Tag: poets of wordpress

 

don’t you ever take away my joys,
my labor organizing or autonomy.
i’m speaking liberally,
predictive and
coded with demands.
I haven’t shaved in days,
developed musk and am
running fingers down my legs
to watch them in the mirror
creep like Daddy Longlegs.
calling ghosts, I say
but like a broken record
and starting with
don’t you take away
my joys, make me
deferential.
I’ll cut my hair clean off,
you’ll see

but there’s only three feet
between us and I’m leaning.
 wait for me
to throw my locks all over
your kitchen table.
rest my skinned skull
on your knee, Venus is
obsessed but well,
I begin to get up fast
 just as happily.
it always starts with a well.

walk by the little girl
in the well.
don’t fall down the well.
watch out for the well.

“the well” (for Pluto in my third house)

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normally
I just open the door
and walk right in
but this time I decide
I should be invited.
founded on repetition as the old adage
of classical conditioning,
some things work best in saturation,
a vacuum
and unrevealed to the participants.
this is an examination of ethics.
no, an examination of motive.
same thing, the query being:
is it stronger when stated?
as the querant believes,
it is stronger with want
regardless of
palpable confirmation.
want is hope in modern language
and the most consensual
exchange of felt.

either way,  it is
best to have some controls.
I arrive, same fashion,
dramatically.
you have been out in
the snow with your friends
and enjoying the view
of the constellations above
when you hear the twig snap.
you will see their yellow eyes to
your right as you react
and you will be alone
suddenly like that compelled
to walk right in
before you see me cloaked,
walk right out.
you say I am the coldest, darkest
thing you’ve ever met but
my two dogs are
licking your frozen cheek
as you lie beneath my feet,
a sturdy boot on top
of your face, me baring down
without much weight but
pressure of depth.
but you seem colder than that.

you are face down
becoming the tracks.
I am taller than you expected,
yes?

2.

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I am up by dawn, or close
to it, again.
thinking this is what true love
is doing; proving habit,
demanding morning study.
this has happened before and
every time it happens,
it is strengthened so much so
that what has woken me is
an old phrase you said to me.
I could hear you fumbling with it;
an act of reflection while in stalemate.
how long can obstinacy maintain the
buoyancy of flight?
I am learning to stay fresh and put
and you are summarizing yourself
with an inaccuracy that doesn’t
need me yet.

I heard you rereading it one morning
to yourself, no doubt
questioning your word choice
as I stretch, be careful what you
say.
but I know what you meant.
and I know what you like.

there are rules to this though.

“the act of naming things”

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sometime late January
you spent the night with a woman
watching the moon grow.
come take me in my own abattoir,
my thesaurus.
I unrolled my tongue
ready for our first kiss
 and out spilled
someone else’s lung.
how did these things
ever get here?
I wonder aloud.

I had created a dalliant
stockyard in my bed
 to occupy us:
red-hot,
full of other people.
you were outside in a corduroy jacket
counting her freckles
as I was slicing the outside of
someone’s arm
to crawl inside
for warmth.
wait for us to duel it out
 in the morning
biting the inside of my cheek
 to taste victory
 and she was on top of you,
crowning.
well.

well,
I had been waiting to show you
self immolation and I know
some fun phrases like
vous aimez l’intensité.
you had been waiting with kerosene
and some promises to hold
 my pretty ashes
hostage; replete
with scathe,
a few words.

“fidelity”

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myself I receded
into the carpet maybe.
I don’t know what I did
some days. I was  hard pressed
to prove I could be
both a dehydrated kind
of  thirsty and
objective
in my pursuits
but both my hard-wired
illusion and my precocity,
my seduction were
suddenly a bit
of a crucifix
needing some tempering,
some rectifying,
maybe a mirror.
I began to practice my
southern accent,
my Irish accent,
my English accent,
my New Orleans accent.
“Fine,” was all I could
muster. and I tried not to look
at any age lines.

I went forward
with an earnest attempt
to gain access to the mind
of someone else.
I remember just staring at birds
for minutes at a time
with no other thought
but a swirl of energy
 swarm me.
and how I could once hear a
woman chewing potato chips
across a coffee shop.
it was a million
little things like that
where I stopped
and realized I could
probably walk through
walls if I was careful.

“the lullaby”

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there is a peace in exposure
and a peace in silence.
and I still can’t discern
 where I fit completely.
sometimes i flit about town
 with my paper point tongue
 and become the trap for them.
other days I sit quietly
and rearrange my stones
to surround pieces of paper
with words scribbled
as a representation of a symptom
of superstition.

 

when people say they are superstitious,
they usually mean they
don’t walk under ladders
or keep broken mirrors,
or if you’re Russian,
put your purse or keys on
the table.
when I say I’m superstitious,
I mean that if I think
about something too long
it begins to grow legs
and walk out so I can
see it better.

I begin to line the doors
with salt and brick
dust. I begin to line the
tub with black tourmaline
and smoky quartz. I
begin to line the bed with
kitchen knives and then
I begin to chant the
names.

