My bones cut like an oasis in this room

and you have decided to live

in the shadow

of the hallucination

that promised shelter.

I promised you

I’d stay hot

but you never thought

it would come

so dry, so abandoned
like this.

“the desert”

you still creep around my edges

like the protruding roots of
our favorite birch outside
the bedroom window.
the branches scratched the glass
in gusts, and you
asked me how I was never
startled.
you said: even in nightmare,
you play it cool.
this is nightmare to you?
come cross me on an unprotected
plank and I’ll show you what nightmare
can do.

the leaves fall dead in the
winter, but the trunk
is thriving in places
hidden.  I am bathed in
slivers of moonlight and
gelid anger
watching shadows dance behind
the blinds, biding time
in heated blankets,
cusps of friendship
with men I might feign
to like to move
you.
I can feel your silent steps,
I can feel your body cross the 
garage.

you still know my home real well:
my fetal curl, my pillow smell,
and you still visit me sometimes
to trace your teeth long up
my thigh.

my ever longing service bell:
I ring, you crawl,
your incisor blades
are seeking throat.
I can smell you in her bed
all right,  but you still hold me tight
at night

like one long
and steady
choke.

With men, it was pertinent

I was both feared and

adored.

I didn’t clean things up.

I left his bathroom

stained with our attempts at

reconciliation so he knew what

once owned me;

knew what I once owned and

abandoned with silent, fervid

violence.

“the infusion”

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”

I’m two things:

but you should know

sometimes I become a noose so

tight,

you try wearing me

like a loose fitting garment,

or just one hard day’s night,

and boy, I will 

hang you.

“Saturn/south node/fourth house in scorpio”

There is no linear time. Everything is happening all at once. You may meet your own death every night and still never see it coming because you do not expect it. It is the one guarantee that we never expect. We expect love more than death. I laughed when I wrote that. You do not earn your birth or love, but you earn your death by taking your first breath on Earth.

writing is the only shot I have
recreating moments,

reinterpreting the past.

nothing ever comes back.
and my memory
begins to play
tricks on me.
and because I know,
I learn to write more
legibly.

“foretelling” or “dementia”

I need

 the force-fed fever or the fury,

the moaning or the excessive worry,

the albatross I drape

along the shapes that the shades leave on my waist

when I’m alone & in sudden need,

some emergency that forces me back under the sheets

in a pretty heavy dysthymic fit of 

missed opportunity.

we choose grapes & mud slurry

over contact every time.

we choose as if we have to:

impenitent thirst or the gentle mercy,

 the lie or the glory,

we say:

my god, how could you! or I’m sorry.

pause when agitated or doubtful

(or sink your mandible heart on them).

“I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.”

“Something spreading underground won’t speak to us,

under skin won’t declare itself,

not all life-forms want dialogue with the

machine-gods in their drama hogging down.”

–Adrienne Rich

under my therapist’s guidance,
I sit down and talk to my inner predator,
learn where all the trouble started.

now, now, listen to the guilt, it’s talking.

 I’ve always been drawn to sentences:

spent sunrise picking at covered clots;
veins growing lush with unsheltered heart,
profuse & spilling drops that
take years of self harm but
eventually
amount to
(fingers crossed)
one very
disconsolate
flood.

the salve is in the drowning.