Tag: love poem

you can shake your fist at any
foaming coast but her
break remains unscathed,
her scorn in
waves,
her calm in
 tides,
wet snarls pacified in
moon-swept stages
depending on the time of month,
the climate or the
stage.

you are barefoot:
some pedestrian gesture of
 worship.
shrine.
avoiding the shells and
ghost crabs that litter the beach
at gloaming.
you’re wild and roaming
 again seeking to slice wrists
with guilt and urgency,
pretension,
steal the scissors from his girlfriend’s
pocket.
                    what’s it like to be a hypnotist?
take a seat.
notice your veins rock,
glisten with munition.

life’s a seething blade
and you wear yours deep in your lungs.
the ways you have learned to assuage
are more permanent in placement
if you face it when you
say it.
write it on the page.
have them sing it with
vexation.
have them say it out loud and
curse themselves.
you watched your hands become tributes
to iniquity so you ask your feet
to become your fingers
now,
nothing from your mouth
going forward.

watch your toes curl in the sand
before you start wading.
you are practicing the dying art of
self-restraint.
you are practicing
prayer, overdo
amends.
you are seeking a quiet rest
inside of  yourself.
you are seeking the
 sudden wreck
that laid you.

 

I.

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I read a note out loud to myself:
everything that is really hard
is going to save your life
and a blackbird landed on the branch
outside my living room
window.
still, their eyes small and
sharp
waiting to dive,
waiting for the buzz of cicadas
to start again.

that reminds me,
I say in my head,
i’m emaciating.
I take a sip of water.
starved from the looking
without touching and
I want too much
has many meanings.
I read the words aloud again
and pour myself a thimble
of almonds.

i begin to charm him,
untie a ribbon from her
rib cage and kneel,
tie his wrists together
and lick his inner thigh.
someone asks
and then?

and then you become the
braced masochist
and I become
the looming hit.

“maelstrom”

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this is fresh.
like the last word
someone said
or you losing to find
old photographs
of you unsure of
yourself in a graveyard
set to the mountains
at sunset like you couldn’t
imagine not being there
or having that.
because it was there it was outside
and you were there.
the last time you look at a place.
the space between states,
the plane ride to your
brother’s coma
this is fresh.


this is the last time you’ve ever
seen or heard from someone.
my cool affect, my rehearsed
temperature that I am clutching,
I watched waves take things away.
do you know how close i stood to the water
that day?
the sky was black and full of lightning,
swollen with compulsion.
a tropical storm touched the
ocean and on instinct,
 it swallowed itself.
 my aunt screamed,
came to grab me and
carried us both up to the house.

i cried about a flip flop
drifting in the current on the shore,
begging her to go back.
you can’t tell anything
about a statue
except it’s resting form
 but i have experienced forty,
 maybe more,
 deaths.

cool
but if you ever saw the contents of
my purse: the twisted straws,
the clutter, lists of
things to get or hold,
you would see
 that peevish child
taunting the ocean’s
grip and dashing,
longing for her
endless swaddle,
 invincible in
execution and
carried. 

“the bay”

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my notepad is open
and my hand is smudged
with ink, the lists.
the things I’m naming:

ways to feel unsettled in transition,
states, or,
I mean the way they wave
as you drive,
and the way the birds landed
on the trees outside my stained-
glass window.
all the while thinking people
should just understand
like they had your history
with them and
feelings.

my mom once hung a “feelings’ chart
on my door
so I could circle the face that
most resembled mine.
was it envy driving this
appetite? me,
always shaking in some corner,
full bladder,
crumbs on my lips,
dictating, taking,
moving everyone to room
to game.

