got too many brambles hiding under these bushes

Mary

2011-01-16T09:46:00.001-08:00

Mary

Teetering small, pale feet
On the edge of the pool
Fall back fall back fall back
Feel the water reach up
to meet you
Sink you
Thrash you
All on a balmy summer day

Some comfort found in her
Virgin white ceramic face
Grace in stillness of a statue
Centered in an alcove of a cathedral
Surrounded by crimson poinsettias
I look at her face
Mary was a woman,
She must have suffered
Mary was a woman,
She must have felt loneliness
As sharp as desert sand in your eyes

---

She is a small creature body fitted with
A fierce wolf head
Behind bars, behind chains
It's the lock down of night
I can hear her begging, can you ever
ignore it?
If you hear the warden coming, do
you run
or do you free her?
Let me out of this prison
It's not me, it's you
It's not me, it's you
Go now, remorse is so much
better than guilt
You can light as many candles as you want
Prayers evaporate the moment they're spoken
I request action
I require sacrifice

Not Enough Time

2010-11-21T18:02:00.000-08:00

Not Enough Time

It's a dull thudding pain in my brain
and you said you'd be busy
All day
It's all about time, sticky caterpillars emerge from leaves
I need more time
He's an angry man
A small, hard-boiled man - a closed fist man
He taps his watch and forces a heavy sigh
Because there isn't enough time

These are the rules I tell myself
There's a sour taste on my tongue
But every sin is washed away
If you follow the rules:

1.) Don't get mad, it's like a dog's frothy mouth
2.) Don't get hurt, it's like a panicked insect caught in your sweater sleeve
3.) Don't talk too much, no one wants to hear that stack of cymbals dropped on the floor

Well then what?

You asked if I was okay, and I said
Yes
Because good girls remain positive
When questioned
But I fear the leaving, I dread the draining
As you walk away

My throat closes, a knot caught as I swallow
When it's night
And it's raw
And you're not here
I can't say I miss you, the neediness will reek on me
Like sweat
You'll sense it, you'll run

It's not like you have a choice

I keep these moments like a pill
Under my tongue
So it will be absorbed and flow
Through my veins
How my lips felt against your
Unshaven face
How I laid in bed that afternoon
Inhaling your lingering scent
Long after you'd left

Nerve

2010-08-29T19:18:00.000-07:00

Nerve

Emily Dickinson wrote

A poem a day

To quiet the beautiful rage

To manage the hauntings and dreams unfurled

To express thoughts that ping in the brain

Like a dropped penny on a hardwood floor

Beneath her feet

In white dresses, searching through those

Wild nights

Can I hear her now?

Quiet now, my father is coming

Quiet now, the wind clatters the thick panes

As a little girl

Death came a knockin’

Like Jehovah Witnesses on a field day

Choked fists pounding the front door

The bedroom door

The pantry with its boxed secrets and packaged sadness

We weren’t sure you’d be home but we’ll be

Damned

If you don’t pay up every time

Stop

Your message was clear, boy

Needn’t repeat it, boy

We’ll see you around the way

You think after years of scraping fish bellies

I’d actually beg?

Stop

Two girls hop scotch on cracked concrete

A tune spinning from their small, chapped lips

“Lose me once, lose me forever

You weren’t that important

You weren’t that clever”

Once the rain hits, this chalk lexicon washes away

Words were never so temporary

Their bright colors can’t prevent the cleansing

And little girls have to grow up sometime

The Crocodilian Desert

2010-07-02T15:07:00.000-07:00

The Crocodilian Desert

She can’t stand the visage of extermination

Can’t stand it when loss is a tambourine clanging in her

Ear

Can’t stand it when mortality corrodes her

Eyes

Can’t stand it when death follows her

Home

Walking through a crocodilian desert

Bleached armadillo carcass on her left

Like leather shells abandoned on a waterless beach

Trails

Teeth fangs crusted in sand – those gritty incisors

Watch your step

Don’t look at me that way

They can’t hear you, ya know

Back on the urban homestead

The torn white plastic bag dances like a ghost in the street, caught

By the wind

Will it be okay I want it to be okay please be okay

A car swerves to miss the gust filled beast

A hollow moon rises above the trees

You leak tears for those that don’t love you

You cry for your silent, foreign momma

You wipe the slick snot from your nose and you weep

For her

For yourself

You crave self-pity, ooze regret like a toxic glandular slime

It fills your body and rots you from the inside

Out

I got out

I abandoned the crocodilian desert, left the sand spinning

From my heels

Heart striking fast in my chest, my legs pounding

Running through a thousand sunsets I see the forest

I taste the nourishing, warm mist - it’s inches from me now

The mums bloom out of season

2010-05-05T17:11:00.000-07:00

The mums bloom out of season

Let's blame it on the stress
Woven above our heads like spider webs
Let's blame it on the anger
That tip our raw fingers like salt
Let's blame it on love
Exhaled like breath on a winter day

The mums have bloomed out of season

Fits quivered exploded from my ribs like
Cascarones at Easter
Rage stung my tongue I'd swallowed
That hornet - a sour pulsating velvet body, wings
Dampened by saliva
I did not see the light did you?
I'd woken up screaming
Did you?

No

The pool that swelled beneath your head
You kissed the carpet
Left a thousand phone calls unanswered - their rings cut an airless
Room
Voices unheard you knew better than that
You let us all know
Mums will bloom out of season

Silver, slick fish slipped from the net
You couldn't get a grip
Examine your palms to see scales, a bit of fin
Sail away
Dive into the freezing water, waves wash the tears right
Out of your eyes

Like they were never there

Guess my future has always been sewn up
Like stitches of a doll's mouth
I don't say it's better
I say it works

---

Don't dissolve me in the gutter, don't
Let me down
Every muscle breathes you, every time I part
My lips I kiss you
Every hollowed out heart I've held in my hands
Can be repaired
Please repair me (yourself) - find your sewing kit
I need this now

Prayers for Girls

2010-03-23T19:49:00.000-07:00

Prayers for Girls

I remove it like a winter coat during the first thaw
of spring
the ice blankets
laid on the ground this past season
melt to reveal
baby green fields abundant
Next comes the navigation
it crops up like crocuses
it needs your attention now
it's no longer simply a trail
in the deep umber woods

Magnolia

2010-01-23T15:06:00.000-08:00

Magnolia

Soon the magnolia tree

On the corner of Middleham and Turtle Creek

Will bloom fresh velvet cream petals

Leather leaves with fall, curl, brown – sink into

The earth

A biker chick lives there

She can see the magnolia from her

Bedroom window

Old weather worn Wranglers

From a man she’s never met

Hang as curtains

She can see the dew kissed blossoms

Forming slowly before her eyes

Almost as if they’re real

A disconnected stereo speaker

Serves as a nightstand

It vibrates in the darkest hours

When midnight is memory

She sleeps

---

You left me in a boat

Drifting on tides, I can feel the

Sun bleached paint stripped planks under

My fingertips

My eyes reduced to hot sweat squints

A horizon may be near, it may not be close

And

You’ve taken a residence in my mind

And back rent may be due

If I ever make it to shore

To find her plane

Bones, compact mirror, aviator goggles and cap

Driven into the sand where she fell

Caught by wind, taken so high, the continents a mapped

Outline below her

Propelled above deep green seas, swallowed by clouds

Tumbling

From a cockpit to gulp air, flail limbs, the ground

Came up to meet her

I want to find her plane

Unforgotten, I sift through the granules for her wind-buffed bones

You loved me

You loved me

Back rent may be due

Upon my arrival

I’ve pawned those memories

To gas up my bike

Tortoise

2009-10-22T16:01:00.000-07:00

Tortoise

And then came the time
They had to cut her from the house
The bricks and caulking like wet chalk
Layered in every crease of her home
Had failed to release her
What’s a girl to do
Thankfully boys with chainsaws will break door jams
Blast hinges, bust open filmy windows
To reach her beached and sequestered body
Heaving and alone, removed far in a
Dusty rose bedroom that smells of ashes, sweat
And fear

Decades (centuries?) before she had walked along
Sidewalks strewn with elongated tree shadows
Mottled wild flowers reached to her from overgrown lawns
An orange pink sun was sinking behind pulled cotton clouds
Firm in her thighs, steady in her ankles as
She passed boys who smelled of tobacco and
Cherry soda
Girls with jeans that dipped to reveal lower back tattoos
Twirling around curbs on bicycles, wind catching their ebony
Wavy hair
She saw their dark eyes glimmer, she kept walking silent but
Alive

Breathe in, breathe out

I moved, I moved from where you
Knew me
Crawled upon the back of a giant
Tortoise, its elephantine feet lifting moving shifting
Forward I moved I moved
I have moved
From where you knew me

You don’t get a forwarding address

---

I will attend my own Zoroastrian funeral
Paint the nails of my left hand black
Lay upon the smooth shell of the tortoise
I’ll find fame, I’ll find love, I’ll find a death hush quiet
But they will all know me
(In hearts, in my throat, I know that’s not what matters – not what
Truly lives)
I don’t want to miss me

She’ll spread her doughy legs and give birth
On the back of that turtle

Memories can be like needles to the tips of
Fingers
Remembered as too loud, too much, need dripping like
Used car oil
I’m not there
I’m here

And you can’t have my forwarding address

Someone has to lose

2009-09-08T17:05:00.000-07:00

Someone has to lose

Some of us get used to being a
Descendent of failure
A damaged ancestry inked into our bones
Knowing nothing better we
Birth
The same
Wet, squirming in placenta sacs writhe
New sorrows, a womb empty
Since sun produces showers
Swollen clouds obscure views
Strangers keep to themselves in sun bleached, rotting wood cabins
They clutch unloaded guns to their soiled chests
Mutter with ragged teeth about ending the world
Sadness crawls through every mouse hole, slithers
From the fireplace that hasn’t seen
Warmth in years
Glimpses caught between deep green trees
There used to be a trail that lead to a stream…

We get used to losing
We nicked the soles of our feet on rusted nails
Protruding from ancient bridges
Jammed knuckles into slats of ladders
Reaching skies we can’t see
Whatever was enjoyable, easy, loved was erased
The dead stop breathing despite your needs
The storms roll angry despite your contemplation
Of wants
Dreams
Desires
It washes everything away, water recedes and you don’t
Choose to keep memories
They crumple dry petals disintegrate from so
Long ago
No one needs to taste
What could have been different, possibility mocks those
Who remember

There is nothing to fight for here, take down your signs
Silence your bullhorns
Don’t you see she’s let go of what was being
Offered?
Don’t you see someone has to lose?

