You’re faithful
Yeah you paid for it with your life
let’s assemble
let’s gather up all your
things and throw them in the
furnace, keep us warm
fire hearted in the night
On Sunday I
Found a figure and it made me cry
Freedom calls
Freedom for all of our
kind and let us break the
circle, holding all the
pieces up to a light
In the street
Where they grew up as kids in a fight
No bandages
No backward glances to
the road unravelled, so
pick up the pieces for
the long way home
Syllable
labeled
the essence
not a torn tag
ripped off at
Target, not a
piece of cloth
distressed to
seem, different.
Kids will not be
kids, if kids are
taught to push each
other down stairwells
and laugh into their
soup tureens at
lunch we would all
die. I remember the
world as green as
emerald, stinging
nettles sticking to
my cheek and my auntie
rubbing bruises off
my knees. Treachery
is when teachers
hold a lofty ruler at
your neck, to measure
your worth, anecdotal
arithmetics
cause gymnastics in
child’s mind
swimmingly, the dot
grows farther off
the center, and here
I am lost with the
rest of them
I don’t remember the last time
or the first time. I don’t remember
time. It has only just begun…
It was hour 13, or 15, and we were
so high off elevation that my entire
plane of existence fell out from
under our feet. I might have cried,
maybe we both did. I wonder if
my mom had held me in her palms
and asked that I would
simply fall asleep.
Do birds sleep in mid migration?
It’s kind of sweet to imagine us
as albatross rising
against the wind without
a clue about what’s really
happening. Birds,
especially birds of prey,
can read the wind to find the
most efficient path of
turbulence for travel
but destination is not always
Where we end up.
You’re so small
says a stranger
a man and a blur
overstuffed with ego
strange misshapen man-thing
eyeing me down like the
goose feathered bed soaking
in new blood
It’s the new moon
I will dance if I want
as the witch and raise
my arms like serpents
to crush you
petals loving on thorn
and sabers, excalibur
exhilarating for a bodily part
king me on a queen-sized bed
and I will trump your ego
with the small of my back
and the olive pit that
makes you spit and die
You’re so small
Child-woman, not grown
malnourished
fed up with watered
down cynicism and threats
Do not claim you can carry
the weight of those you
deem as miniscule
Your masculinity is in awe
when the predator is
subverted by waxed
and naked moon
It’s a blur
one thought funneled into the next
a consciousness disrupted
like the song I sang in the shower
I don’t remember the melody
harpooned into rungs
of poolside parades
as he held my head under water
forcing me to swim
and all I see is a foggy
mirror,
naked and dripping
profuse shame into
the monotone carpet
or was it plasticized wood
in that scarce lit hallway
where I will always
stand with my head
bowed, gasping for air
Enamored by you, recoil
The flint stone, grassy
image of your hair
you strike me on purpose
a flame in a barrel
a nocturnal flashback into
a crevice,
a mirror of our prints
She says her name
says what happened,
still is
“rape”
and we are lit
burning on the brush
the prairie
the grass
the woman tied to a bow
and bleeding to the oath
a bleating silence
a vagabond profanity
Pneumonic breath for ruptured memory
Iron cyanide, cloaked in
a paper crane, a million folded
stars and all the lost
inhabitants who locked
themselves into me
I am a fragment and a firmament
to your truth
To talk about it is
incendiary,
destruction for the safety
of secrecy and the hush
that follows a child
into upturned rooms
Syrup and spice packets
manicured squares which
pack the plate of armor
to dispel the infliction
of stupidity
Distraction is reaction
to cope with intolerance
the incompleteness, the
fresh pressed covers on
my throat, the gap not covered
in between you and my knees
and everything in between us
which is broken
No covenant
nor word
to tell your story
only a blazen wingspan
that touches all the colors
of the sky
one moment to the next
as columns of dust
as fired clay
The dark grows heavy
And it breathes me in
Each pulling, struggling
Lovers howling for fire
In the folds of night
I am a threshold
Or a barrier reef
Not penetrable but sometimes
Whole enough to be broken
Laced in between worlds
Is a body of stone and
Beaten flesh,
As a lover culled, uneven breaths,
Thrumming
As a granule or a shadow
Tossed and tumbled off
The shores all flushed in moonlight
It is pain, bright and alive
Drowning in maelstroms and
Hurricanes that keeping pulling
