kiss her fingers and say:
you are a jungle.
I stretch,
yawn,
and out falls a
knuckle.
What does love feel like?
she asks.
I turn,
cough,
and out falls another.
kiss flowered mouth through teeth
and say:
like a wet machete
ripping through the jungle
“camouflage”
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.
Death reversed.
I am nothing but
kamikaze and the
soot palms that steer it,
a blaze of worst thoughts,
typeface and colossal remorse.
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.
“the red book”
I’ve always been drawn to sentences:
spent sunrise picking at
covered clots carpet soaked with
unsheltered heart:
profuse and spilling drops that
take years, nights of picking and
other forms of self harm
but eventually amount to
one abrupt and disconsolate
flood. I’m upright,
soaked in streams,
copper rivers and caged
in sore body and
the newest sun.
smear some blood from my thumb
as I pick up my phone to
take a picture of my torn knees
in the rising dawn.
find a filter first.
“sepia”
to cloak my embattled joints
(hide your armor)
before I send you the veiled snapshots
about it.
I’m not obvious in
torture. I’m not
obvious in scar
but I have spent
previous lives hung and
spurned for your enjoyment.
define retribution.
when you finally see me
again, I’m a smirk on a lynx
peeking
through a grove of bush:
dead quiet in pursuit,
low to the ground
holding steady for
pounce.
you will feel my jaws
land before you feel the beat
of my pulse.
if I am anything first,
it is a woman
of course.
“lilith”
I am releasing the stiffness:
years of posing, postured
and pacing, chasing
gratification.
I’m indulgent at
least, greedy when
touched and hoarding.
when you drop the straw,
the miracle happens.
clutching at the edges of everything
for security, my life of
picked up pennies and
spinal pain from bending over
and taking it, from being prideful
in my penurious form,
twisting myself into smaller
shapes.
crowned and the oracle reminds me
of that swirling storm,
I’m near to, right outside
and.
heavy is the head
that little lie about
choice.
“the tower” or “two of swords”
for some of us,
freedom was a legend;
a cage of smudged windows
and insatiable longing,
a crippled twirl,
pace
around the apartment
with a wand in hand,
repetitive crescendo in head
or the sudden broken glass
on the porch,
the
knot of fervent caterpillars
sliding through my guts and
prematurely spilling out onto the floor,
dissolving into pools of blood
like little girls ripped in pieces
in the midst of a tornado’s whirl
when they should have hid in the cellar,
waited patiently,
incubated like their wild brothers
anchoring in the moisture of a soft,
hemorrhaging sarcophagus
before they soar;
destroy their cotton packages
and hatch into thin air.
when the day is finally warm
and facing them, they
tear through the tether
unbridled in
exodus, unimpeded
and ready to transform into grand ideas
and take off without interruption
like the little girl’s
scorn;
now grown,
an envoy of acrimony
and the blue-black tones of
home and I pause here to ask myself
before I commit to the
flight,: what does metamorphosis
really feel like?
ask for knowledge,
wait for the visceral reply:
my skin
tearing at the thread of
each inside, each wound
stretching wide
for me to see, wide
like an orbit
enough to case the sky
and black inside turned
outside; now
black each wing of
bone and vine,
black my eyes and
black the sea I shoot
from; everything I touch is black
like me,
and I can see for miles.
“transition (pt.2”
when it came to me
you said I was all
muscled positivity
as if I didn’t hang myself once before;
as if I didn’t try to tell you
how cavernous a grin is,
or anything at all.
even though you are never sure I won’t
find that perfect bedsheet knot
or not or a razor or a kitchen knife
or a drunk night on the freeway and I’m
headfirst in the cement mixer
but I made it out of that
in jail and alive and I am
always palms clasped and grateful.
you say you pray
with FERVOR as I finger the locket,
my brother’s ashed clasped
around my throat
and I hold onto
that same little lie
about choice.
I let go of the wild lavender
sprouting from your toes through
the hints of splattered paint.
there’s a meadow in your abdomen
coaxing foxes from their
holes your knees knock mine,
sudden sting close and sharp
the way memory sits on your skull
then pulled back
how you held me
far away sometimes;
making wind happen
blowing kisses from the pines.
the bath is on, I’m cold.
you always say
I’m cold.