Dignity

2009-07-21T16:26:00.000-07:00

Dignity

Rule number one:
Always keep your dignity
Do not accelerate through
Yellow lights
You look desperate and cheaply
Made as a patchwork
Skirt from your mother’s scraps
But recall your name and no one owns you
You rummaged through the dusty firewood pile
In the end you chop your
Own logs, heave the axe over your shoulder and lower
With force
And no one owns you

We move as light beams bounce
Off planets
Not always knowing what is to
Be encountered
And it can be like syrup
And it can be like a storm
And you can wade in water up to
Your knees, the cloth of your pants
Saturated, dark and heavy
It can be sweet and it can be
Sad

We pitch our bodies forward and lean
Into the cool air
Because we can
Because there is no other choice
There are footprints behind me because
I can leave impressions on the
Earth (follow me, see where I go now…)

Why do you sit alone as the dark weeps into dawn?
Licking the carpet for what might
Remain after the rats have scattered?
You know better
Insight was the light bulb smashed in the outage
So you shook the flashlight gripped in your sweaty
Fist and prayed for
Illumination again
I won’t be in your story, I want to hear
Singing I want to hear it again
I want to hear it now

Crisp notes leave my mouth and it all
Falls away
I build, I thrill, I hum, I build, I build, I build

(I never said I wouldn’t take your hand)

Distance

2009-06-22T16:04:00.000-07:00

Distance

My eyes have swollen, hardened to
Shrewd garnets
And you’re little boy blue
I kept my distance
Purged it from my blood like toxins
I keep my distance
Leached into the atmosphere, it doesn’t breathe
In me anymore
And I further, I birth a chasm
You can’t reach me, you never really could

Understand
It’s not that I don’t deepen love
In my heart
But you’re not that precious
And I had a cabin to forge
Its taken root you can see it from
Space
I finally take full shape without any of you

I carved my fetish necklace
Carved it of bone, carnelian and topaz
(Hadn’t been able to find the jade)
So little signifies now, I feel it cool calm in my hands
It warms my neck
At night I dance with the feet of a thousand jackals

Oh, I should thank you
You fueled hot iron rage in
Me so my voice was
Finally heard
The megaphone had been cold
To my lips
But I sang, I sang
Can you hear the notes bleed ripe from my throat?
If you ignore the song, you lose everything you’ve
Nursed in your heart

(Not my problem anymore, I see highways ahead)

---

I needed you to miss me but in the end
I fertilized my own yellow roses

New Low

2009-05-20T13:26:00.000-07:00

New Low

It was then she began to swell
Skin on her hips blistered and erupted
As the expansion took over
She couldn’t
Fit through the door, her head
Pressing against the puckered drop ceiling
Friction enough to stop all movement
Flesh-splitting edema she’d
Opened her mouth to explain and
Frogs escaped in hoards to cover the floor

There’s a taste of a new low here,
Licking the tiles of a dirty floor, the gooey
Algae-clogged bottom of ponds
Sinking further than she thought was
Possible, stones providing weight in her pockets
Wrapped in sediment cloaked in rotted roots
Where was her sky now?

This is how we lose friends, sweetie
They slip through our fingers
Like paper dolls and drift into flames
Brown edges detach float upward like dust
None of it was real, and you knew that
Surely you knew that

She gazed down to slowly raise each finger
From her palms and they
Were empty
She’d not been given much, a few pennies
A broken pencil
Some tattered false eyelashes, used pieces of chalk
A faded, torn Halloween mask from years ago

And somehow, as expected, she’d lost it all along the way

---

It’s like I’m walking in a movie
Where events I can’t control
Happen to me
Woven in your soul is important, vital
Work for you to do in this world
I remain the same, please don’t think I
Planned it this way
I’d bled out blue when I thought red was in my veins
My toes stapled to the Earth
When I’d always imagined flight
You told me you didn’t care what others felt
About you
I’m entrenched in the opinions of others, it eats me
Alive, maggots on a corpse

Vigil

2009-05-06T14:31:00.000-07:00

Vigil

Their vigil doesn’t begin
Until noon
Dawn is for a different kind
Of dedication
They gather sleep as they can, carrying
It under their crusted eyelids, settling into
Old bones and stringy muscles
The morning can do what it wants
To them it’s not a delay
To wait until the sun is overhead

Tattered grass patches slope up to concrete roads
Displaced bursting flame wildflowers
Crop up the sun-dried incline
The diesel soot of the highway works its way
Into their clothes and hair, into
Their memories

Someone stuck a small American flag
In the parched ground
A few days ago, they sit in a
Circle around it, rest a forehead
In a greasy hand
Rub chapped fingers across dry lips in thought

..of the cars that race to destinations
They can only imagine
They know they aren’t there, aren’t them
Aren’t one of those people
The people who drive, work, jabber on cell phones
As they worry about the sea of red break lights
Collecting on the interstate at rush hour

The vigil continues
Every day I’m here to take another
Breath
Heading to another exit, unable to read
All the signs
Pressing my foot to the pedal often too early, often
Too late
No matter where I head, I always return again
Like Monarch butterflies to the forests of Mexico
Genetic coding awakens my homecoming

They remain
With their flag
The speeding cars nothing more than a
Mild drone barely touching
Our internal worlds

You don't live here anymore

2009-04-19T19:10:00.000-07:00

You don’t live here anymore

The fish with their lacy fins
Dart from aquarium wall reflection to reflection
Back again
The wind catches the bottom of the hanging
Spider plant basket on the balcony
Threatening to topple all and what sinks like left over
Fish food in my brain
Is that you don’t
Live here anymore

The days stretch longer, like tired limbs
Waking from slumber
Minutes become hours since
You don’t talk to me anymore

Tall, you seemed to brush the clouds
Above you but
Never recognize their simple beauty
Knowledge leads only to pain
You said
I held
Your fingers in my small hands
And wished it weren’t darkness
Nestled between your ribs

Guinness and cigarettes
Sparsely furnished apartments
Porches dusted in night and ashes
A million kisses in the dark
Tears the next day

---

The trees softly gestured in the breeze above me
I remembered life before, hollow, burned
Scattered and infected
But
Beneath the April blue sky, the afternoon air in my
Marrow, calm now
Listening to melodies, laughter and chatting
Around me bloom like bluebonnets
A small girl with blonde pigtails
Lifted her kite above her head
I saw now I could breath
Again

---

You slipped away from my field
Of vision
A failed experiment in the lab
You’ll dose me with silence
I’m never really angry
You simply don’t
Live here anymore

Thank you
Everyone inside me was
Accounted for with you
I’ll share your joy
When you’re born -
Misery will lift like
A shell that never belonged to you
I’ll never stop wishing
I could see your exquisite eyes
One more time

No you don't

2009-04-07T15:21:00.000-07:00

No you don’t

You needn’t pretend to be enamored
To the
Gills with my long dusk orange hair
You forgot its touch as soon as it
Left your dirty fingers
You don’t think
Of me minutes before falling asleep
Your head about to connect to the pillow
Littered with animal hair and old teeth
You’ve forgotten me
I’m no better than that porous memory you once had
Walking along a pebbled trail
And then it left through your ears, hummed into
The turning leaves of the canopy you
Walked beneath - it was
Gone
I am gone, no shadow, no imprint, I didn’t
Even make it to a ghost, I never saturated the
Walls like a haunting
You wanted me to go, I obliged, it’s
An unfinished poem in my heart (but it was the only
Polite thing for me to do)
For you it’s an appreciated close
Of the door
(shut her out! I said…Don’t make me ask again!)
Please
You don’t
You weren’t
Patient, you smelled rotting petals amongst
The folds of my dress and under
Moon
Moons
You ran so fast I never heard your footfalls, your
Escape from my home was softer than a whisper
And more violent than a slashed throat

Don’t pretend you ever held
Love in the bottom of your
Lungs as you sang to me, don’t
Playact, mime out a character of
The romantic
The lover
The smitten one
It’s no longer convincing…

If you talk, your words shatter
Like frozen droplets on a cement
Floor
That’s why the baby doll cries
As soon as you shut the closet door
That’s why I waited in the damp cave
For days
Hoping to hear your echo

If you’re not missed, you never existed, your being
Is dependent on the kindness of another’s mind

Density

2009-03-30T16:19:00.000-07:00

Density

She knew she was the sole cause
And brevity ached in her like low
Chords strummed in empty
Churches
Night
Oversees gardens and fields of flowers
Laid in unsteady rows before her
If one was precious
Can more hold meaning in the droplets
That hang on the tips of leaves
If one was willing to taste her lips
Can more Wisteria grow purple and bold around
Shadow-encased corners
If one loved her
Could it be that others
Will view her value and cradle it
Near as a guardian

Late afternoons she has
Hair woven by insects
And is
Tucked neatly in a grave

I tilted my head to hear
The word of Jesus, the whisper balanced
On the tongue of Buddha
Cupping a hand to the side of my head
I even swept away my hair so not to
Obscure any sound
I waited for the message, I held
My breath for the meaning delivered
In Shiva’s tender hands but it came…

…on the breeze
Instead and
Life wasn’t less important
When the why was bleached out and hung
Under the sun to evaporate
Meanings aren’t fertilizer
It rains and it dries, festers and heals over
This repeats
It’s still swollen with the most acute sense of
Love, there is reason
To inhale, exhale, look ahead

Mexican Cemeteries

2009-03-24T14:30:00.000-07:00

Mexican Cemeteries

Placing my hands gingerly
Against the cool metal of the
Chain link fence
I stand just on the edge of DeMaria Cemetery
My breath held almost in waiting
A clear calmness wraps my shoulders

Beyond a gate built by weathered hands
Decades ago
Fly banners challenging the unchanging
Countenance of death
Sun faded plastic flowers of a Robin’s egg
Blue
Red, white and purple wreaths eternal in their circles
Are burrowed boldly into earth cradles for those
Not seen, not forgotten
A molded cross props up a raven haired Mary, without end
She weeps, stoically her head tilted down
Gazing upon still, silent ground
She says that life has always been
The most consistent series of losses that sometimes
Free
Haunt
The human heart
A weather beaten American flag moves quietly in
The wind, hanging without apology from a tree branch
Overlooking all those who are without a voice but
Create continuous memories in the living

Often it’s unripe fruit
Eagerly awaiting a day of
Full fleshiness and juices
That glisten just below the
Surface
No one had asked her if she had wanted
Them to leave
Though trails marked lines leading away
From her
Taking two steps into meaning, horizon
Was on the tip of her tongue

She said (daughter)

2009-03-04T17:02:00.000-08:00

She said (daughter)

She said
They sure did a wretched number on us
And I think of a metal rake
Scraping down my back
Years of throwing stones on rooftops
Dear mother
Dear father
Aim your dart, run your finger along the feather tipped
Edge
Miss every single
Time, was it
Laughter or crying that was so very
Faint
Does it matter now?

I swung eagerly from the drooping
Oak tree branch, my small feet leaving the
Ground
Catching air, joy was swollen in my chest
And didn’t the lemon forsythia bloom every spring?
Get a running start, grab hold…there you go

Who can stop you when all you see is sky?

Searching my sometimes calloused brain
I can’t disagree with her
Looking through the slats
The top of the staircase
I’d always felt so sorry for you, it simply broke
My heart
They lie deep in fields I never visit
Anymore

I said a thousand goodbyes in my head to you
Because of you
I know how love blossoms, grows but
Thankfully
Never truly changes

Now ripens a time of sisterly love
And mop headed children who giggle
And run in their overalls
I see the grip bruises refuse to fade
And I taste the
Pain like vinegar
But it’s slipped into every corner of my
Being
So I love what I can’t remove
It’s born of me
Like a daughter

Toads

2009-02-06T15:48:00.000-08:00

Toads

Leaves littered on the sidewalk
Though they’d been abandoned to rot – I’d
Lead them there after a journey
They refused to dissolve. They formed into a toad,
Scaly skin covered muscles leaping away, no water
Where there is hurt, (deserts shrink wrap this pain)
No words no words no words I hadn’t been
Prepared for the
Violent silence that followed
Distracted, I had been reliving you
Running your tongue along my teeth
The sweetest touches had finally reached me

As I felt your hands sink in my back pockets
I tried not to fall back in time

---

I scratched out
So many letters in my head, I wrote in fevers but never
Sent a thing
So verbal compulsions dribbling flowing from my mouth was
Necessary, it was an
Absolute like ice in blinding winter
It had been absent
You ignored my eyes changing from green to blue, you tasted
So salty brutal, you smelled of sorrow drowned in anger
I grabbed greedily (desperate) with my nails, (don’t tell me to let go) –
I hadn’t meant harm
I’m so sorry, I wanted to
Apologize

You won’t hear me now
It’s over
You said you didn’t think you’d mind, you could
Tolerate (me)
Using tweezers to lift every stitch in my wounds, I stifled
Screams and chose sobs instead

(How long ago did you die, little brother?)