 

I don’t talk much
sometimes.
actually sometimes I
let my mind molder
like an untended peach,
just growing brown and soft,
unused, inedible,
 unexamined any further.
put everything I own in trashbags
and toss it out.
   it’s called a cleanse.
I do this every year.

but in malice, the brambles
that i’m tied to,
dauntlessness prevails,
action, cardinal,
bitter.
they always say i’m bitter.
give me coffee,
watch me run in circles,
flash my tongue.
what it’s like to rule like queen:
favors coming at you and people
trembling in their seats,
the gluttony, the theft,
the power
What do I want?
and at your leisure.

my leisure:
the growth between getting
and having,
if there is truth that people never
change, I guess I am stuck
 somewhere on a trail
walking.

“the long walk”

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i go on a smolder binge.
lick my lips
like you are licking me
from inside
the lens
my lips are drier
 than they look,
pursed slightly,
fuschia with a hint of quiver,
black corset with the straps
 pulled down to reveal
soft breasts and
rock hard shoulders
used to baring the brunt
of the pain they
spill to me
and expect me to carry. 

I trace a broken nail
over the length of my clavicle
to remind the camera
I have been touched
before.
he says my eyes are “bright”
and pauses for impact.

they are traced with
 sharp blue pen
smudged with charcoal and
unblinking, wide open
ready to receive and a very
false articulation of how
 I actually feel
when touched.
as if a question appeared,
I answered,
    I am usually shut tight,
     braced for impact

thinking of finger-filled nights,
someone else’s on mine,
sternum pillows,
tonight im
missing hem,
torn stockings,
dirty feet and unkempt nails
with grime underneath
picking at the past.

its perpetual,
a haunting you can’t
name,
your death or
is it everything in
between?

“vanity”

 

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we did gestalt chair therapy
and something called
“parts therapy”
in an effort to rectify the wrongs
I felt from childhood,
and the way I walked,
crooked, hunched a bit
 like
I was always remembering something:
either a feeling
or a future and
trying to get nearer
 but also, barbed,
alert yet
oblivious to any real danger
coming my way
because my spine was made of a
Tyrannosaurus Rex.
it rode the whole back of me
as I pranced along towns.

when i see her,
she has wings and she is twinkling, sort
of glimmering wherever she goes.
her hair is shaped like
a mask, and her eyes are bright
green,
slitted,
she is wearing all black.
she has put a spell on
a whole group of men,
walking through the
city with her hands out
and humming to her
stations.
touching thighs,
touching arms,
waiting for invite
and crouching.

sometimes covering her mouth,
hiding laughter.

and then sort of
bowing with an accent,
saying thank you
so much.
what did you ask me?
what does today feel like?
it feels sharp,
hidden like a cobra
but fast and willful
like a pierce
that ends you.
or is it the force I’m forgetting?
how a beast can survive
devastation and with no knowledge of
your history or sentiment about them,
ravage you with
one bite,
pulling you underwater,
twisting you as you bleed
into their teeth,
every limb suddenly free
of burdening socket.

“the alligator”

 

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this is fresh.

like when my cat’s claw gets stuck
in my fingertip or when I
bump my elbow on the armoire
he let me keep.
things only last for seconds unless
they are eternal like
God’s choir,
mass extinction,
our howls like bells
like doom
like fate.

 

I try to tell too many
that this has happened before but
never with the same
patterning; the cavern
patience that’s filled with
liminality   me in the
tub and dreaming.
I have no fear of the color
hazel or unmade beds
or the way you let your fingertip
trace my thigh’s Baphomet
 as you turn to me
and say 

this will never end.

 

I bet you never say a word.
I’ll grow to equatorial proportions
and bellow.
I have no fear of
mirrors, men,
mirages or monsters.
I have no fear of depth.
I have no fear of flight
or landing, heat
or frozen streams.
those talons.
those waves.
those headlights.
I have no fear of death.

you? you will know me
by my sudden strength:
silence and never seen
again the same way.