I beckon to the side:
you and I are from the same
arctic sky.
help me in so I feel
the frost of your fingertips
trace me;
my broken back to you now.
my nails are brown tipped and filthy
from digging myself out of my ancestral
grave and I’m spattered in the ,
sweat from a hard night’s day,
walking alleys, stalking shadows
and you’re truly unremarkable
these days save
the mosaic of carpenter’s paint,
some gray cement
garden: no flora, no fauna,
and even God told me to pause
and rest on my previous laurels
before I get carried away.
but i’m a martyr for this,
God,
I crave repercussion
I become a
yawning, clanking watering can
spritzing your open lips,
dolling up your stolid ground
to birth your stories:
pollen murals out of micro gestures,
extinguished longing that suddenly reignites and
I’m grabbing cattails from the gales to
comb out the tangles of your childhood,
fistfuls of mud planting seeds in the
tiny cracks around your chest that my own
sharp-toothed grief left when you
muttered the first
no and I stepped a few
years back.
freedom will teach you how
to stay in all new ways.
there is no difference
between love and liberation
and some were born saints,
you say as you help me
in the mugwort bath,
the smell of rose and lavender.
I plucked the petals and dropped
them one by one
for aesthetic reasons.
not free of indulgence, but
patient your fingers make
stems in the water.
“hurricane”
all day long
I vacillate between intention
and immediate withdrawal;
my habits, my beloved
hermeticism and the double meaning of
everything and I’m
ambivalent about every choice
I’ve given myself over to–
even in completion,
I shrug.
let the wind take me.
now I am in blindfold,
a preparation and I am forced to
declare it.
your arms are free
someone drew two swords and
showed me and I am superstitious,
lining wrists with crystal rosary and
jasmine smoke and tea and
smashing my fists into a
mirrored wall to feel the way
(across)
it might when I finally
say something,
when I finally stand still enough
to embrace the thing that’s
said.
7.
things I like:
symmetry and
the act of naming things,
the synthesis of dream and
disorderly thinking, and my bout
of many hidden rituals
like a drunk blossom,
full and suddenly
noticed
“Leo”
I was so broke
and depressed. sometimes I forget
that. it was the depression that was pinning me
to my apartment after you left;
keeping me locked there
keeping me imprisoned.
I let someone use my old Access card to pick their
lock so it did come in handy
after all.
I’ve put on no weight but I’m
satiated and all security is an illusion.
numbness had me
making more terminable plans
with bathtubs
bu some small joy always carried me:
my cat Alize,
always and
a used and discarded turquoise shelf
I found when I was out.
I hung it loosely on the wall,
without commitment and the wood
became immediately blackened by my incense cones.
the corners splintered and were
dripping rosary,
rarely dusted and topped with pictures
of my deceased:
Nana, Papa, Anselm Hollo,
other clients, friends I knew
in childhood and
unknown cousins,
guinea pigs,
first dog Pepper,
my first dead brother
or third dead uncle.
always drink or suicide,
something tragic when it comes
to my family but
I’m still here and
brave, I think.
in a few different ways
but I want cleansing
so I tear it from the wall,
I’m stripping the floral siding
with my fingernails,
peeling the paint back to white
to present to you
a dusted start.
I wear black skirts with lace
lining for the cats,
rain boots when I go out,
drawn shades with a smirk,
and nothing when you start
to come about.
6.
well, they always start
the same way:
in winter, it always starts in
winter when I am my weakest.
I am usually unsettled,
raving at the window,
the frost,
the cracks in my joints announcing
themselves in arthritic temper.
you’re so young
I’m so young at this.
inexplicably manic
during the darkest months,
at times I know I should
be sleeping but I am reaching
for anything that reaches
back.
in truth, I am a nihilist and
men didn’t teach me that
nothing ever matters and
nothing is ever coming back.
I watch my days get dragged away by tides
that become encroaching swells
and think to myself,
well, it always starts
with a storm.
I am a nihilist,
nobody had to teach me
that and no men
held that void quite like
I can hold that void.
they mocked me and I let
them and mired in my
constructed reality I now feel
a thirty year repression
birthing from a well,
from a heavy pour
and it carries eels like
lightning, the nose of sharks,
their discarded carcasses like
past betrayals coming next.
you like rain?
a little deluge for your
flight.
I feel no obligation
to anything:
my rectitude,
our plans,
or my penciled tips
on how to revitalize
warehouse row,
I’m tired and
my want for self grows and ends
in impatient provocation,
your spiral notebook,
the bottom of the ocean
as the engine fails.
and you say
well, anything can be
contained in a cloud.
to which I reply,
catastrophe as well
“the well”
daturamoon.com 