---

Screens moved before my eyes
Light and sound bled and seeped around me
But it never made contact
Like living in a TV
My palms pressed against the glass
Lips moving, why can’t they hear me?
When I had dared to pray
That a God god (who?) would deliver
You to me, (could I be
Finally deserving, had yet to be
Good enough)
It had been a complicated simplicity for you
To rest in my arms
Though usually foreign on my tongue, I had
Used prayers to keep you, I’d asked so nicely

Like a stray
Found far from home
Can I keep him? Please…

Torn away pain fills
In all my gaps now
Numbness falls like night, alone
In it hollowed my gut intentions
(Remember when you had hope?)
Are those whispers inside drums
Do they get my meaning, will he
Ever know
I loved him

I wanted to apologize because I miss you even as terror
Glows in the corner of my room

Mean well

2009-01-20T07:07:00.000-08:00

Mean well

They all mean well
Even though they aren’t here
We mean well, what’s hidden in the mouths
Of girls
Hey girl
We meant well, you never begged
Or we never heard
Riding your rusted bicycle up the wet paved road
To the chapel
They’d removed the cross, and the potential to
Offend
Whether blonde or ebony, they’d tossed their silken hair
And strolled away to the other side of campus
Dreams tucked in the back corners of youth, it’s
All filled now with bellies rounded by
Pregnancy
And weddings of white satin and gold rings
It’s not so well hidden, and you
Watch the flickering TV in the evenings
And didn’t you know girl
They always meant well
We meant well
We’re not there, and emptiness between your
Ribs bloats until a crack is endured
Don’t be angry girl, bitter isn’t in this
Season
Because don’t you know, they
All meant well

Preemptive (don't leave me)

2009-01-07T14:52:00.000-08:00

Preemptive (don’t leave me)

Bloat up fish, rancid
Fluid pools in my kidneys
Pushing my rotted scales out like
Flags of failure
I attempt to curve my mouth around
The flake food, gills collapse
Eyes still – sinking down to rest my belly
On gravel

(Where’s the hook? Might take pain only
because it’s so
clear, defined)

Swollen by hate, they scream through the lines, she
Can’t understand and
Waits (waits?) for his call
Longing to savor every word like
Hard candy
Later, she’ll talk to him in the
Fog of her dreams
As the metal gray of dawn ascends
Silent begging pushes against her lips
(Stay behind my teeth, do not ever let him
know)

Cards to chest

I talk to you in my dreams
You didn’t know this could
Have all been
Preemptive
Had I decided then…

The gag slipped between my lips
Snaked back where teeth meet teeth
Wasn’t sure at first, I was caught up in the
Eyes
The cloth edge cuts like wire, corners
Bleed drops warm iron taste it on my
Tongue

Count down

I have sorted through my goodbyes
Taken stock of every face you’ve showed me
It sits and the fuse is lit
Thumping hard against my ribs, my heart
Keeps me awake
I hear the carwash next door and wonder
When I’ll be clean
Of this want
When will you say all you mean?

(If you only could know how
much this all matters, how precious needed lovely
every moment is)

I replay the tapes of when I learned you
Were real
The joy is full and beautiful,
The music rich

Butterflies

2008-12-21T06:41:00.000-08:00

Butterflies

As butterflies can nest
In the still limbs of trees
Their best imitation of
Brown soft silent leaves
There can be an open dawn
Bold quivers in every vein of wing
As moving out (awakening)
Isn’t nearly as impossible as conceived
In the tiny insect brain

Forgiveness can provide flight
As darkest anxieties rattle in the belly
Old pennies in a mason jar
Rock caught in your shoe

Lifting delicate wing it tints with pigment
Rising to the surface because it’s
Been about risk for
Far too long

I can’t read your level of patience or
Know
How your heart will pound with your
Dislike or indifference for me
(A Morse code I can’t
Hear)
But I have milk to drink
I have trails of small pebbles to place
Beneath my feet
Suns to lie beneath, absorbing
And yes, it’s all boiled within my
Damaged (healing) brain
But it’s been worth it, because of you
But you must see
It’s been lying in wait for longer than I (you)
Could imagine

Meanings unhinge connections

2008-11-27T11:41:00.000-08:00

Meanings unhinge connections

Night, your head does a bob
And weave
Through clouds shading over the
Moon
Grasping does no good, you
Come and go
Regardless of paper-thin commands that leave my lips
You dodge often in shadow of my
Desperate clutch, you create your release
Whispering desires (it’s always too soft
For you to hear, no – you ignore what you know)
Sweetness
I wake up, slight shame tinting my mind
Of what I dreamt of you

If I could meet iris to iris, hold what isn’t mine it could
Tolerate
Turning just in time to see you skipping away
A smooth, flat stone across water
(Meet me there, won’t you?)

---

The parasite aloneness
That drained your body as a child
Can’t be on my plate now
(It’s not mine)
I wake up in dawn and wipe
Clean the fair skin stretched across my chest,
Put on my
Patch (it together) and walk out firm
So I can’t eat what you gave me
And there can only be silence
From me now (get used to mute, or forget it all)
(Fade back to where you began) There
Is no aching for you anymore

You cry (bleed) for your babies
Of your flesh, your production (your most complete love)
And what ties you to a reality
That often escapes your chapped fingertips
My elastic heart captures that there is beauty woven
Into every muscle, each organ but
Apologies flock from my ears eyes nose mouth
I was loved as something precious but what
You clamped upon wasn’t me, and
(Forgive me) I didn’t wake from an electrowarped coma
To be someone’s crystal pure window dressing
Gloss
Finish
There are often stings of regret, it nips at my throat
And holding you was always balm
I leave it anyway

It leaves me anyway

Is he in a soulsleep? Or does that offer
Too much credit
Days of empty mailboxes
Calls deadened by the other side, it’s
Rote
I give it little thought though my frame
Grows weaker, compromised as
Always
By the leaving (your super talent)

I wish I still missed you

---

Discussing puzzle pieces
Doesn’t mean the cardboard outlines fit
And hidden behind curtains is
What I mean to any all (some?)
Where I stand, no yard stick
Can’t place it, can’t thumbprint my mark
In the porous lives of them
Do they hear me
Do I create a visual in their soul
Was anything of me resonating, carving into
Their hearts

Sorry, I’ve got to go

Justified

2008-11-10T17:59:00.000-08:00

Justified

I know this warning (licked it with my tongue, oh
How it had tasted on the tip)
It’s rung through a static ping pop omnipresence
For longer than my eyes will adjust to
Do not attempt with so much frayed wire
Detach as safety demands (alert stung quills piercing
Again
Again)
Do not move forward less there only be threadbare sheets,
Tattered dresses, dog-eared books
Silence layered on silence it will
Consume you

A sweaty fist gripped the lever
Pulled down - now
Pitch, soot
(lanterns need not apply)
Circuits in retrograde, bleeding blackness
As they retreat

Placing feet on that suspension bridge, crossing from
Sandy shore to pink horizon isn’t worth
The potential freefall through merciless
Openings in the slats to
A watery grave below
Hurt is so vile in this way
Erasing decision, stealing choice
(A hand over your mouth)

(negativity killed this cat)

---

Surely you must know by now
(your brain was always copious in
your being, envision it becoming gelatinous
in my fingers – don’t think that)
How hatred fills every pore (replacing
Calcium) within my bones
And weakness doesn’t prevent my seething
Venom for you and pretty girls don’t wish
Death
On others
And nice girls don’t uppercut to chins of
Boys that snake-fang heart ventricles, leave
Blood and disappear for better
Opportunities

Having neither, I spite (spit) freely
Tangle every curl of your hair around
My knuckle ‘til it breaks, snaps but
You’re not released yet

You made me this way
He didn’t love me, regretted the day
I was pulled by forceps from mom’s
Belly and caught my first breath
You mimic his cruelty, I lick the
Mirror to see
If it’s real

Her time in the web had been
Marked with fragility
Held in a spun cradle but
The spiders had emerged from all
Sides
Like screams echoing in a forest

---

I don’t have to be sorry
I’m justified

I can

2008-10-28T17:55:00.000-07:00

I can

Simply couldn’t be
Your life: bell shaped flowers, soft
Hanging on an October bush, so silent
In the fall breeze, voiceless flutes
A hint of cool
Mud-colored sparrow
Squatting where branch meets trunk
Spindly legs, chirping
To no one

Couldn’t be

(Void of an audience, couldn’t be)

Perhaps once a weakened body
Slack, held up in a mother’s arms but
Some refused to plan your
Funeral (no matter how beautiful the
Music might be)
And insulin pumps and a GED later
A song formed, bristled up and
It bloomed

I can

Ghosts flee, you present as opaque
Bold
Flesh bone mind heart
To lift the chords, raise the recital
Give life to now full words

Anger has left here, sadness has no roots
Wheat braids
Sway to melodies
We crave to spread wings wondrous
Even if without a witness
To show the notches reached,
Scars of where
We have been
And how far we’ve come

Can you hear?
Laughing is easy now

Madonna/Whore

2008-10-14T17:46:00.000-07:00

Madonna/Whore

Go on ahead boy, drench me in ink
Until every cell is congealed
With the saturated pigment
Stain my body like night
(somehow the lucidity of an evening sky is lost)
Paint me what you dislike, what is bitter on the tongue
I’ll roll in it like the pink fleshed sow you whisper
To your buddies about (teats engorged but I never
Give birth)

I’ll run (devil with thumb-tacked wings) until
Your laughter drones a tone numbing out leaving my ears
But it rolls back in, a tumbleweed across soil drained of
All nutrients
(I’ll show you rolling I form Ouroboros, I said watch me)

I’ll scrape the glaze from your eyes layer by layer

I’ll be your Madonna/Whore

Maybe I’ll turn Betty Broadbent
Show every mark, every badge pricked into my
Skin – hundreds of hours of carving
To flash my colors to all
(Notice my face bare, untouched)
Though Billy Tipton wore
Trousers every day until he died
To tuck the truth away
Shame disgust unable to categorize
Cloaked just below the surface
Is always an option
It never was, it is now – what I make it
What I make it, I only inch forward by action
Every night he swayed out that jazz in clubs
Joplin, Corpus Christi, Kansas City
And not even his wife with the plump, crimson lips
Knew

---

Your words about who I am fall from your
Mendacious lips
Like chipped, dull beads
Produce a clattering as they hit the floor
You ask me to gather them into my apron held
Up like a woven basket in my diminutive fists
You keep them, you wrote the check
They live (squirm) inside you
My name was never really there
Because you never knew it

Clean

2008-10-01T11:25:00.000-07:00

Clean

Springy afro curls leaping
Up into the sun (reaching)
Denim bell bottoms running
Blue woven against the sandy sidewalk
Do you know, girl – do you know?
I forgot to clean
I’m clutched in the dirty velour of this
Car seat strapped in traveling
Bald tires treading along the sun-kissed road
I forgot to clean
I said
I’ve forgotten how to clean (can’t organize order frame
I’m silenced secrets folded into
The batter of my head)
My fish cloaked in scales wonder
Where the morsels of pre-formed granule food
Are coming from
(It’s like I’m not even here)
And you run, spry, sweaty, eyes focused on
The belching bumper of the street bus you
Run
Run
To catch your ride

You know I’ve become part of a play
No one has seen and
It’s hushed reeds sway so softly in the early Fall breeze
When did I become totem pole
Stork empty of all
Weaving wreaths no one will hang on
Doors
There was an opening, I passed
There was a gateway, I entered
No one was a witness or
If they did
They didn’t care

And now I’m wandering the apartment
Unable to clean, unknown where food will
Sprout from
Wearing a mask no one can
Interpret
Whispering yelling languages of words
Falling
Falling
On deaf ears, swaying back into the corners
It’s not that they’re mean
It’s that they can’t see feel taste
The droplets forming on me now…

Instant potatoes

2008-08-27T15:00:00.000-07:00

Instant potatoes

Flakes envelope as if trapped in a snow globe terror
(Wrangled among the sweat drenched sheets, morning
Brings choking eerie convulsive silence)

Consumed

You can’t just add water here
Pour globules until the shiny, white dust
Absorbs all ballooning (vacant of color)
Overflowing
The pot, spilling to the orange glow burner
(Vessels completely full can be so useless)
Doesn’t work that way
Don’t you know real women
Grow solidly from the ground?
(In her mind she had always been a golden yam with
sturdy flesh; pink searching eyes blossomed
to grow more and more
and more)

---

One morning they came and
Threw her into a wheelchair
But she couldn’t even manage that right
Busted wheels busted in her head confusion
Slashed tires thrashed throats and
Dented mangled metal she can’t propel
In this cradle for her disability

Waking up with the vinyl seat of
The chair
Stuck to her pale oddly heated flesh she
Spilled to the floor and crawling
Waves of panic came through her
Vocal cords
Spasms the speed of light constricted
Her throat there was a swelling and every
Nerve woven into her face was afire
She felt her knees press into
The bathroom floor
Choking, gagging she could only
Curl her fingers around the rim of the white toilet
Steady shaking exhaustion rolling up her
Spine
Distinct simultaneous needs to cave in and
Survive
Subtle as a pin prick, she holds on knowing each
Gag her mouth produces robs more and more

She knows there’s been a short circuit
A spongy ball of flesh at the base
Of her primal brain has
Whipped up in sparks
Stupid to wait it out
Toward rebirth?