“the red book (revisited)”

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she talked to me all day
 in riddles and I welcomed
 her gentle incursion,
 the way she enunciated certain
 things and said y’all
 and quite frankly charmed
 while armed    broke men with a
 chain or a flash of knee
or surreptitious motive
 and I held steady
 with one open eye
 and crossed arms
 and no plan to move
 in either direction
 when she asked if I still
 favored her.

not a single person in this town
 knew her and not many
 elsewhere.
 if it were up to her,
 she said,
 she’d disappear without a trace
 into the ocean
 or a foreign life
 leaving a legacy of
 riddles and ghosts that
favored her but not one
 in a bed, or
 several chained in a
yard not able
 to break through the
bushes to door.
 yes, I still favor you.

wore a veil,
 wore a shrouded smirk and
 moved wide but
 never wanted anyone to
 recognize her face.
 in the sun,
 became a mist
 wafting wearily
 through rows of houses,
 blocks and noting
 trash, and noting straws,
 noting needles,
 and a penchant for
heart.
 in the dark,
 a trace of flame
 from distant candle but
 never here.
 still,

 ok, howl.
 if you placed her in a cage
 full of rocks and
 sunk her to the bottom of
the mariana trench with enough oxygen
to last her the swim back up,
 she’d find every school,
 hold the middle,
 let the sides be eaten in
 her disguise,
 ride their backs back up,
 wash up on a dolphin
 at your feet, half dead,
 blue, freezing and with an unctuous
 grin just to prove
you still favor her.

“Saturn in Scorpio” or “how guys save me in their phone, reversed”

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“I have no future plans,” I began calmly.
      I am arms outstretched
walking nowhere but with
ardency so
I am labeled,
whimisical and manic
like a wound up
fairy, the character that
keeps the music box

spinning
that leapt from its
little gold coiled post
sprinkling glitter,
growing nerves and
ankles that bend flat
to walk to run to
crawl

people like me because I have no plans,
am honest about it, and
have wings that carry weapons.    I
hear in a distance
   someone repeat it

I use intimidation as a tactic to seize opportunity


Well, I also use black magic

“seven of cups”

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I believe in wormwood,
dried root,
my brother’s ashes
in a silver heart or
a ceramic urn
locked in vase
locked in mirrored chest;
a chant, a poem.
datura when the time
is right.

sometimes I do ceremony,
sometimes I just let things pass.
we do that for others,
carry our grief quietly,
bury things deep
within ourselves.
but sometimes in a fit,
I spill over.
tell you everything.

you said
I like to swim
so I am braised with razor;
become a carnation lake
at your feet and
you said rain–
I like gardens.
so I condensed and
waited to show off my new arms
lined in fresh alyssum.
my cycle     I always meet them in
winter
where my only
light is moon.
my flowers blossom
under the chilled night,
drip a dark nectar and
I am thirsty and
you already know–
I believe in
altar.

I believe in overflowing
chalice.  you believe in
holding space for growl,
holding me with
distance.
you watch me lay the
dill in bowl, line the bed
with tourmaline.
run the bath with
chamomile and yarrow.
I am full of tincture now.
I can move like a jaguar:
slow and black and
hungry.
I am hard to see that way.
you said
I am game.

you’ve been watching
jaguars move,
you’ve been memorizing motion,
I drape myself in constellation
so you can better see me,
storm so you can better feel
me and I traipse across the forest
floor waiting to be found.
my tonsils growing
chelicerae,
my rib cage growing legs,
my bottom becoming fat
with thread and
I know what you like
and I know that
you are game.

you are writhing
game in tiny, tiny
snowflake threads
hung far above the
ground.
 switch places
I become the woods
encircling your howl.
you become the kicking,
breaking patch,
the river marked
by footprints, then
lost, then drowned.

in winter
it is long and dark
and hard to contain
myself
gorged with nectar
hidden by
the wind.
sometimes we do that for
others: hide our
spines.
you watch me prey;
sip the drip of
the effulgent crescent
bulb I worship.
you become the shivering
deer, caught fly,
gutted bunny hooked in

jaw.

I become the
scorned red bath,
the woods,
the bottom.

 

“datura moon”

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