smirk.
black lipstick and naked eyes and
lied about time when I asked her.
she looked at her wrist to
count the hearts but missed an
hour and she is
dulled,
not rusty but
blunt and I know
when she walked away,
her hand was
steadily sharpening.
“how guys save me in their phone #6”
perfunctory
and evil like a tease,
slow to build and
protected by sheer
want
an alarm.
a storm brims the coast
and you start writing down
anything you remember
about me.
I am undulating in great
tidal gasps; a siren
sights set on horizon,
humming low, humming
softly and
come in closer
splayed across the break.
your arid soul is thirsty for the
new oasis I’ve become
but your obtrusive leaps
are doused in hex
before they ever reach me.
you are responsible for
some of this and
I am responsible for
that.
my bed is soaked
and I am angry.
black in vengeance cloaks
in white to walk the streets
the way furtive angels might.
you send me butterflies
at night
to assuage me.
I return the offer:
I dress in wings,
suck the nectar from the
dusk’s flowers,
learn her tales,
twist into my final form:
a long nightmare,
black hairy legs and
two tagmata,
one long dry choke
at the stroke of
3:33 every
morning onward.
you spend the year immured
in poetry and pieces
of half finished themes
obsessing over everything
you turn to see.
over everything you thought you
saw out of your
unrelenting periphery,
how many twins do I own?
thought you
dreamed and wrote
down, unwind,
which moon did I come out of
and how many wolves
did I set free last night?
I become immune.
you become the
stranded calf in
my forest while
I spend the year
immersed in baths of
black obsidian and
forgetting what it
ever meant to
me.
“us, reversing”
one day I had a dream
you bit the head off of a blue jay
and spit it back into her nest.
when I asked why you said:
To prove you will never leave me.
here I am,
on command about to run
across the canyon and I
laugh real loud in my
skin tight
dress:
the one cut real low in the back
in the shape
of an obtuse
triangle;
jarring contrast to my
scared-straight spine
but I still
slouch.
I twist the straw into crooked pieces
and tell myself things:
make sure they know
you are having
a real good time
show your teeth
hearty laugh
with belly and mouth and your
lips are stretched to the limits like your
social apathy.
show your full moon eyes
and hide.
hold your tonic like a wand;
fall asleep
inside of yourself
in the middle of
everything.
later, he will show
you photographs
to prove you were
there.
if you are lucky,
he notices the story
dripping from your
eyes, the door
opening, the splash
of scarlet on your tights
as you replace each page,
as you become the
walking lake flooding
the wake that held
you, and he becomes
the witness that love
is shaking sometimes
but still sharp
and with purpose,
the utility that seizes
to deconstruct,
to create with its
efficacy,
to create layers
and cut through them,
distorting to repair
or make more of less,
make more of one solid square,
make moats of larger masses
retaining density.
not the surgeon or the stitch
but the undulation,
the quiver of the knife.
“tributaries”
I come over wearing
everything I own:
a pack that stalks
and stays together in lunge,
a freshly oil-stoned
suit of knives and
the bled-dry opaline
home that I nest in,
my cozy coronation robe:
my clanking vest that
announces my arrival to
your home.
it is me
wreathed in
all my men’s
bones.
“Hecate”
I have innumerable theories about
myself because people have told me
who I am and I was
unsturdy, unstable, in tantrum,
unfed in many ways.
I watched a lot of screens.
I used to stare at my face in the mirror
to watch it change and I used
to talk to plants.
called it “plant math.”
a way of division. always
start with subtracting then
adding then multiplying.
at a young age, I grasped death
by cutting worms in half and watching
bugs eat other bugs.
you can say this even if you can’t
say psychopath.
I felt nothing watching worms
writhe except giant and I slapped
two friends across the face
before I was ten.
classify the dormant into boxes
and you have a child who will
spend all day behind a shed doing
“plant math” until she has created
a science.
I know three things about myself:
“the act of refutation”
I’ve shoved my current project
to the side of my mouth
because I am bursting with
decisiveness and for once,
can you even believe
that I chose perplexity,
a saint’s patience,
not begging,
ruining it anyway
just so I can sit here like
a lonely bitch tied to
outdoor patio furniture
waiting for the sun to go
down or for their master to step
out?
just panting and sitting in
her own piss,
shedding like crazy,
bewildered at the sky’s
sudden brightness,
conditioned to salivate when
your screen door opens
as if I even have a spare
drop to lose in this
heat.
GIVE IT TO ME.
“bells”
this is fresh.
like when my cat’s claw gets stuck
in my fingertip or when I
bump my elbow on the armoire.
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 rage.
“the red book (revisited)”
they are not shocked that I have
tattooed every lover’s glyph
along the stitching of my skin
but that I repeat the same story:
I have never, ever loved.
“yet such grand displays for men
that have touched you!”
I glare.
in general, I glare.
you can fuck three thousand men
and fall into each one’s abyss and
never touch a feeling but
no one believes me when I say
I have never, ever loved.
“yet you repeat their name with
such fever I think you may be
sick.”
I cough just to get attention.
if we are in a room full of people
and no one has looked my way
for seconds, I clear my throat.
no one believes me when I say
I am a pacified nihilist.
“yet you lend your hand to
every thing and the way you wear
your man’s cologne makes me
think you want so deeply.”
I want to sit still.
I walk the streets wrapped in
beats, a phrase tattooed on my
tongue. a glyph for everyone
I sung to.
(toss five dollars in his cup)
I have never, ever loved.
“the seraphim”
we both saw the lighting storm
and we both held metal rods
under a tree
like we deserved it or
like we just wanted the tingle back,
confusing amends with self slaughter.
we could just enlist–
bring kerosene to the housewarming and
tell your friend,
pour this here
gesture to our clothes
and necks.
hold hands.
watch us try to put
the other out first
so you believe you can
long without conditions.
consider love and
freedom exist at the
same time.
here is what I demand:
eye contact.
a witness.
an extinguisher.
your fit in vocabulary,
whether fresh or stored
or researched but
directed right at me
so I can hear the way your irritation wrestles,
the way you covet remorse and old marks
and I have a new cane to brand you;
mahogany wood hand carved,
if you ever just laid down to take it,
my sting.
let your silence make way for screams
and welts, not fair?
well. that’s what I deserve.
but you don’t believe in any of it
or that you are growing a handlebar
mustache and I’m squirming, in bondage,
under a metal rod under a tree,
amorphous so I can slip free
and the sky is finally black enough.
the antonym of black is everything
at once.
consider love and self-sacrifice
exist at the same time.
consider my ethics and organic
expression.
consider I’d be real dumb
about it.
consider my skin would melt like
altar prayers, wax and I’d be
wasted sending rain, a lake,
a splash your way.
me, avoiding water.
me, melting.
me, disintegrating just to rise in
white like an osprey or
an egret,
perched and
habitual,
seasonal.
graceful, large, eyes on
the prey.
consider love and altitude
exist at the same time.
“the long flight”
carried with her
a weapon: her keys in hand,
a disarming speech pattern
and no reason to suspect
her about anything.
I never tell a lie,
she said
leading me to
someone else’s house.
(how do you get away with that?)
I just never finish the story,
she said and I
hung there like a
Christmas ornament
glistening in her iris.
“How guys save me in their phone #12”
daturamoon.com 