Primer

2008-08-17T17:51:00.000-07:00

Primer

Mountains where steam rises from dense clusters
Of green, pungent foliage
Are places of dreams
They like to live between
Where you’re asleep and when you’re awake
(Shhhhh! They feel safer there)

She was going to buy
A can of white primer from the stale, reed-like man at
The hardware store that had no windows
That fresh primer was going to be hers
Like melted vanilla ice cream
She would cradle it in her palms and paintbrush in hand would….
(What can cover all?)
She would… I said she would

There was going to be an embryonic spirit, germinal
In her womb of a
Beauty that ached like split wounds but warmed in healing

Dreams in death throes, shrouded so I can not see – the screaming
There was going to be a house but I’m paralyzed in the field
On all fours and can’t grasp my way to the door
It’s an extinction that makes dinosaurs look lucky

Hold up (I know this is hard)

You think a necropolis has been constructed
In my gut, a temple to deterioration, a tomb fabricated
By all the slaps to my face but inside it’s tender,
Perhaps injured but careful and so very
Alive
(Could you ever fathom your wrongness? It’s toxic ivy that severs bricks
you’re lost in the mundane of placating me Problem is I’m no
child, I never have been – my eyes have been covered
in the dust of
centuries but I’ve never been blind)

If there ever was black ice encrusted around my liver
It was warmed and liquefied
Has run into gutters, has leaked into pavement and
Evaporated by heat and now
Even you couldn’t see vapors

(It’s so gone, buddy)

---

A-boy, you lead me to the ECT and now I’ll be lit up like Christmas
As the current expands my veins channels vessels
As light inhabits my brain and alters deforms the waves
Walls the palest shade of pink torn down do a flip, do a flip
(You won’t get much on the investment)
You lead me to the graves of every girl before me but I didn’t trip
Trip trip, I didn’t trip

At night I can see the knives impaled into my bedroom wall
They form the shape of a man
There is no glint because there is no light within dark
The fear is
Somehow soft but ever-present
(No one knows I pushed the steel into the drywall myself)

---

if you don’t love yourself vomit no one will vomit love you vomit and did you ever
think of working on that, little one, ever consider working a little harder?

I’ve had hammers and nails strapped to my hips
Since I was 4 years old
You tried to dump me into your Horizon of Aten but I won’t go
You go

There are dreams that die like insects without known cause
To be swept into a
Tissue and entombed in a trash can and I never said
It was all worth saving
But you don’t call the shots

Things lost, things forgotten (rats in the trees)

2008-08-09T17:40:00.000-07:00

Things lost, things forgotten (rats in the trees)

Are we now the lost
?
Did we somehow
Slip into knots
Tumble into webs

Dead spiders curled up behind
Tapestries
We faithfully clean them out in the morning sun
As more arachnids death-march in, finding tombs in fabric
(again again again…)

The rats are nesting in the trees
Their dull mange fur shielded from the
Light
By rotted rooftops of vacant homes (oh
The smart somehow know when to leave…)
And now
You tell me…

Little girl (hussy) you tell me

Is that balloon full enough
In your gut?
Have you forced every morsel
Into your bowels
And has it been sufficient
Effective
To saturate your body until you’re
Full to the throat
(How do you expect to speak now?)
Is it enough to undo
The

Way the hardwood felt beneath your
Small, meager feet when you screamed and they
Shut the door
And whipped your buttocks
Until the bruise flowered flushed indigo
Only discovered at bath time the next morning

Saline sweat trickles then pours down
Your back
Collects at your temples
Flagellant, you’ll make it right
And deliver the gift of all you deserve

The shower clears swiftly the sweat that’s
Already begun to evaporate from your skin

But the rats nest in the trees dear,
Only a matter of time before the swollen
Fruit
Begins to rot
(Don’t act like you wouldn’t eat it anyway)

"I miss you"

2008-08-01T18:58:00.000-07:00

“I miss you”

Curt blips flit across the screen, a few terse clicks
Static pops through – your usual style
So
I’ll never know
Whether you missed what crouched loving scared beautiful
Precious
Behind my eyes
Or just the wetness between my legs – slicked pavement after rain
(If you noticed potholes sinkholes crags jagged by past storms
you didn’t say a word)

Such a nice boy

I hate to say
Sweet boy
Straddled above me a drop of sweat my eyes could
Not discern in the darkness dripped onto my
Already damp flesh
And it wasn’t a baptism
Sweet boy
It wasn’t a Christening
It never was – you above me sans halo sans oil
To anoint
It never was

(Ya think a gal like me outta be saved?)

You never got lost in the magma marinade blackness of my
Fully dilated pupils
But I did (it was a thousand moonless nights) and now
There’s a passenger missing from your car
And you wouldn’t let me meet her anyway
My voice never could rise above the music you played, bobbing
Your head
Lost inside, buried inside – inches from you I was
Alone

Some things are to be kept separate – more buzzing over the line
Ticks snips into my ears I can’t hear a thing I said I can’t hear

(Oh if you only knew how I had desired to kiss every word)

---

Granddad, did you see what they did?
Suction cups disks of rubber adhered like tentacles
And my skin plucked puckered up but before
The welts had time to bloom
It ebbed out of my pores, it was drained
Everything that was whole
Everything that was
Me
Did you see what they did, granddad?
It was leeched from me and now in their minds
Need they believe I have nothing left?
Raped of my juices it's gone but they needn't
Believe I have nothing left

---

How where (why) do you bleed into
The souls of others?
And is the transition always of sting?
Who removed the irises from the eyes
Of Roman statues their lids open
Sans colored lenses
How could they possibly have seen?

Why was I so blind?

This isn’t about your goodness whole as a pie
(You’ve got a pass)
You simply couldn’t weave me into
The scraps shreds strings your life
Has become
In flux a badge
Transition your personal planet in orbit

“I missed you”
We leave it behind an unwanted child, something
Born bruised torn there are tunnels I’m missing
I’m missing
I’m not there

But don’t you ever tell me who I am

Banners

2008-07-13T10:28:00.000-07:00

Banners

She’s got a lot of flags
She’s never been to Tibet
But banners run from pockets of a
Patchwork quilt skirt cinched to her waist
Flowing woven they sweep into her hair
Flood the ground where her feet are anchored
Yes, there are so many banners
Here
Their expanse, their extension - they nearly graze the tenuous sky

Each morning she awakes with desperation
Rattling her bones and an inky fear in her
Marrow

Still, the banners come like trained soldiers
Stand full attention at the foot of her bed
We’re here whether you like it or not
Her mouth still crusted with all that collects during sleep
She doesn’t greet them, can’t get that far but trust me
They are never ignored

---

A thousand rejections scrappy rodents that bite at her hem
She kicks them away with her sandal, a solid thud to the side
Of that slight and pointed skull, her heel could smash it
To bits
If only their onset and retreats weren’t so fast and
Unpredictable

There is a puppet show she knows she can’t be
A part of any longer
The wax and cloth figures may rot on their strings, perhaps burn in effigy
She’ll be long gone
She won’t smell the smoke, won’t see a fading nor explosion
(Did she ever know who held the lines?)

Just be done

United I stand, divided I fall

2008-07-06T10:34:00.000-07:00

United I stand, divided I fall

It wasn’t like in the movies
The temperature of the air around her did not
Drop (the chill in her bones more internal)

In the doorway
The first to meet her gray eyes was an
Asian soldier (a little battle worn)

Creased face mouth clamped down
Body clenched fist hand cocky on hip
Helmet slightly askew (a quivering she detected in his muscles?)
Sallow skin a canvas written on and then erased too many times
How odd suggested her mind’s voice
I should notice his deep irises first
Thin red veins threaded through the whites of his eyes
As if by a seasoned seamstress

If I had only known her tongue curled to produce
Her wrecked sadness colorless confusion but the words
Failed to leave her small, plump mouth
But his eyes never left her gaze
The draining from his body was all his own
Without words there are no warnings (sometimes)
She reaches softly toward his ebony hair
Knowing it’s too late for that now

I love you, know I love you fleshy pink begonia blossoms
Fall to decay on my concrete balcony I love you

He told her that a cactus can grown beneath the pines

Beside him was a torso broad
Lifting gaze, the tall Nordic
White hair combed back with VO5
A sheen like that satin wedding dress from 1936
A face of jowls, progression and a secret pocket
He kept words in – there are a finite amount
Best not to use them all now
So all is communicated sufficiently in the end?

Yes

He saw her drive South in a car that would soon rust to fail her
But was proud and always had been
(Balm to her wounds)

---

I didn’t forget you
I didn’t forget you
The stout German whispered next (she didn't really see him, didn't
Need to
It was what he said...)
You didn’t need to wear the short skirt
The last time you picked up scripts from the pharmacy tech
His sandy hair disheveled, his clothes concealed
By that thin white lab coat nearly thread-bear
And a plastic name tag
Pinned to his breast
He counts Easter egg colored pills nimbly and fills your
Orange bottles then tops them with white caps
But whether he imagines his fingers in the bend of
Your hair
Is another matter (important? Not really)
Stop apologizing
A letter written 16 years ago pecked at your inner organs
Like a starved Blue Jay (don’t take on it’s color, dear)
And he didn’t even recall the words leached from
A place of
Anger hatred shame something approaching love
Take his heart out of the backpack you wear on the front of your chest
It’s oozing now and it’s not yours
It’s not mine

Messy – rid yourself of it, you’ve got your own juices they
Charge in your veins
Don’t you recall what I told you in the living room?
I know you saw an opaqueness in his fair skin
And it scared you but he must scrape, take razor, take shards
Of glass
Scrape it clean it’s his it’s his it’s his to make transparent

But I’ll never know

You don’t have to know

---

The Asian soldier, the tall Nordic and the stout German
A thick volume clasped beneath each of their arms
Descended from her house into thicket, into forest
A slight ringing in the air, hint jingling was there a mist in
Her eyes
Or were clouds parting for the face of the sun?

Brittle leaves and grackles

2008-06-14T19:26:00.000-07:00

Brittle leaves and grackles

In a morning more bleached than light
She descends the stairs
Of her house made of
Balsa wood, rusted shredded wires
And cotton balls near disintegration
She waits for him
(it all hung by a thread but only half her mind knew this – fully
she waited
for him)

Her body a frying pan to catch his oil

Is it duty or an orange sunk in her chest? (Where do you think this is going…)
(Where do tender white blossoms come from little girl?)

It saddens her that it’s a draining of all things organic and
Carbon-based

Drab curtains of brittle brown leaves
In a space of ever-cooling quavering dyed with absence
She waits for a wool coat to walk through the door
Linens are so bitter sour
In these trembling walls quaking with every breath
Stained rags on a line
She waits for him

He said
There can be truth in advertising
Needed to get his shield
(She already had her chain-mail on waiting for the
phone to ring, had dull dented armor encasing all
before picking up that line)
But truth is elusive a stealthy beast that bounds into
The thickest forest, you’ll never catch a glimpse

I said you’ll never even catch a glimpse girl

Jet grackles have now gathered
In the space between here and the
Do-it-yourself car wash
They form opaque density in the corner of her eye
She still sees them (so many now…)

She cries salt
She cries sugar

---

Things, events, people – an expression glimmering in the eyes
It all seems to happen around her
Not to her, (certainly not with her)
She’s not been entered into this system
She escapes the movement; she’s gone to base camp
Retreat and yet…

Her bones ache to be useful
(Put me to the test)
Throw me out, I’ll catch up – I’ll burn that house
Down
To the ground
(Surely you’ve guessed I’ve planned my escape for years?)