“1/1/2017”

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you’ve been watching
jaguars move but otherwise
blind as fuck and 
petting foxes in a field
of green when you should
have been in motion.
you’ve been
 memorizing motion
without comitting to the
movement, atrophied:
the way you arm falls
asleep beneath your sullen
face as you wist away the days,
and the way your hands
grip anything within a one mile
radius forming little claws.
you are crippled
with entropy; an uncertainness
of order, a muddled prescription
of chant and everything that
leaves so willfully
must richochet again.
what’s the little joke about
choice?

I’ve been draping myself in
arms and
storm so you can see
as I traipse across
the forest floor
my tonsils growing
chelicerae,
my rib cage growing legs,
my bottom becoming fat
with thread and
I know what you like
and I know,
sweetheart,
that you may be a masochist
but we know that
you are game.

my name is Arachne,
nice to finally meet you.

you are writhing
game in snowflake threads
hung far above the
ground like
prey which leads
us back to witch, we said
be careful what you
 say. you said
my name is artemis
but you also said 

“arachne”

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we are here,
that little lie about choice.
the way you can’t seem to keep
the gloves  on and your knees hurt
from walking to the center of south
philly and back and
(I didn’t touch anything but I didn’t wear a mask)
and the way your tongue forked,
when you began to share the
story of your violence.
what’s been done to me
now done to them,
you begin the ritual
of candle setting.
it’s half pure ire
and directed intent.
say their names aloud:
Oya, Sekhmet, Lilith, Hecate.

I am Artemis. 

they say be careful what you say.
you say I am very good
with a word,
a sword, and
un boligrafo
to show you’re trying.
I heed each warning and name
them again

  1. when the first thing comes true, the second follows swiftly.

that little lie about
choice.
we are here at four candles,
name them again,
 love,
namely,
what’s missing:
(let’s review)
anything palpable.

  1. be careful what you say.

love–a thirst.
will–a birthright.
take justice–not vengeance,
but perception and the gentle
 folding of my hands in my lap
as things begin to be done to
them..
time–something I can’t wrap
my head around.

  1. love is a choice.

and choice. that little lie about
“choice.” write it again without blinking
and what then do you see?

  1. love.
    will.
    take.
    time.

 

“the choice”

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deep breath.

 

I carry tempest in my
lungs,  a cold black murmur
that hooks it hums
in earthworms and writhes
to surface after rains
 winding street lamps to
devour them like dirt cake.
I hit the corner as
you are walking up.


the light goes out
and somewhere near
a tire screeches drowned
by the sharp inhale
you take when
a cyclist scrapes his tire
on a criss-crossed track
and spins into a tumble
that splits his helmet
on a bumper and someone
screams: are you ok?
(this city is full of
accident lately).
I stand still on
the flashing yellow,
not afraid but respectful.
your hands are clenched
in pockets waiting for
the red, face turned away.


I’d been walking slowly,
wearing cotton sundress and
consenting saunter.
a practice.
my hips are wide,
lips are pursed and
I am quiet, light and
diffusive but lucky for this
place mostly mired in
my own insides.
there are twelve dogs
with meat in their eye
nearby choking on their
collars.

I am wearing a blue alyssum
in my hair but
you will know me either
by my touch
if in enough of a rush and
close proximity to brush
an elbow with a thumb,
or the sudden sun I permit:
open laughter near your
chin, grabbing you
with force,
 inordinate apology
for the accidental brush
and really everything,
moist I’m sorry spills over
my freshly-done, pink
velvet lips as we collide.
wait for green or
similar direction.
there are sirens in the distance.
I open my mouth
to say this city is full
of accident lately,
isn’t it?

you?
you will know me by
my fang-toothed smile.

“morphic resonance”

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I’ve been learning
performative emotion
to keep the ones I’m fettered
to warm, and to feel their
slippery manacles tease
the tops of my feet
like feathers as they pull
me.
paint my lashes black
and they’re wet  and
shaped like little
bolts.

 

we watched fireflies and I
licked your earlobes,
tried your fingers on
while I played with truths,
denied them.
felt your chest pressed hard
against mine.  we clanked
with ease
and I took in the scene
of two people unclothed and
unseen
underneath some crescent
in your backyard
without friendship between them;
without people between them and I dared
to stare in a way that endures more than
deciduous planting.
I broke at the
not now
you spoke back
with a masculine fragility
I had never known     envied,
tried on later with pants,
unplucked eyebrows
and alone.

you became red.
  I became an unwatched bull
headed to your porch,
snorting and you were
bare faced and guarded
 in all the ways
I have yet to learn.
I’m so obvious:

a scarlet blaze that starts with a joke,
two bodies parting,
an unreturned question that ends
with a sharp exclamation,
annihilation of something.
ends with a reminder from someone higher
to stop destroying something
to eliminate one part.
I am a wave of coercion
pulling you in and under
when I should have been
patient;
when I should have been laid in the grass
gently, next to the ant hills,
where you can learn my lifelines:
breasts,
spine,
toes curled without injury.
when I should have been pausing to notice
there are no people between us.
when I should have been gracious,
with you and bare-faced,
or wet cheeked or

I remove the rest of my top
and close my eyes deliberately
to show you the length
of each thorn.
wear my eyes like a hooked rose
with my tongue pressed
against your chin,
my lips trace
your jaw       I say
more softly
than  ever before,
having been tempered
and forced close:
you know,
darling,
let my teeth hit your lip

I have never
become divine without first
becoming storm.

 “ascension”

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