Tag: poets of wordpress

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 and wait for
the night to break.

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”

0

I am decked head to
toe in rosary and sapphire
ashes, free of any
previous attachment;
hidden by feathers,

shielded by sigils,
the bark and the strand;
the one line of web
 that catches the moonlight so you
know what trap you are walking
into as you land.

I am striped like a tiger
with the arteries of
the other in
another insurrection and
I am bathed in night
so you only see me
when I drape myself
in stars, become
a roving constellation.
together we
are better like
 a pack:

taut-backed:
 hold our curves
like jello axes,
my mouth is sometimes
sandstorm
then suddenly
wet.
little storm and waves, a
flood     we are bright eyes and
hearts like meandering cannons,
step soft and low like lions
or snakes in the grass.
our chipped nails hold prayer, tongues,
the clipped wings of our grandmothers.
we are here.
we are clawing at your porch
and oiling the glass in silence
to wind up your banister
without notice   teeth out,

sliding under sheets,

look

 
        i’ve got an apple for you to bite.
breath like gentle reminders from God
               now, now, learn to be amenable
feel the uneven pulse that vengeance wore;
the way I lay and devour your
sword; the way I become naked
and big and magnetic like Jupiter:
suck it in and
throw it back out at you;
mangled, a new form you can’t
manage anymore.
pausing so you understand the difference in
revival and survived
as you lean into every
sharp point I can provide.

glint from the knife reveals
an untamed eyelash:
unpainted and short and straight
with might.
we are partially cloaked but baring
 light smiles,
wayward breasts you can’t touch,
wild right,
a heat between our thighs that you can’t
 hunt, and it’s close enough to

smell,
to taste,
to lick our days to waste.
we are wearing the masks of
unlectured howls,
thorns plucked from our ribs,
a blood crusted march,
a cold and ancient
 vendetta.
we are arrows:
lit and pointed.

we, my sons,
 are coming to get
you.


“the matriarch” or “the other us”

 

 

0

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 continent 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”

0

sparkling explosion of
cellophane and champagne nails
tickle birthmarks down a
back.
fallen glitter eyeshadow:
roving crescent moons
dangling off a throat
from everywhere a lip hit
and pieces of gold dust
rolled off my nose.

bare mattress,
a girl licking a cheek and a
bare tear
sort of near.
hearts like lava
fill the blue gray cracks.
ghost stories and berries in bed,
mouth filled with laughs.
I’m in an afghan
sinking my teeth into a shoulder,
straddled with bare feet.
and what else?

I’m somewhere else.

11.

0

Sometime late January
you spent the night with a woman
watching the moon grow.
                   come take me in my own abattoir
I unrolled my tongue
ready for a messy kiss and out spilled
someone else’s lung.

I had created a dalliant and forbearing
stockyard in my bed to occupy us.
                  I’m red-hot and full of other people
You were outside in a corduroy jacket
counting her freckles as stars
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.
I was biting the inside of my cheek
 to taste victory
 and she was on top of you,
crowning.

I had been waiting to show you
self immolation.
You had been waiting with kerosene
and some promises to hold
 my pretty ashes
hostage.

“fidelity”

0

apodyopsis inflicted
and I can’t lick it
so I imagine you unfold
like paper origami
one more time.

finger your jeans and
you spill open.
I lick your cheek and
feel you bite the side of
your mouth in halt and
can you remember
the times you fanged
your way through bra hooks
 and brunches, never-ending coffee
 and one-liners?
something the other ones taught you.
stiff congratulations or how are you and
that’s wonderful
followed by
nine months of inimical
silence.
I move quietly     quickly
distort you into something
palpable.

my hands move
clumsily.
I keep you in amulet
in my pocket and I queeze you when I am
nervous.

you are licked,

smoothed with assurance,
rubbed.

you’re the botched swan
I frame proudly;
me, robed in black flowers
and loaded rifle walking
out of mid-February
with you tucked in the crook
of my arm.
you become loosely creased
 looseleaf reduced to a crumple
floating to the floor
without altar,
a harmonic little
m o r e
in my palm
on your way
to the tile
where I gently lay
you    leave you
altered without prayers
once more.

leave you twisted
in want,
deformed.

“warning forms”

0

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”

0

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”

0

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”

0

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”

1

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