Step one: absorb it like the energy it is
Step two: know you were never a victim

You were never just destined for dirt

Tiger lost in the woods (won't you come out?)

2008-06-09T19:07:00.000-07:00

Tiger lost in the woods (won’t you come out?)

She prepares her full, malleable lips with a healthy dose
Of Cherry Chap-stick
And begins to inhale the breath she’ll
Need to speak
Caught in a place of ladders that lead to stairs
Where one could be expected to climb up a slide
Silence catches a snared tightening around her ankle
And there’s a deadly pause

You’ve done this before, it’s almost rote
Spread your two fingers into a V and
Drag them up your throat
But they’ve heard it all before, check a new topic

(No!) – it’s not exhausted yet

Oh, how I wish you knew my name
I’d bless you
Could you ever know my name?

He was in a place of hard wood and books
Archived volumes lining walls crafted of shelves
But she couldn’t see the titles
Burnt like a brand on each spine (she tried to stand up straight)
But how could she see
Her little eyes, they shrunk in the sockets
Fell like raisins on the floor

If there is such an event as rebirth, let it begin with me
If I can leave the maze behind, make it dust as I walk away
Don’t you know my mother?
Can you see her pressing through the flesh of my face?

A rosebush in a corn field is considered a weed
(Some things just never change)

But that’s not all meant for him, this snakes back
Like plumbing through old, rambling houses
No, it’s not about him – not all the time

---

She toggles between
Placing fluttering kisses on the bridge of his nose
And deftly excreting toxin from amphibian glands
To tip the arrow that will
Pierce his liver

Didn’t someone tell you
This was like writing on water?

I said some things don’t change
She foolishly grabs at the back of his shirt
Unable to grip, he slips through the doorway
And soon it’s as if he wasn’t ever there

---

Carry your basket, no matter how heavy
Or poorly woven
Scan your eyes over the stretch of fields that caress into
Mountains
Dip into ravines
You were born with a birthmark that looks like a map
This is a multiple choice test where no answer
Can be an error

I’m sorry, I can’t bleed any more ink for you

A little matter of balance

2008-05-26T16:48:00.000-07:00

A little matter of balance

Little drooly crazed sweat-brow girl
Once upon a time
Rejection appeared like bizarro Zoro
Carved flesh already burnt twice, thrice a fourth
Time
(Good measure, right?)
Blood diluted cloudy pus weeping through her pale blouse
Crusted over
(You think I don’t feel it adhere toxic to my peach flesh?)

Her pupils narrowed to pin pricks
Looked him squarely in the face and
Howled
“You don’t deserve good things”

It’s a matter of balance
If my shopping cart’s empty,
You too must starve
(Did no one explain how this works?)

You were a stray dog who caught wind of
My mental disease on the air
A fetid stench you turned ran bounded
Through woods without leaves

There would be no trial
The jury was out to lunch I heard
The judge was gone fishin’
With no exoneration there can be no chance
I had rolled the dice, you crushed them in your
Fist like stale crackers

Later I had doctor’s excuses and a pardon foil
Sealed by governor let’s-try-this-again
I’d lost your address and besides, wasn’t your mailbox
Rusted shut?

Now you find one to kiss on the shoulder
And expect me to paint a smile on my face
(I’m sure either oil or acrylic would do, too bad I gave up
that kind of art years ago)

Oh, I’ll find you in ashes
But you won’t rise again

Can’t you see whose turn it is, silly boy?

Is this thing on?

2008-05-11T11:44:00.000-07:00

Is this thing on?

The only evidence she’s
Said anything at all
Is a frosty nebulous loose form
That hangs in the air just beyond
Her lips

She’s got embers the color of blood oranges
In her vocal cords
Red irons spark in her mind, land on her tongue
But she’s found…

Sometimes the inside of his ears
Are caked chocolate wax peanut butter
Doesn’t matter what his mother fed him as a child
He won’t claw it away

What about the ones
That fell into the dirt
Before she could catch them?
(She insists to this day that her
Doughy arms had been strong enough
To hold them)
What about the one that fails to send
Her cards
Though he knows her address?
(It may have been scribbled scrawled
on a coffee stained napkin
but he’s got it and he knows he does)

He knows he does

---

Yeah, sure he’ll guide her
By her honey hair, his palm on the back of her neck
Toward the zipper of his pants gleaming like
Metal teeth a beast’s jaw
But he doesn’t know who she was named after
And that’s the hammer that smashed the glass
So it fell like ice on the floor
A distraction
Just in time so she could run away…

Catch me if you can…

She’ll hide in a Venus fly trap
You won’t get her now
The fleshy innards of petals encase her
But she trembles when an insect hovers near…

---

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to play
She just couldn’t be the toy
He grabbed at her like a spoiled child
Her throat caught and though she stuffed
The pebbles of fear down into her belly
With fistfuls of newspaper
She turned
And there was the rock face…

Climb. Out.

Now

Love takes on death (wouldn't mom be proud)

2008-05-03T18:31:00.000-07:00

Love takes on death (wouldn’t mom be proud)

Before she follows that
Cherry candy licked El Camino
Skulls painted on the rear window
Black flames prowling up the thick metal hood
Into an eternal night
There is a scent of dogwood
In her mind: pause

(Before her demise, she knows not to
Binge eat
It’s always important
To leave a size 6 corpse)

Isn’t what we leave in posed photos
More important than the flaws we display
When blood is in our veins?

(Sad) – the daffodils tell her it’s different

---

When do they become more
Than whisp sparse faces in a hallway mirror?
A peripheral haze gentle (acid?) visage fade
Can’t be all that upset
About what you can barely see
Silence like ice crystals, collect
Around the heart
And yet…

There have been times she’s curved
Around his frame like it could be
Her own
And there has been an iris and a peach
Opened ripened strangely and beautifully ready
To receive

Because there are things to be given she never
Knew
Existed before she felt their weight in her lap
The tip of a pure water vapor cloud tastes
Solid
Like he is solid once her mind holds that belief
But it’s true (safe) true (safe) and she
Again
Ready
Open
Ready

A kind of poison drained, leached from her
Core
And it was, somehow, time

(Doesn’t mean the decision was right, it means
there was a decision to begin with)

Gun

2008-04-22T16:53:00.000-07:00

Gun

It wasn’t a raid and SWAT was a no-show
But there was
A single gun
Metal phallic glory hot to the
Touch

She was shot while eating
Partially chewed food caught midway in her windpipe
Shot in her bed (the quilt silent witness)
Shot while her bare feet met the earth, walking
Outside to feed roosters

Cool, distant mountains reflected the blast back to her
But quiet erupted so steady, sure – her eyes may have been lidless
Doesn’t mean she saw a thing

Only in the shade of subsequent tomorrows
Would locals whisper the shoots had been
Messy mold days old scraps in a bowl you forget, animal
Slaughtered on the kitchen table and
Mean

---

After the log chopped thud of death
After a sinister stillness sets the heart, arteries, lungs to useless
Weight
There are a thousand fluttering sparrows
Tremendous action, wings layered in forward motion
Arrows cutting air to a rhythm of hope
The loudest inhale
You’ve ever heard

The Cigarette girl, the Sow and the Mermaid

2008-04-01T17:53:00.000-07:00

The Cigarette girl, the Sow and the Mermaid

Cigarette girl apologizes
For not having your brand
Could’ve sworn it was in this tray
Fingertips scrape the bottom and sure enough
No cellophane wrapped boxes
She’s let you down again
Can’t produce what you want
(Don’t ask her what she’s good for)

(Oh cigarette girl, don’t scald that tender tongue tip
Taking a sip of coffee - the temp you can’t predict)

She gnaws her lower lip and thinks:
Next time, each finger could be sheathed in a thimble

---

If you look in the corner of her mouth
A crust collects like old memories
You can see
She once was a pregnant sow sunburned
Blistered pink hide, cracked like your heel
Dead fetal piglet inside her
Agony until the expunge

(Could a death-birth set her free?)

Burrow back far enough and recall...
Somewhere there is a mermaid
Reclining on a water-washed stone
Her aqueous tangible fins lavishly take up space
Because they can
A deep green sea offers all
She doesn’t need to provide anything
Right now

---

But if you ask, they’ll all agree
There was always more she could have done
Better

Rules

2008-03-15T15:46:00.000-07:00

Rules

Know
This now
There are rules

Measuring cups, scales, steno pads
Teaspoons, tablespoons dangling
From a thin steel chain
Her fingers chapped and steady but it’s not skill
Sharpened pencils graphite
Record fear it’s dirty dishwater (then why so precious?)

Don’t get me wrong
I know…
It can be

(Grey matter in girdles)

Come on GIRL
Let’s go GIRL
I said GIRL!

(Clang clatter bang GIRL
She’s Clabber girl
Trapped in a pose
On the front of that damn can
The cupboard door’s
Between her and the world)

---

Alchemy

There are lines of text
To be traced by her index finger
Forehead woven in worry
Did your dilated eyes catch every word?

The floggings descend like the sun
At dusk
Because she’s failed like sour milk
She didn’t follow
The rules

---

And will her legs be open today?
Her moods morph like clouds
They’re never the same shape twice
Aprons, scarves, nooses and necklaces
Placed on heat it reduces at the bottom of the pan
To…

Tar
Love
Blood
Spit
Grime

Look quick!
Behind you!

(it’s gone)

---

She doesn’t know why sometimes he’s faded red
Flushed blushed hued in a median
She could draw or push

She stands still
Eyelid twitching she eyes his throat

Bamboo

2008-02-28T14:58:00.000-08:00

Bamboo

Speeding on the highway
Her dented compact
With faded bumper stickers
Is a bullet train

Did she dare to even blink?

Made it to the toothpick forest
But she found the bamboo among splinters
And she was the bamboo smooth strong
(It was more, you see)

And he can’t have it
(He can’t have my fucking bamboo or the lock box it came in)

Get your own

Or maybe you’ll have to find it
Between your mother’s breasts
That hang old grapefruit
I said they hang from her chest
Like loaves of stale bread

(He won’t admit he’s so very hungry)

---

She drove straight up
Through square and merciless
States
Changing area codes and zip codes
But not time zones

(Oh, but hadn’t she been there before?)

Where do those apples come from again?

And sunrises could not be distinguished from sunsets

---

So it became a little silly
She got in her car again
Headed up the highway
There’s a gelato shop on the corner of 38th and Lamar

Raisins and prunes (reduced for quick sale)

2008-02-10T15:42:00.000-08:00

Raisins and prunes (reduced for quick sale)

When asked
She had hopped on
That motorcycle (told hesitation to take a backseat)

Wrapped her arms around his
Leather jacket
Elation had come through her
Easy as the wind in her hair
The engine growled as they whisked
Down streets paved just for them

(The glint of an exacto knife can be so subtle dear…)

Sweetie
Her fingers had glided gently against
The nape of his neck
(but here’s the trick…
He had taken her there in the first place)

(Weren’t you told to look both ways before crossing the street?)

A ghost had stood before her but it looked like a man

---

Later in the kitchen
Pouring pancake batter
Onto the hot popping Teflon
She didn’t notice
At first
But the plastic spatula left her hand
Flipped through the air (it had will)
Landed on top of the microwave

(Why did you go where you don’t belong?)

