Tag: poets of wordpress

 

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
and my Pisces and
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”

0

show me how to be an angel,
sky,
I think I’ve been there
 before        before I found
what my hands can do
when they’re not pressed together
anymore:

bring donuts for the office.
offer silence in embrace,
holding space or advice
if they say help me get through
it with action.
paint houses, mend fences.
pull the nails from my true love’s feet:
I placed them everywhere and
I make contracts,
real amends means I wish you well
and won’t ever
contact you again.
smile openly at strangers,
hold the door and inner weeping.
stop repeating anecdotes that expose the
 dark recesses  I’m engulfed in so I can
stop
passing this on     so I can
save face, space for
longing, mystery, idleness.
it’s the surprise that I can’t take.

I invite them to dinner:
ask them to bring a favorite song,
one dish and
a defect they love.
I like strings and female wailing;
chords that are long, surfeit with
 unrequited love.
I want it to sound like a heart that’s starving
 for admission but will take it slowly
 with a snare drum.
I apologize profusely for how bright my
 apartment is these days.
I know you expected something darker,
I say,
 but I prefer a blinding scripture to the days I
waded in shade and open constriction.
they understand the situation,
my indifference and malignance.
they offer me some gifts to assuage
me and I waste the night
with demands, scrutiny,
verbal inspection:


show me all the books you love.
recite your favorite lines.
I think the world is crawling with caged geniuses
 that got lost along the way;
are you a lonely prodigy?
I need to see your insides;
 palms up to show
 you aren’t hiding anything.
are you the predator or prey?
do you believe in martyrs,
more importantly,
 do you believe that the devil vets the saints?
 I’m no killer, I promise, but I’m not the easy way.
do you believe in chance?
I once watched my fate unfold across my eyelids:
 two parties coming together in black and white,
a future that was possible but someone whispered:
 it is better to ruin this thing.
I believe in lessons.
I believe in dormancy.
there is no such thing as a mistake.

they show me teeth, piano, films:
Begotten.
I laugh, I’ve seen it:
I show them the drugs I bought,
my darkest cackle and matching garter.
show them a dozen ways to trample gardens
with a notepad.
do you see how I can write the future?
 look, I planted bombs everywhere.
 I show them demolition.
 I show them scribes can craft the wicked.
I show them altars, smitten
eyes and a tongue that’s wound around
the Earth.
I show them what my insides look like:
wounds and trillion year old dirt and
I light three candles,
wear them like a rope.

have you ever let a thought just pass?
one interrupts as I dangle over his
crown.
let me down.
and I repeat to him what I meant to say
 the first time we met to explain the danger
 of restriction:
it is nothing,
time    a longing
and I wait.
I say

will you teach me how to wait?

“ricochet”

0

 

it’s the feelings I can’t take.

I can’t sit still.
you never sit still.
I don’t take breaks and
I can’t rest and I can’t stop
once the frantic pacing begins
and today is special, it’s a
double moon day and I knew it
before I woke up.
it’s a two of swords day.
it’s a double shower day where
I try to cleanse myself
obsessively without confessions.

now I am sad about two things:
the way I let things go
with grace
that I can take a bath
about and mourn publicly
because anyone would expect that
and then there’s the more insidious thing:
the way I ruin things privately,
what no one sees
with grace
to stop myself from
sabotaging everything,

there are men in this town
who know me.

1.

 

(the red book)

0

this is the edge.

that place we walk,
that line we pace
where we are crossing borders
but we aren’t ready to let
go of the hand on the other side.
a tightrope and I’m a leo
so I want you to see me
learn balance,
learn control,
learn poise in public agony.
there is no point without an audience.

so here comes the men.
the men.
the men.
the men.
and so begins
the slaughter,
dripping red,
the men.
me, my insides;
them, their insides,
us together in a swirl of
chaos of my choosing.
the three phantoms beholden
to my unceasing confession.

“And why do you tell these men
things long after they’ve left?”
my therapist asks.
tell the truth.

(Because I miss my fucking brother)

But what I say is much longer.