The mind to the rhythm of
Celestial bodies, a beached canoe
A sullen field of metal
Hidden in a bowl of seaweed
In the dream of dreams
The bulbous clouds of unwakening
The wreckage of my soul is
Turbulent and unmoving as
Crushed amethyst and piles of salt
The heart pumps liquefied gas
Inside every crack
That I own, even as it
Fills me up with a lucid fire
And lying still in
Catacombs I wait
For night to claim me
The walls are real. The walls are a barren, overgrown, vast untouchable. A totem pole that brings kisses from gods and jade emperors, the lightning rod that pulls electricity and sets disaster on my nerves. Brambles cluster in the narrow foyer of the trachea, treacherous as the wind that carries tips of poison darts. Languid, it lays, the monster that lacks a speech to carry forth a symbolism, a meaning, double-edged. It is a sinewy connection, a vine that creeps and twines upon the mind, a dank and fuzzy cave where mystics have come to bleed their virgins. Butterfly wings, an array of chrysallis lit with a pale fire. There is a small stream that winds and unwinds all through the underbrush, the waist high canopy of set decay, the audible sighing of tall conifers laced up with moss. A penrose ribbon carries my thought on a conch shell, streams light and darkness, black when the soil is fervid with unnamed imagination and a thorny growth. It is the death horn, skeleton dream. It is tanglewood that snares and catches dead bodies falling backwards. It is my hands that bury them, weeping. Night terrors bring gifts from beyond an eventide inviting ill-tempered guests to warrant themselves my body, its throne. I crack like fishbones and dilute, minutely. It’s home, right in the center of madness and waking. Fear is the foundation, quaking root, pebbled like the orbs of predacious mycelium that grows upwards, ever upwards. The stones inlaid as round buttons on a pillowtop are a labyrinth, leading all inside, almost like mandalas, nowhere else but here. The air is wild flowers, jasmine and night. Murdock song for listening in twilight. Within the heart of it a fountain quietly whispering. I listen to its whispering.
Today or
tomorrow
I will bury
something
not in a dirt
covered frenzy
dust, bitten or
hidden, displacement
of trust, but with
ceremony and honor
to ashes with alimony
and testaments on
trial, with golden
ringlets burning to
diffusion
The goddess opens her
proverbial cordial and
pours a drop of
tranquility into my grave.
Viscous and vicious
when change happens too
fast, and you start
to forget your name
date and time of your
birth, how tall and small
you were when you both
disconnected from the
source.
The cord is bound in
blood and every drop
is a stone passing
all alone in the dark
you are like the stone,
tight and ungathering til
all the forces turn
elliptical and the cycle
winds itself up for repeat
Fear is shame and maybe
Prozac will help you feel
your nerve again. It took a
week of unlearning to submit
to the idea again,
and again.
I am not, will not
I am
braided are the
cyphers and
crucibles of
hysteria
History beats us
with its fists
pummeling into trellises
the shape of mania
by design. Two halves
don’t always make a whole
A hole is where the heart dies,
achingly.
tonight
I am an affirmation
you don’t make
up for it, because affirmations
are endless/
We are a nod
unspoken contracts
runaway like
so many birds
flightless/instinctual
urges overtake the
blindsided mirror
hanging over our
bedroom door
consent is not given
it is seeked
it is excavated
it is a seed buried
deep inside for wintered
forage, for being coaxed
outside of snowbanks, for
being a cold bitch, for
powers to bewitch and
be silenced over fire
tell me your star sign
i will trace your pattern
back to Mars
I know i am in a situation
when it removes my clothes
and my autonomy, not always exactly
but with an eye for precision
the way a surgeon systematically
cuts you apart to take a good
hard look at your insides and all
the private functions of your
nuclear parts, I mean
analytically this doesn’t look
good, and anatomically i am
dispossessed, what happens
here is a secret between all
worlds and nothing is so
simple, nothing at all.
outside everything is quiet
grey green or the color of
death, not the kind
that goes forever,
but to saunter with
on a quiet walk home
pull my cardigan closer
layer on layer
closer and closer
so i can pull myself
together enough to stop
taking on a recognizable
form that keeps on
looking back over her
shoulders at
absolute nothing
underbrood 