---

It was then it became evident
Her bra was full of raisins
Only prunes between her legs
Cement crusted in her hair
And now

Now

I’ve been reduced for quick sale

(He decided he’d rather not have what sagged in her what was left from who she was before no he didn’t want her bright eyes because he wouldn’t hold the raisins and prunes in his brutal hands)

Still she’s sad 'cause she can’t hate him

(Sometimes we would rather be hit than not touched at all)

Rat girl has a shrine

2008-01-27T12:57:00.000-08:00

Rat girl has a shrine

The coffee mug you left
On my table
Has become a shrine
Unmoved for days

I kissed the cool glazed ceramic
Curled my finger around the handle
Before putting it in the dishwasher

The thoroughly soaked tea bag
Soppy and brown, clinging
To the bottom
I touch it with the edge of my tongue

---

Rat girl
Apologizes
For being a rat
Placing gnarled claw
In front of beige bucked teeth
Twisting dirty fish-line whiskers in shame

(Many days she wishes she was fish girl – she just can’t always make it happen – wants to sprout scales to form glitter swishes in cooling waves)

The back alley urine can stay in rat girl’s fur for weeks

---

Condoms in wrappers
Spermicide in egg shaped tubes
They won’t be used
So make a temple

---

Dirt fills the spaces between her toes
Note: air on face, she’s outside (sun?)
Is she at her destination?
Did she make it after all?

She can't tell
Can't always predict the direction a tumbleweed travels

---

She refuses to pray
One prays out of desperation

The Bone Collector

2008-01-05T17:58:00.000-08:00

The Bone Collector

At night he imagines
His bones 50 years in the future
Encased in glass

Globules of sweat
Escape down his temples
They’ll collect his bones
When death has silenced him
His screams will be woven
Into the calcium and they won’t
Hear them

(Their eyes will gawk like darts penetrating targets)

Fear a gunshot blast
Impregnates
The meaty calf of an
Elephant
Poached for ivory

Before the REM of midnight
His dreams can be
Cotton candy
Roses for his mother
Sheets on a clothesline in summer

But twisted in the darkest hour
He sees himself except
He’s not himself
He’s only

Bones

---

Her nakedness like light
Her strong hands trailing
On his body
Places no one has ever gone
He dares to look between
Her legs
And yes, he wants that but mostly…

Take care of my bones
After I die
Create a shrine, leave them by the cat bowl
I don’t care
Toss them in with your laundry
Litter your apartment with them
Just keep them with you

Her lips quiver above his earlobe
“I will”
It is then he offers his colossal head to her
He can rest
Her soft thighs how he always imagined
Clouds must feel
Release settles in him
As she curves her body around him
Like a guitar

(written 1/5/2008 at 8:02pm)

Bus

2008-01-02T16:06:00.000-08:00

Placing busted buckle sandals
One step down then another
Careful like a dancer
The diesel fumes swirled above the hot pavement
The bus grunted and belched away

She was at the wrong stop

Again

A man walked by
She called out to ask
Where she was
And did he know the way back
To where she was from?

He furrowed his eyebrows
Behind his glasses
“You talk too much” was all he said

“I can’t be pretty all the time” she said

“You were never pretty” was his reply
Except she didn’t hear it

Barefoot she was flagging down another bus
Her cracked heel sandals left on the sidewalk
The only sign she had ever been there

(written 1/2/2008 at 6:11pm)

Love comes brutal, comes early

2007-12-30T09:33:00.000-08:00

Love comes brutal, comes early

In days there can be a burning
Barbs that catch the side of her throat
When she pauses to enjoy the sun warming her face
A slippery silver eel that snakes in her ear
To whisper worries like dark prayers

(Quiet!)

At night the moon is a glazed saucer
Keeping her company from the sky
She feels the pressure of his lips
The way he curved his arm to hold her
His hair the most beautiful flame
His laugh balm on wounds

She thinks of reeds and grasses
His arms weave into thatches
That hold her head when it aches

But she doesn’t want to think of thatches
Don’t they sometimes break when assaulted by wind?
And haven’t they ripped when saturated by rain?

---

She can feel the wind grab and lift
The kites on her arms
But she doesn’t want to loosen her foot roots
Gnarled and woody, they secure her to the ground

(Release?)

Not now – if when – she can’t tell

Her fingers fiddle nervously
With the fish hooks in her ears

---

She’d go hunting for him
Take arrow, take spear
Conquer no man’s land in her heart
Reach a final frontier and present all
Confess all, be all
For him

---

Some mornings hot water scalds her tea leaf body
And she bleeds into dread
Water turning translucent brown in a cup
Mashing to an opaque charred sea

But in her 31st year
A Christmas card came
She thought she couldn’t be this lucky
But she is

(Can she hold that hot star?)

(written 12/30/2008, exact time unknown)

Fire

2007-12-11T18:21:00.000-08:00

Fire

It’s not like
She’s never tasted fire

It had engulfed her, forcing her skin to blister
Flames whipped up in the folds of her skirt
Smoke smothered her face
Flames chewed her eyelashes to the root
Her tonsils singed she couldn’t always
Talk

(Scream)

She had stood in a burning storm that turned her sky to ash

It wasn’t that she couldn’t take the heat
(She had a metal lock box for her vital organs)
It was simply time
To stop burning

She makes graves for cinders
She’ll never write her stories in charcoal
Again

(It’s okay – just time to go)

---

Dawn christens her forehead
She wrings out the fabric
Of a million black nights
Hanging on the line
It will face an infant day

Squeezing her hand
To make a fist
The pink knuckles reveal cracks
Red blood seeps into the white of her skin
It soaks into the gauze covering the wound

Who called a cease-fire?
And why didn’t I get the memo?
Pony express and carrier pigeons
Came to relieve the night duty

(Now you can sleep)

---
Comb the pain from the cloth
Not the wisdom gained
From bitten lips and dilated pupils
Misery sits like oil on water
Pour it off

(Don’t worry – the fat of her past is in her hips)

She pulls her hair down
From the rubber-band that held it
Snaps loose into cascades
Waves that are free
Time to keep moving on

(written 12/11/2007 at 8:22pm)

Forgive me

2007-12-07T17:25:00.000-08:00

Forgive me

To her, he looks sick
Vapors and anxiety settle
Under his skin
Quiet storms roll in his eyes
(Does he even see her?)
Rain in his mind…

With her apron strings taut
She cradles him in her white cotton lap
His head nestled beneath
A tomato soup stain
Wet with worry
She presses her chapped lips
To the tan skin stretched across his forehead

Deliverance

Her kisses will be shed like skin
He wipes them away
With the back of his hand
They remain like left over jam
But he’s finished breakfast
Sticky and unwanted
They end up on his sleeve
She finds them in the laundry the next day…

(She washes all with tears)

He doesn’t know
Sometimes late at night
Her brain screams frenzied fear
A fever hot behind her eyes
He bobs and weaves, a prize fighter
In her dreams
She can’t but she tries she can’t but she tries she can’t she tries
To clutch him to her
Like something rare

---

Forgive me
I know I taste like threat an acid sting
Syringe injected into your base world
I said I’m sorry
I imagine your bronze face resting in my palms
And I meant to tell you
My love can be like cobblestone
But the blade of your shears
Snips the wet spongy tissue underneath
And a pin prick bleeds to a flood

(She could be a life preserver thrown in choppy seas he doesn’t want her
he never has
he doesn’t hear what the tides say, he doesn’t plug into the current
and is lost)

She kisses him over and over and over
Clings to his warm body
So she can hear his heart leap rhythmically in his chest
Awakes, sees she only holds her
Pillow in her arms and he has faded
Like inked night bleached by morning sun

(When dark falls again she chases shadows in the forest
each silhouette that emerges on the trees
sounds like him)

(written 12/7/2007 at 7:21pm)

A soldier and an unmade bed

2007-12-04T14:16:00.000-08:00

A soldier and an unmade bed

Her head: swirls
Rains down on a pillow
She wants to rip out the seams
Of each day she’s lived
Grab silversteelglinty needle
And sew it all again

Rogue thread pop, pinch out – toss

Anxiety is the night watchman
5 years
15 years
(How many times do you get to make it right?)

She wants the past
To be written in chalk
So an afternoon shower releases all

Sweat stained bra hung to dry on the balcony
Crimson tampons in the bathroom trash
Cat with a human face
A single girl serenade

---

Details are sprinkles
On top of the cup cake
She has to count them
Before she is allowed a bite

(She might starve before it’s over)

Excitement a leap frog
In the left side of her chest
But it’s painted blue

Her mind the needle skips on the record
Catches snags in her throat
Ripples of urgency spread
From the pebble she tossed in the pond

(Find it!)

Her ears always with radio static
She tries to capture words like moths
Pin down to make meaning
Read cryptic signs in wings

Too bad she’s
Drowning
In crackles whispers rattles hums

(Where is her antennae?)

---
As a soldier
It’s an insult
All his energy be spent
Guarding an unmade bed

(What are you fighting for?)

(written 12/4/2007 at 4:14pm)

Happy Birthday

2007-11-16T18:47:00.000-08:00

Happy Birthday

My jean pockets cough up dry heaves
No fish hooks for the cork
No tweezers no pliers no forceps
Barren denim my fingers come up empty

Hot grenade heart a flutter stop rush hum (this may not be good)

(Sound the fucking alarm - I don’t have the metal I need!)

Worker bees form mass then disperse then whole again
Disembodied stingers quiver in my brain
Poison released before darkness

Reams of receipts furiously clicking then overflow
(I was never good at math)

Buzzed out
Adrenaline bleached
Shaved

But really – that can of vegetable alphabet soup is out of date

---

If I sip the Xanax smoothie
Can I see the 31 steps?
(Don’t ask me what lead to here…)

---

Boys play with sharpened sticks
Tear gauzy wings off flies

And I follow them wherever they go

Mice can scurry in the winter
The gray toad can bed down frozen
My shoe boxes get so small
But boys are etched in concrete, they are tattooed on flesh

Offerings: spit dirt semen blood silence

(But don’t forget the cornucopia Rx)

What do you expect?
Someone took a Sharpie to my map
Bled my highways into blobs
Creases then perforate

The leather of my leash is in his palm
A choke hold but I was told
To expect religion

(He gets to draw the lines)

I said wait:
He lures me still
My hair in his knuckles
He said peace born of pain

---
Georgia O’Keefe
Didn’t always paint flowers

Under the laser of the sun
It appears all a waste
But deserts have horizons
Cow bones hold spirits

(Baked land hides my seeds)

(written 11/16/2007 at 8:48pm)

Aquarium (Richard)

2007-11-03T06:10:00.000-07:00

Aquarium (Richard)

Padding down the street
In pink satin ballet shoes
She tripped jolted
And fell head-first
Into an aquarium

Nose dive into water encased in glass
Thrushed up nostrils blood elbows knees
Boxes of the most merciless kind

Her orange hair
Twirled like an eel
Snagged on her teeth
Caught in her lashes
In the water that blushes from
Periwinkle to ink

Thrash

Eyes big then shaded
Lungs made of lead
Compression and lack of…
Gasps

Blue
A sweet surrender of a wet inhale
But the hammer in one hand trembles
Metal squirms

(Do I choose the Formaldehyde martini?)

Richard

I know (no I don’t know)
La Brea tar pits
Your boots must have been tired
Boyscout on the edge
Technocolor balloon
Flows above your shoulders

(I fell in too)
(Who do we tell? What for? Why
do they get the inside scoop

a carving, hollowing)

Then rotted planks

And the bullet that shattered your teeth

(maybe you knew that you were
out to sea
but your tired heart couldn’t swim)

I will cradle your fatigue in my arms
(It’s so grey now)

---

The white cord of her I-Pod
Gets tangled with a tampon
In the sea of her purse

She can’t get them undone
Then she does

(written 11/3/2007 at 8:16am)

Agent Orange: Infancy

2007-10-19T12:21:00.000-07:00

Agent Orange: Infancy

She hiked
Split hooves
Split lip
Sun then moon then sun again

Crinkle eared
Smash faced cat
Had whimpered
Scampered away
Leaving a trail of fleas like bread crumbs

She thought:Beauty has been drained of this place
(If only she had brought a coffin, proper)
But in the end she let the dust dry
(Just as good)

When the wind hit her mouth
It was like chewing on chalk
Her lips swollen blaze of mid-day

Limbs burning from exhaustion
Her body ached for shade
Dust creased in crow’s feet

That’s when she saw him

He was in a lush tree
His cone shaped head
Pointed upward

He was growing
Toward the sun

How could eyes that big
Challenge the sun?

