I keep a bromeliad at the doorway
to protect me with her spikes
“I have opened it.”
–Alfred Tennyson’s last recorded words
marrow cage
pinned under his sex and a
a grab for steady wages,
three thousand pages of
unique rejections
and my wrists are bound
together by self denigration.
a noticeable attachment to water,
currents or anything that’s
palpable,
a noticeable longing for windows.
my veneration for absence.
a noticeable longing for door knobs,
my admiration for sadists
and what they take,
an unwavering self-beratement
tightening the joints of bone bars,
my masochistic streaks
and the interminable door
slamming shut
and less concerning to everyone
involved:
a noticeable absence of love.
“door #1” or “the daydreams”
“there is heaven inside of you.
other things too.”
–responses from God during meditation, 07/17/17, 8:43 pm
“Name your torture,”
one of them said
cutely.
I wanted an orchard
but I swallowed the vodka
he handed me
willingly.I don’t believe in simplicity
or explaining the meaning behind things
it’s why I write poetry
I say with a hint of clarity.
you are buried deep underground
like winter’s favorite
slaughter,
spring’s daughter
Persephone
in her tomb of
bone and gold.
you are the sudden
eruption of fruit on vine,
and fences lined with
a crust of
flowers.
you wraith like honeysuckle
and rage in thorns.
you are both
the rising,
and the metamorphosis:
the lasting arrival.
you are the dark queen
in her final hours
returned to Earth
to wage a
war.
you are Persephone’s
final futile hours
screaming at the flowers,
soaking everything in
massacre.
“the crusade”
but in the sun
I’m thirsty,
let me be a rose about it:
dew sprung,
rained on in
blood red gown,
opening.
something always
noticed; something
often picked
even lined with
thorns.
1.
You send me butterflies
at night
to assuage me,
but it doesn’t take the sting
of ambivalence away.
I return the offer:
I dress in wings,
suck the nectar from
dusk’s flowers:
a long nightmare,
a black balloon,
one long dry choke.
You spend the year immured
in poetry and pieces
of half finished dreams,
obsessing over everything
you see.
I become immune.
I spend the year
immersed in beds of
black obsidian and
forgetting what it
ever meant to
me.
who’s the wolf
and who’s the deer?
Run a bath of rose quartz and
whisper those three words
you’ve been dying
to hear:
this unfolds,
reversing.
“datura moon”
watch your men,
girl.
they are starting to talk,
shiver,
watch you
from a distance .
all that glitters is usually filtered
unless God is involved.
It’s winter and I’m not
cloaked in night yet?
You’re taking the long way home;
passing by my
window for a peek of
my flickering lights,
my private worship,
my fire tongue
now burning itself to a
cinder, cooling with the drops
of pinprick blood
dripping down my
altar.
And I’m preparing to
skin the ash from myself,
drape in only white,
and twirl through these
cold months
with algid splendor.
I am seen by many
but never touched.
For you, given our
history, that seems very
advantageous, and despite
my proclivity for sudden flight,
my growing meridian wings,
something is keeping me
here.
Something is keeping me
floored, and despite my
recurrent lake coffin
premonition,
something is keeping me dry,
safe on shore
and alive.
daturamoon.com 