one time I came to in my kitchen
holding a knife over my wrist and
a phone with an unsent text
to a girlfriend
asking for help,
telling her where I was at.
these things haunt you
when you do the dishes
sometimes.
“squall”
Dear xxx,
I hope you’re happy
soon.
“How to free yourself”
but to you there’s no difference between
decimation and the resolve so you’re
palms out begging for it
and here comes the reaper
wearing your blood.
you are God-drawn,
celibate,
obsessively
testing yourself and
wrapping lovers in
protection.
what white eyes you have
even in blackness,
even in malice you take
the time to care:
line their wrists in violet,
mugwort, alyssum.
crown them in tourmaline,
rose quartz and apophyllite.
it’s your gift we’re after
hear them clap.
become the madness for
them; deliver asylum and
I love you.
it is always me on the hearth
learning chants and you
tall, wickless and
unburned beside me
so I can’t see unless I
set myself on fire
and you remember the
bind you’re in.
what it’s all about.
I already said:
it’s the titles you should
be looking at.
“this unfolds reversing” or “in pyre”
at least I give you transparency.
even when I’m moping, I’m dancing
in songs of satin
rippling with sob and shimmering
deep bright with
the sky’s opacity.
I am combusting: a
flood of recourse and
you are
drowning, immersed
in capillaries bursting with crisis
and then immediate clarity.
my hands let go of the
flood I’m cradling.
you watch me move
like a snake across your
ceiling draped in shifting
constellations
you have no choice but to
memorize and I’m wearing
the crescent as a crown and
your ears like a gown
and someone else is full of warnings
gutting rabbits
in the garden.
each night I go to God and ask
for favor.
in the morning, I remember
one line.
I hand them back their most
prized possession:
a page, one line;
one at a time
wrapped in
flakes of
shrimp and you
told me you were
STARVING.
“aquarium”
- Big picture: I don’t belong anywhere.
- Small picture: Buy bed.
January 5, 2014 and we
have arrived in
North Philadelphia.
“hypothymia”
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.
1.
consult the oracle again.
wear what you want,
let these animals control themselves
my tiny ball of citrine says so
I put on my cat suit
and go for a walk
to catch tan in the new
big sun. it was a long winter
of regression, needs unmet
and anchored in self by
a weighty repression,
lamps and the length of
my ire stretched, permanent,
coming undone on your pillow
where you wept in peace
until I charged back in
costumed in tank.
i’ve blown the tea lights out;
my presence is altar,
sit naked in the eyeline of the fan and
spools of smoke from bamboo incense
crown my head I am showered,
manicured, my skirt is barely an inch of fabric
containing my pubic bone or
buttox so they’re stuck
to me like sweat hot salt
sticks dripping down my skin.
I dab some tiger’s eye oil and jasmine
on my wrists,
brush their arms with
my nails, cut through centers,
stop absentmindedly to change song
and let
their thighs press my thighs,
their forearms hit mine.
it’s the invitation I am waiting
for. there are
ambulances wailing all over town
carrying victims of stroke
with blood rushing upward
forming an arrow,
the fletching pointing to their throat.
they feel the beat of wings
before they feel
my hands wrap their larynx
and the first thing they tell me:
you’re full of secrets.
“catcalls”
the medium between
complacency in vengeance
or photosynthesis
is God.
“transition”
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