Deep green leafy canopy
Dew
Had collected on his peach fuzz head

His wet mouth open quivering
On the verge of speech
But all’s contained within

For once, no words needed

Sighs left her chest, flooded out
A letting
(She’d been holding her breath for miles)

Getting a grip on the bark
She climbed
She reached her Agent Orange baby
Saturated flora cradle his eyes

Met hers

Agent Orange baby in her warm arms
He fit
They walked through a million
Dreams touched by cool water

Heart: thankful

(written 10/19/2007 at 2:23pm)

Leonid

2007-10-09T18:47:00.000-07:00

Leonid

Didn’t you hear?
She tucked herself into
That ivy covered village
Afternoon sun slipping down the hillside
Like a cracked egg
Fatigue rattling her bones
She rode her horse and cart…

To live with
The tallest man in the world

His chest holds an entire
Countryside blanketed in flowers
Not meant for the dead

Revival

His whisper a wind over the fields
His gray eyes like pregnant clouds in the distance
Her face in the pupils

His hand could hold her entire body
(This is how God made me, it’s not an accomplishment)
Though some days she can’t feel he is even there

His lips might cover the entire side of her face
(But we are understood now)
And she is baptized new…she is held knowing
His still Moai face hides a warm ember heart

---

They had an
Agent Orange baby
The world recoiled
From the baby’s protruding eyes
Light bulbs oversized marbles
Ping pong balls of glass
(What do you see?)

I’m still your mama
A child’s smile only needs one witness

---

They left everyone behind
In a single breath
Their language was horizon
And never-ending Sundays

The length of his arms
Was enough to hold them both
Agent Orange’s eyes
Guided them forward

She shed the haunting
She scuffed darkness from her shoe

If anyone else spoke
They didn’t listen

(So much ahead!)

(written 10/9/2007 at 8:55pm)

Black haired Barbie doll

2007-10-09T18:24:00.000-07:00

Black haired Barbie doll

She's a Jesus fish from Siberia
In the icy fist of Pluto
Wax and paint smile
Dotted and glinted eyes

Pain as blue as the eyeshadow on her lids
Pain as black as the mascara she applies
Everyday
Her ink hair flows a raven river

Church in a strip mall

She told me she cries everyday
Warm tears, iced face
She’s gone to the cafeteria
In her wedge heels
Her tray is full of desperation and need
Approval
Love
As translucent as that Jell-O mold
And just as difficult to hold in the fingers

In the shadows she doesn’t know what these words mean
(A razor blade carved that smile)

And the sweetness never reaches her mouth
How many miles to Disney Land?

(written on 10/9/2007 at 8:22pm)

9/19/39

2007-09-22T10:09:00.000-07:00

9/19/39

The day he was born
Was the day she died
(So much frayed thread)

Wasn’t sure what to do
(A sticky ? on my brain like a starfish)
I lay on my stomach
Cheap, ivory satin bedding beneath my worn elbows
Pillows for eternity, I guess
The dirt hit the lid closed down on me
Brown hard raindrops

Inches built of dirt gravel inches building dirt dirt

My head was caught
Inside a blue marbled vase
When they buried me
(I couldn’t even rest my chin in my hand)

---

The tear fell from my eye
While I was in the shower
(You don’t get a do over)

It melted with the suds and took
A whirlpool ending
My stretchmarks wrapped in that orange towel
I combed my hair good morning
Left the bathroom..

---

Daddy’s little girl
Impaled herself in the backyard
I was walking past
Left my daisies
Flicked my cracked pink Bic
Lit the cinders, smoked a goodbye

Vacuum to my ear suck out what isn’t needed
New capture and release program

---

I woke up in the linen bandages
Rubbed the paint from my eyes
Took what was mine from the pots
Dug my feet into the gold sand

Ran
Ran
Ran

Cracked sarcophagus becomes smaller in the distance

She can’t hold the smiles her lips burst forth
(I didn’t know I had teeth)

---

Ruth, lady: I didn’t know

(written 9/22/2007 at 12:06pm)

I wouldn’t own the word hurt for you

2007-09-15T17:06:00.000-07:00

I wouldn’t own the word hurt for you

In shadows, it dashed by her ankle
She didn’t even feel its breath
She knelt down to examine
Her own eyes enlarged to meet…

A small pink eye
A licked bead
Watery eager pink iris red pupil
Scared a quiver small shiver
Down that delicate spine

Bony toes curled into nails into
Her hand
A trembling soft mass
In her palm

She lifts the velvet ear to whisper
The tiny inner airs catching her breath like dew
She can’t release the word
It’s too raw too early – opened
Tomato flesh – paring knife on ripe fruit

She lowers her palm and it scatters –
Puffing its miniature lungs with
Grateful escape air, flee air, be air

-

In that air
Her arms would calm the scampering beating
Of his arteries – smooth coursing blood
Vessels showing through downy pink skin
Her kiss
---

As she heard the Mason jar slip
She pinched her eyes shut
Caught breath and braced for the concrete
That would come to meet her jelly body
Her jam incrusted fingers, her runny hair
Licking cement, oozing along pavement
Unclean in the end

(don’t worry I speak the language too)

(written 9/15/2007 at 7:07pm)

The Man

2007-09-10T18:00:00.000-07:00

The Man

She knows about the 8 days of therapy a week
She knows about the uncut cherry pie
She knows how dour thankless can be
She knows the blue shield-shaped pills
(What’s your major malfunction? Output does not equal input)

(Who's going to pay for her gas?)

System overload
---

I am made of rotted foam
The yellowed kind found layered
In old mattresses, pitted, urinestained (I don’t have to be pretty)
What the hell does she want from me?

I skim under water caught in liquid glass
And that's fine, brother, I said it’s just fine….(so smooth)

If only she were useful, like a tree
Instead she's smashed apples on the pavement
She couldn't possibly want something from me
My giving is that old, empty trash bag you saw on the street
Just a minute ago

My pupils sprout plastic plants –
(I’m sorry, what were we talking about?)
You expect me to remember her name?

I was a little boy once - whatever hot fever rose in my heart
Was stamped out like paper on fire – concrete - better
I got a free pass on the whole caring and loving thing…
Sorry, she didn’t meet standards (send her back to the factory)

My hands shock blocked ice
And it’s my right – (I’m sorry, were we talking about something?)

---

She wants the one who calls her girl
Pure emotion swollen drops a necklace – her throat
Fingertips – she gives in not because she has to but because it’s
Safe – she couldn’t close her eyes for anyone else
She can only catch her breath when she fills his eyes

(written 9/10/2007 at 8:36pm)

Of snakes and moods

2007-08-25T19:19:00.000-07:00

Of snakes and moods

Afternoons
Like flashbulbs
Blinding burned retinas so her eyes only see cruel moons

The curtains run chartreuse sour
Melted by the heat of the day
Sweat beneath her arms smells alone

(Where does one go to escape the neon umbrella?)

Nights
A cool runny bedcover
Old egg whites aging in a dirty bowl
Snot from a child’s nose
Dingy dishrag pillowcases she saw
Gray carpet crawling
Stones and pebbles
Toilet paper tears

(But we’ve gotten a bit off topic, there are feelings sure but what about…)
I said what about

Here:

She buries snakes

Whether their sinewy forms writhe with life
Or hang dead with wrung necks
Limp like her hair, scales under her fingernails

Sand. Peat. Wet cement. Clay and mud.
She buries them because she doesn’t like
The way their forked tongues try to taste her
Once, she allowed a sneak peek
The fang beneath the spade head nipped her throat

Forgiveness? Surely you are kidding (that’s a kick to the head).

Squeezed until reptile eyes stagnant as pond scum
(She doesn’t even give them crosses – they are so on their own)

The sweat her pores produce while the killing is on is sugar, it’s milk

Raged muscles red and round
---

(Every once in awhile she is foxy who trash talks the grapes)

---
The words she coughs from her lungs
Don’t match any of the slideshows in her mind
(What did he say as she was flying down I-35?)

A hot child smashes the puzzle pieces on the black and white linoleum floor

She tucks realthoughts behind saidthoughts
But really behind displayedthoughts
All you really see are the displaythoughts
Because they are the wantedthoughts

And didn’t she show up every Halloween?
Punctual is a new skirt

(Shhh!) In the end inside her left ear you can see inside you can see inside you can see

The rag is wrung behind the white of her eyeball

(written 8/25/2007 at 9:06pm)

Catalog girl

2007-08-24T13:31:00.000-07:00

Catalog girl

It was the metal clink of the handcuff around her white wrist
That snapped her out a diced ice coma

Barely warmed over like a faulty hot plate
The slits in her scarred face probed to see

Where did we start? (gnaw for the root…) it is

?

She taps a ripe vein and tightens the strap
By pulling on it with her hungry teeth

Just her luck, the syringe slips from her fingers
(Damn that cheap thing)

When did approval become the salt lick?
She pushes damp twists of hair from her face
When did it become so very
Crucial

Love

Cheese in a trap
I’ll be damned if she doesn’t
Go for it
---

That’s when she became a paper doll
Faded and thin between the fingers
Everyone can pick favorites
The cute red jumper
A pink party dress
Sassy green slacks

(Just tell me what the hell you want!)

She grabs her fly fishing rod
(This time she’s aggressive)

Sweat bleeds her eyes and she holds back a grimace
(What page is that on?)

She’ll rope in what they don’t give her
Empty jars stuffed with newspaper when will she

Be full
Be full
Be full

---
She wiped surfaces clean before dirt had time to fall
Took your temperature and folded your shirts at the same time
Not a tear she couldn’t catch in her palm
Cradled others ‘til her arms gave out

