Tag: love poem

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 a quivering knife.

“tributaries”

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I drove through
all of middle Earth
to get here;
to lean into the sharp points
of middle hurts.
in true poet’s parlance,

I am nothing but
death rehearsed.
I am nothing but
kamikaze and the
soot palms that steer it,
practice typeface.
I smile to show you
some white in this
hot, red place tonight.
I’ve got my cat suit on:
solid shoulders, strong,
curved back and a heavy head
that is full of
it    a blue cracking
heart to match.
I say where?
and you say
nothing.
smile to show you
my canines.
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” or “the red book”

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under my therapist’s guidance,
I switch chairs to talk
to my inner predator.
 now, now,
   listen to the guilt,
   it’s talking,
I want to find out more about
her; what to call her,
where she hides sometimes
before I feel her seep into
each step.

I decided to have some boundaries
with the universe;
lined the edges of my bed with
geranium and lilac threads,
lined the sills with limonium,
wove my weave with daisy.    
my tub dripped nightly:
 an altar of salt and
lavender sage.
watched my toes glide to the surface
 by a dozen votives.
tease the cat
with little splashes at her nose.
forget everything.
my entire winter
was littered with
shards of celestite
and low violin.
 I could see the sky when I wanted
from my dining room table
or on a brisk walk
to pick up oranges and Earl Gray
for the morning.
rediscovered medicine in prayer
 and herb and
 open mourning for my karmic retribution,
suddenly rectified,
suddenly deserved.
           (do you deserve the good?)

amethyst in my sock drawer and jasper
near the lamp, I held
one shout in my throat

in an effort to continue to
subjugate myself.

protect myself from myself.
protect myself from herself.

but it’s so tiring;
that anorexic
bloodlust,
insatiable mouth,
the doe eyes and
planned outfits,
the scent so close
you begin to change shape
without notice.

you begin to grow a
mandible heart.

you begin to drool.
you begin to chomp
a little at their
wrists as they hand you
something.
 I decided to get rid of my light
and aventurine,
I calmly tell her
the following week.
I tell her:

I plan to spend the year
fat; replete in web
and feast.

“gestalt”

1

it hurt
but not as much
as memory

“death (reversed)”

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before I lived in the pink room,
I made you lug every piece
of oak antique two-piece
furniture up my winding third story
walk up and set it exactly where
I wanted it before you
were done.
I only like things with value
 I gestured to someone else
and everything I owned was wooden.

when we got to the room with
the stained glass windows,
the room cut in half,
cut with four windows and
we both eyed the pale yellow
stilted glass cabinet
that looked like it came from a carnival;
one of those old machines where you put
a coin in and a fortune comes out.
double mirrors, two legs and all that
was missing was the teller inside.
you looked at me as if you knew
I would ask but
it stays.

it came with the place and
years later, I made another man
rip it to pieces,
plank by plank,
and carry it back down the stairs.
I want the mirror
I said without looking at him,
looking only at my reflection
as it glinted at me from the living
room and I carried it back to
its place while also
ignoring his pleas for warmth,
his servitude to only benefit himself,
his displays of courtship
on his knees where I never
asked him to fall.
just clean this up.

I was focused on my legs.
I was focused on my thighs.
I was focused on my torso,
my serpentine twist of a spine.
I have yet to see either of you again.
and here’s a free scroll:
like the algid vortex that
blows from the north
and coats the town in
freeze and forces those to skate
across,
I break men.

I live in a pink room
with a rectangular mirror
propped against the wall on
the floor surrounded by
cards and flowers
and at night,
she comes to me
like the riding crop
that sharpens as they gallop,
I break men.

“the mirror”

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I derive so much from one word.
The license plate that careened into the pole
instead of me that night read
“ prisons” and
I knew instinctively how he felt and
tonight I’ll do:

a spring equinox meditation.
brush my teeth.
cut grapefruit for the morning
and ride the waiting out
pay homage to my Pluto;
my twelfth house of self undoing.
i’m becoming a panacea of my own:
memory, tincture, flowers everywhere,
the fuss of first love never leading anywhere but
here in another meditation
on the river walk
and

draw my poems out of the older sutures:
undo, redress, pamper the wounds .
think about it.
send you a letter.
remember the way grief sits,
unsettled, right after dusk,
right under your chest,
right under your breath:
a blue river from your fingers.
send you that letter
with my wounds
pasted
in the margins.

reminding you to
think about it

pay homage to your Venus.
she is out,
casting cars into ditches
while you cautiously watch the lights
change.
you are holding selenite in your pocket,
standing where they
are now sitting and wilting
in screams, the way you asked:
one more chance please

you snap and they lose their
breath just like that.

“prisons” or “Venus in the 12th House”

2

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 dare to say
when she walked away,
her hand was
steadily sharpening.

 

“how guys save me in their phone”

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I step on wet cat litter
 on the way to the mirror
and ignore it.

my feet are bare,
my knees are tired,
my legs are still spent from cartwheeling down your block
all summer: bruised, broken spindles
of scabs and bravado.
I’m ignoring the gravel
under my toes.
I’m plucking my eyebrows.
I’m picking out tights.
I’m meeting someone soon.

I try on several lipsticks;
take my time with each palette,
each gloss, each burgundy line
of delusory affection drawn into
a wide, wolfish smile.
I’m nude for a while
in front of the sink;
 my dry hands are
 unwashed but I can smell flowers
on my nails as I tease my split ends
into hair bigger than it is:
rosewater from the quick spritz
 to my face to pace myself
when I feel the urge to
go back in time,
erase and retrace things in
 illusive reception,
name them things like
us or
enough so I learn how to
stop.

unfitting for grown women
and I’ll continue to falter:
cut my hair unevenly
to the nape of my neck without
sexuality,    
be  incorrect
           and often
without attachment to its correction.
take my time with mopping things,
take my time learning ruby liner,
onyx lashes,
diffusing for a while.
spit in the faucet without washing
the couple spots the stream missed
and I stay waffling between color schemes
and themes of conquest.
I remember the years of unnamed longing
and I scream as I
suddenly soften.

heels are the last to go on.
they’re uncomfortable but I
like how tall I am as I prowl past your place
so you get one last double take.
I clack over the litter without a glance back in
its direction on my way out the door and
if I’m lucky,
if I am very lucky,
I’ll teach my daughter how to shapeshift her way
 to knighthood without compromise.
without insertion.
 she can keep her crooked breasts,
her imperfection,
her relentless gaze towards furtive weight:
 martydom.
her overused adjectives that she breathes
even in her sleep,
works into every passage;
how many times can one really be amenable or
replete?      but I am
 and often.
and sorry, how many times she is sorry
when she meant to say nothing,
when she meant to say don’t call me or
yell I’m starving.

my love will have a cradle and a blanket and
a mobile with the planets hung crookedly and
 carved into the center of Jupiter
hovering far above Earth,
her mother’s favorite emblem of luck and
expansion,
with a butter knife and an old eyebrow pen
the only poem I felt strong enough
never to rework:

rest girl,
you do not earn your birth.

12.

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I am protected.

I am wet and giant
and shaking from the
waves.
I am the midnight ocean
 birthed from the absent sun
taken over by the
 full moon’s rage.
I am 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.

“reversing” or “us”

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round, tight ass and
bright, blue eyeliner.

permanent ink stain on
left hand with a note
or symbol
or something of former
value, a reminder to her
 and she is
brutally apathetic to any
male presence
of any kind.
postures.

she asked for the time and
is currently walking
away from me to
ask directions from
someone else.
she asked for the time
and turned around once more
to smile
before she asked him.

“how guys save me in their phone”

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