The words bunch, block, and back up
like ice chunks in a narrow-necked bottle.
When you said, "I am a popular girl!"
I heard "poplar girl". A grove
of trembling slender stems popped into mind.
Dodging the clutch of the pursuing god.
Too much Ovid. Silly.
There really is no time
to just pretend.
Put off mind-play, don't let its motor idle.
Delve into quiet like a heron
into a mullet. Shelve stale projects,
dalliances and procrastinations.
Let the blood well up in the wound,
tell it, all the way to hell and back.
Or lock up your looking,
click the wards and drop the tumblers,
stack the cards and bluff.
It's gone bad. Don't settle.
Give up burning your living
every driven moment. Just stop.
Pull your hair back, roll the dice.
Bionote
Phillips is an Anglo-Welsh immigrant, an Episcopal Priest, a gardener, grower of Bonsai, and painter, and has been writing poetry and prose since she was seven. She grew up in upstate New York and have lived in New Mexico, St. Louis, Rhode island, and now am back in Massachusetts, where she graduated from Wellesley College and Andover Newton Theological School. Her spiritual sense and writing life have always been rooted in landscapes and their infinite changeability. She has published poetry in a fistful of little magazines, and was recently a finalist in the International Lawrence Durrell Foundation's White Mice Poetry Contest. Her forthcoming poetry chapbook is "Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity".
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