“Consider your own setting foot
in the heart’s desire:
you might not be this happy again.
Look at it this way,
as if it were real,
as if you were singing to the household saint
who grew tired of waiting and sang to himself
til the whole house was certain
and singing again.”
From The Inspector of Miracles in a “Life Without Speaking” by Mary Reufle
Part 3: the act of taming things
“Being born again and again has torn your smile into pieces.”
–Adrienne Rich
rafters lit with strobe lights,
smoke lines,
broken paneled reflections of
thirty years of bottled insights,
throttled insides.
the air is laced with metallic smiles,
a camaraderie that’s uninviting
and sporadic flickers
of someone else’s lighter.
I rock in the center absentmindedly.
I have no business stopping by.
you watch me with
staggered silence and
constantly,
smile wide and big and
sudden.
I’m impacted in seconds,
sides of me are split,
flowing as I stand
idle.
your smirk some
blunted rifle.
you watch me mask my panic
with ten plus years of
a bawling inner child,
unmanageable reflexes
that end in stifled violence,
milky looks and a muted
predatory hunger.
I am wearing
my best calf impression:
slow,
doe-eyed and anxious.
blue tights, black heeled boots that
scuff the floor as I
wander as I daydream in public;
rub a soft elbow,
sip a virgin seltzer tonic with
cherries and some other
light garnish.
stay as close to God as possible
watch you with marrow armor and
calculated patience and I am a spinning
blue black swirl of approachable
sainthood.
twirl somewhere nearby and deign to give you
open eyes for at least
twenty seconds at a time.
you crack a joke and
my laugh is deep,
loud,
brays right through you
like a swaying knife.
you asked for it.
“first dances”
but i’m a martyr for this,
I crave repercussion;
even self-abnegation
needs an audience
or else it’s just plain masochism
lonely and acerbic
without the gentle recompense,
the moist poultice,
the final amends:
the touch of her
sadist’s fingertips
after she laid her.
all cathedrals use pain as payment
and my crucifixion,
while self inflicted,
is just as spilling
brook and baneful.
my bloodletters will wash
the splashes from my feet,
take their time
with each laceration;
stitch
my gashes
into temples.
“Lilith”
The train was fifteen minutes
late and I was
one month
and counting.
“the accident”
they couldn’t take the
wanderlust,
the exhausting sadness,
all day naps,
three week periods, and
not even a fake smile but
always a goblet.
moonshine as promised.
I was a little
overgrown gerbil:
dependent, sitting in my cedar-scented
piss in a lounge chair in the backyard
picking pine needles out of my knots;
hollow but for some force fed
swallows,
rum-coated water,
stale lines and organic vegan pop-tarts.
a shriveling income and
hooked in my dejection;
my lifeline,
my blooming red moon.
centuries of howls and hands like
needles doping me
so I’m easier to ride,
and my braided tongue
lolling,
trying to unwind,
just licking up all the
shit
you fed to me.
with love,
you said.
“best wishes”
I wish I had more words for
“terrorized.”
just another verse
picking at its stitches,
grunting from the dark and
taking educated guesses at the Rorschach blot
that spreads across its skirt.
but writing with cadence,
inflection, downplaying
it with rhythm as you
try to capture the humiliation of
all the little violations
that add up to today
without one strong word
or accurate verb
to describe the way a knife
sticks for a second and you moan
the wrong way.
what sounds better to you?
I say over coffee, trying to
finish some titles.
“besieged” or “PTSD”
or simply
“raped?”
“the act of naming things”
daturamoon.com 