“the men”

0

it wasn’t just about us,
it was about everyone.
the way I’ve touched everyone,
or better,
the way I ripped myself apart
in front of them.
to pieces.
my self deprecation intertwined
with resentment.
they say i’m bitter.

you say I’m graceful
but you have not seen me undressed.
you say I know you
but you have not seen me undressed.
you say you’re naked
but you have not seen me undressed.
not the way they have.

and that makes you jealous.
you want to watch me rip my hair
out and tell you to tell me to
stop.
oh, maybe wait a while until
I fall in love with someone else.
I’ll hit you up years later,
suddenly, in a panic,
so I don’t confess to the wrong person,
I’ll slit my throat and tell you
whatever comes to mind.
tell you everything about me and
tell you to tell me to STOP.
they say I carry myself with grace
but there are men in this town who
hold various secrets about me,
various veins I have given them
in an effort to assuage the dark
thing inside of me:
my impatience,
my want for everything,
my lack of trust,
my water spells,
it’s the feelings I can’t take.

you haven’t met me undressed yet.
and the third phrase I have written over
and over again in a patient way to understand:
I come over wearing everything I own
so it takes forever to get to the bottom
of things.

“the rose”

0

then it’s flowers and unexpected showers
but it is day longer, sun higher,
you are not mired in the date of departure
anymore, and you forgive the monsoons.
your sensualizing emotions present themselves:
the gloss and black tips,
hips in sheer nylon,
a gentle sway.
sometimes it is unseasonably warm
and you have to hold your cardigan in your hand
but you have managed a smile
and some sense of buoyancy
and dragged someone along
with the sleeves of
your unworn sweater.
you get lucky:
they want to take the
long way and you have a tendency to
suddenly rush things.

you are both broken
doe and the trap laid
for their arrival.

“ambush” or “pisces in the 8th house”

0

too be fair to be myself,
no one made it easy for me.


I didn’t one day wake up
in a fit of terror,
I was raised to be reactive
and scared and I sucked my thumb
until I was thirteen.
that’s called an
oral fixation.
I have a predilection for filling
silence with phrases so
I feel heard and I drink tea all day
to keep my mouth busy.
 my jaw moves on reflex.
I have an oral fixation.
I spend a lot of time chewing straws
and licking my lips
and you always draw attention to your mouth
they say and I have an
oral fixation.

so when I returned to the definition:
a fixation is a persistent focus of the id’s pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier stage of psychosexual development.These fixations occur when an issue or conflict in a psychosexual stage remains unresolved, leaving the individual focused on this stage and unable to move onto the next. For example, individuals with oral fixations may have problems with drinking, smoking, eating, or nail biting.

once more, I returned to this phrase
I had written and rewritten again:
how many licks does it take
to get to the center of an attachment
disorder?
I turn to my therapist and say
sincerely,
I can’t keep anything out of this
mouth.

“the oral stage”

0

freedom is a cage of
smudged windows
or it is the knot of fervent caterpillars
sliding through my intestines
soon
 spilling out onto the floor,
washed in symbol, incubated;
destroying their cotton packages,
when the day is warm and facing them
tearing through the tether,
unbridled,
unimpeded exodus,
transforming into grand ideas
and taking off
like a storm.

2

when I found you,
I was in the mood for some
analgesic touch & rub and
I have always heard beneath everyone’s
duplicity or backpedaling or
hidden words in tongues that tribute
to love that is not giant,
but quiet.
not so enormous that it takes me
but the plain way desire wears itself
on people’s faces and
the plain way people hold me
even if for seconds,

 

I felt that.

 

I felt timid or dizzy
 in its presence.
I felt like I finally heard you
when you said,
just wait.
I have written and rewritten the
same phrase for years,
if not in a document, my hand
or carved a tracing of it on
my new, fresh Baphomet thigh
tattoo because bondage is a
fit I wear:

restraint is an art I intend
to master.   I always bud in denial,
rejection, stomp my way to your
cloud and let it rain,
let it pour,
    love exists with or without hope
let it flood all over your place.

restraint is an art I intend to
master, but what does that mean?
not to demure, but to
grow in body, warmth,
way.
it means, fall.

fall easily.
fall.

fall.

fall.

don’t ruin it with vocabulary
or anxious gesture
so I am letting my hair grow
full and unruly like a mane
and I am inking every inch of
space on my skin
like a map and I am
crying in flower beds again
but I am smelling them.

I remember every dream and the one where we met,
where we met,
where we met,
and now,
     love exists

I face a mirror.

 

“the act of restraining things”

0

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 geranium
circling the tile.
I plucked the petals and dropped them
one by one for aesthetic.
not free of indulgence, but
patient   your fingers make
stems in the water
and I guess I am waiting
for something.

“the swell”

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