(Is that good enough? No?....okay)

~~~

But inside she was all needles and knives
Glints of sharp metal snaps cuts snags
Harpoon left back pocket
Black belt in resentment – aims a crushing chop
To the back of all their pretty heads

She tore one by one…thirsty the entire time

Spit on them all – from blood inside her cheek

---

In the end she stands as still as an oak tree

Waits for the winter to come

Her breathing is a stuffed cotton silence, she braces herself

For what?

(written on 8/24/2007 at 3:37pm)

Reprieve

2007-08-14T17:36:00.000-07:00

Reprieve

Yesterday she had a Portuguese Man O' War
On her back
The venom tart in her spit – it bled acid yellow
Teal tentacle coiled around her throat

(watch out – I said watch out)

10 meters long and still no connection – it seared skin

(I am not messing around - back off!)

Today: reprieve
(Still tied to what was born before, what will be born today)
Death is a fable
Reprieve rests on her head like a feather

But the corner of her eye saw it blossom
And it took the sting from her eyes
It healed the ulcers her emotions had burned in her

And she inhaled/exhaled big, round breaths like O’s in the air, like
Halos, lifesavers, moons, bubbles

---

When she saw the sections of thick red rope
Diced like a snake
Each end darted feverishly

Shovel shaped serpent head will it
Attach to the tail?
(eat to release again to eat and be released to nourish and become)

She fashioned coffins out of her dried wheat hair

The longest arm of a squid will keep moving
After its cut from the body
Dead suction cups attach in desperation

(It won’t go so easily…you shouldn’t expect it to)

-
The skyline is dusted pink by the slowly rising sun
Warm honeyed cantaloupe morning
She places her ears near and hears soft whispers in melodies
She will catch up
She always could – she needed

Echoed space without walls her words humming
Them to say her name
Remember my name…I do

Lull in those cool curved places, carved just for her

And the choice...

To shed the dark side like scaled skin

(written 8/14/2007 at 7:46pm)

Terracotta

2007-08-06T19:00:00.000-07:00

Terracotta

It’s not that the house was dim
Windows captured light
It shattered like shards onto the hardwood floors
(She saw it, she knew)

They all had soft arms like bread to greet her…
Their lips had softened into smiles – not unkind
(This is nothing against them)

But she was a pair of dirty, faded jeans flying out the door
Before she even heard their hello

(She was so fast even the echo couldn’t catch up with her breathless face)

---

She hadn’t seen the glint of the scissors…
That’s where he had opened her up.

Blood born through the white cotton of her underwear
He had been so quick

Snipped up her womb like following a dotted line
Silver jaws eating her pear shaped muscle
Peeled back it was revealed
A terracotta cracked earth
Drained corn fields where dried kernels sighed in surrender

She fell into a death roll and her eyes went back in her head

She scuffed her skin hard – the kernels were lodged within

---

The night air cools the hot dirt underneath her fingernails
It’s then that she sees he is a child
(He could be lulled)

The blue veins in her lids like corridors
Douse her eyes that had smoldered moments before
Shut down in sleep

(written 8/4/2007 at 8:36pm)

Names (The resurrection)

2007-08-06T18:33:00.000-07:00

Names (The resurrection)

She keeps a list of names
Of children she’s never had
Ink saturates the tight weave of the paper…bleeds until dry

Names
They fall from her mouth like dead petals
Crinkled thin velvet crushed
(Sometimes she falls with them)

Sometimes they get mixed in with the grocery list
Monthly bills…
Milkeggsbabies husbands and hamburger
(She had really needed the wine – where does it grow again?
She can’t remember)

A well worn receipt from a coffee shop turns up
At the bottom of her purse
(Who had been there?)

How many awnings does it take to break a fall?

Names are carved into her head like gravestones
Dolls on a shelf
The sweetly painted Matryoshkas' cemetery

(If they never lived were they ever around? She can’t remember)

---

She had been at the starting gate
Eagerness had dripped from her in warm sweat
Turning her clothes darker – she had been ready
Longing had trembled in her bones, rippled through her muscles

But she had found brutal walls of silence
In the flesh of men
Her tender lips had been met with blows…
The leaving had been a draining, endless - she herself had become

Empty…

She is
Empty

Empty like a blue tinged jar found in brown loam
From how long ago?
No one knows

A jar to put all those names in (they won’t surrender)

Mildred…
Woodrow…
Lawrence…
Natalie Dora
She softly chants them with her eyes closed – just a slight vibration to her lips

(The clay choked the ground
until it was bruised a deep orange and thirsty)

---

When my brother died
There was no coffin

He had been born wild of blood and placenta
Needed
And yet when hit with light
He refused to breathe
His fresh, milky lungs crisped and shriveled like fall leaves

(Oh how she had wailed – too bad the world had been deaf)

Without a first gasp there is no name

I say it now under my breath and it sounds like….

(written 8/6/2007 at 8:51pm)

Cross (won't you please step down)

2007-08-02T18:52:00.000-07:00

Cross (won’t you please step down)

Anxiety pin pricks all over her body -
Syringe flecks up a pucker of skin…

Jellyfish sting - swells up to meet

Flesh in flames

Her pores only hint at a brutal maroon below

Anxiety + Anger (they aren’t meant to be but that’s okay
one alone is more powerful)

Don’t mind me (laugh!)
I’m just on my 5th mood today

Head becomes bottle becomes pills and then empty

(She gets so tired)
She is smudged wax on a glass table

---

She knows he is sad boy’s eyes behind a stiff mask
Drip ice blue

She turns away
Sips from a glass of raspberry iced tea
Smacks her red lips in defiant sorrow

Someone said – leave them alone if they’re troubled

Maybe she will. Maybe she will.

---

I’ve never bled from stigmata
My palms beautifully calloused but intact

Someone said – fight.

Maybe she will. Maybe she will.

(written 8/2/2007 at 8:53pm)

Dreams

2007-07-28T18:06:00.000-07:00

Dreams

This was supposed to be on the topic of dreams

Her mouth is full of words they flutter like moths
Dry papers caught in an updraft
Puffing her cheeks until she turns a tender pink
Fading along to an azure

She desperately searches with sweaty fingers
Like caterpillars scurrying on a leaf
She wants to find the valve…

(are you ready?)

…

Her past may be trapped
In the well formed body of a Barbie doll
She bled her head red with markers
But we all know plastic molded smiles last forever (even a landfill can’t compete)
Second hand clothes meant for other dolls don’t matter
(pity is so out of fashion)

Defiant – inches of ice in a midnight winter
(not in cubes? How merciless! A pick will be needed…)

Those drops ain’t holy water
(where is the little girl doll exorcist?)

And who stiffly stands formal upon that final and highest tier?
Icing like caulk, roses formed of Crisco and red dye
Who murdered the bride’s dress?
It’s soaked in (menstrual) blood

She had it coming
…

shut up – you have lids for a reason – sting slap the hand that dares to pick the scab ooze

Sharp inhalation knocks eyes back to focus – (it doesn’t matter that in the morning I wake covered in sores) – I run like they do

Full throttle - she has a giant B tucked in her back pants pocket

(written 7/28/2007 at 8:07pm)

Pharaoh

2007-07-26T20:18:00.000-07:00

Pharaoh

And just when she thought things couldn’t possibly get worse…
The house was engulfed – it screamed with fire
smoke flooding over the hardwood floors like burning rain

In her head: flee

Code red

So she ran
Her heels roasted like pork
Her throat sick with soot

She ran

Into the arms of a pharaoh in drag.

Nestled beneath the wooden beard
beaded headdress becomes halo warm baskets she melts in

Her name etched on the smooth surface of temples (what could a sandblaster really do about that?)

Her dress billows in the sandy wind like sheets hung to dry – her eyes sting gloriously looking forward into the merciless sun - her dress will smell of new day hope beginnings fearless
(bring it)

(she really wants her name on that temple - ivory - clean, her name it belongs there)

Groomed for glory by defiance, beauty – even love

(sometimes though, she wears an old coat sewn of bitter old women) - But not now
Not like this

In this – her existence stretches, expands over time

(written 7/26/2007 at 10:17pm)

Haunted

2007-07-26T20:07:00.000-07:00

Haunted

She searches in a night thick as Jell-o
(Where did they go?)

Heavy atoms mass pitch and tar

She carves her isolation into the air with every step she takes
She slings herself low in a fog that clogs her throat

She
Becomes

Small
They can’t hear her

Laughter crackles in their ears like pop-corn and she can’t rise above that busy noise

She sinks
Pit snake belly cool darkness
dregs in a coffee cup

She’s reduced to a haunting – echoes where her footsteps were

Wet clay cakes over her eyes, fills her nostrils (don’t sneeze)

(such a disgrace – we had high hopes but no guarantees)

Mired

(Where is my goddamn treasure map?!? I paid for the map.)

(written 7/26/2007 at 10:05pm)

Father

2007-07-19T18:56:00.000-07:00

Father

Florida hangs limp off the rest of America

A deflated state – necrotic appendage

He sits on the coast
And dunks his feet – tanned like hide – into the ocean

As the sun crawls up into the clouds
It’s one more day
To hate a daughter

(Even oranges dry, grow beards of mold – wrung of their juice)

Her name
Dust on his tongue

(wringing hands produces no liquid)

It isn’t the missed Birthdays that bother her
It’s the bend
Of her hair
The widow’s peak
That shadows her forehead

(engraved markers she can’t burn off)…..flame rage, cut your teeth, bite your tongue

He held her still until her skin swelled and was useless

(does she know that underneath his tears are burnt?)

(written 7/19/2007 at 8:54pm)

My head

2007-07-18T18:39:00.000-07:00

My Head

It was at that time I took off my head…

(Dead marigold head popped grow new)

My head
Rolled down through the brown weeds
Into thicket
A bowling ball gaining momentum…

The sun was eating the sky

…

Dusk unfolded like worn blankets
My head
Snapped still like the cold it rested under leaves

Turning - came face to face
With small eyes, irises of ink
New mucous welling on top of the cheeks
Features formed in placenta

Losing my head and all
She couldn’t see
Where my body was…left (where? Oh dear!)

She doesn’t know about the heart ripped, seared into my left thigh

Anchor
Suffering only I could own
(Conversations with him no one can hear)

At night I dream of baby squid dodging harpoons

(written 7/18/06 at 8:38pm)

Shame

2007-07-15T18:21:00.001-07:00

Shame

If I kept my shame
Pickled
In a salty vinegar brine

It would singe my fingers…
Blistered skin swollen

Crack=peel=flake --- disintegrate

If my secret
Is a cat’s cradle
The threads are brittle
The knots loosened….

.…sifts into the hot air silt dirt

A gasp clutches in the base of my throat
Tightened fist, bleached knuckles push through
Eyes widen dilated by speaking uttering mumbling
Shudders
Whispers
Simple spells spoken sharply – under water
Under the tongue…

Base of the heart

Broken kindling like shrapnel (if unspeakable why now? Doesn’t listen to time)

Tell me you see the light reflect on the eye under the lowered bed?

(written 7/15/2007 at 8:06pm)

Milk

2007-07-15T18:20:00.000-07:00

Milk

That old pink bra – frayed
Color faded as if it had suffered under the sun
Limp
Slung over the arm of a chair
Like something dead

No one heard it’s pitiful cry (too weak)

I dream of milk
White
Soft as it cleanses
Milk

Drips like tears

I bought it at JC Penny, that bra
Salesgirl with a tape measure
Held taught around my chest

What is the sum total end tally

Where do I fit in?

Milk
Skim it off – lick like honey

(written 7/14/2007 at 10:48am)

Friday II

2007-07-15T18:19:00.000-07:00

Friday II

Drinking decaf
On a dim Friday night
Bittersweetsplenda - harmless

Disconnected trails…..
Mist……end?

Null (roll it off your tongue)

One of those wispy men
With scorched, brutish hands like earth
Crushing, merciless – hot breath
He will

Make me scream,cry,leak,bleed,gasp – wince like lemons
Bellow until bruised

Gonna make me saved
Gonna make me a baby

Every girl needs fruit….proof productivity purpose

A soft headed baby
Fat skimming under it’s skin
Veins
Flushed cheeks
Sleeping…serious (watchful) – eyes wet like rain slicked glass

Silent

Silenced gag mouth…

Mist? (can you look around the corner?)

(written 7/13/2007 at 7:35pm)

Friday

2007-07-15T18:18:00.000-07:00

Friday

I would only be happy

If

A lush green and golden tree
Grew out of my decomposing chest

(How impolite – blood everywhere)

The slick new white shower curtain - still creased from its package - is a total bore
It doesn’t answer riddles

And nothing is cleansed in the end

Can’t you see the soot in my eyes?

(written 6/22/2007 at 10:00pm)

Penguin

2007-07-14T18:54:00.000-07:00

Penguin

I am not a penguin
I am not stoic

When the icy storms rage,
the penguin huddles tightly
with his kind
his broad, black back
caked with white snow
his small, expressionless face
still and quiet
as if bored with the whole scene

his half closed, glassy eye
like an onyx marble
is turned away from the tormenting, arctic wind

I wonder what he thinks of
inside his penguin brain
or is his survival so instinctual
that he doesn’t think at all?

I am not a penguin
when the frozen rains come, I panic

I dream
of one day
developing sleek plumage
a feathery shell to protect me
an instinctual drive
to accomplish what I must
no matter how cold the world becomes

(written 10/10/2006 at 9:25pm)

Acceptance

2007-07-14T18:46:00.000-07:00

Acceptance

The snail
accepts it’s heavy package
it possesses an understanding
a kernel of truth in it’s gelatinous brain
it carries a solid burden on it’s back
silent under the pressure

It moves forward in spite of the weight
it adapts, changeful as the sky

solitary
the snail can be found
sliding along a wooded path
determined, if alone, in it’s purpose

smooth belly flesh
imprinted by gravel
baptized by rain
sheltered by leaves

the sun glints on the smooth shell
a leash, yet complete

(written 6/18/2005 at 12:21pm)

Cardinals

2007-07-14T18:25:00.000-07:00

Cardinals

I never minded
the red cardinals
flitting in the brown woods

Taking flight
their airiness
made me jealous

suicide
the beach in California
and healthy dose of Xanax

Escapism
held in my heart
empty, like jar

(written 10/13/2006 at 11:34am)