I am  God-drawn,
celibate,
obsessively testing my edges
and binding myself to
new conviction;
my need for fluctuations
in behavior,
lifestyle and mood.
baths are my only sanctuary.
my only drop of still                                                    

in  a particularly icy winter.


begin bleeding with
every new moon
and begin thinking it means. 
something. I begin lighting
the sky with votive &

recitation. begin pouring
the blood brinmed cup in the bubbles
with angle, slight motive:
an offering–me; any time
or any way she likes
forever.

you say: define haunted.
I named them all.
starting with the first one.


starting with the first time
I felt wanted by God.

“lilith”


Apples are hard to eat now.
Bread too and other things
aggravate the throat.
But loss no longer devastates;

imperfections no longer force me
into cessation—
breath, existence, love.
I could try again.
Loss no longer floors me.
Suffused with so much grief,
time brings turning
& often material things.
the locket hanging back on the mantle
front and center.  I don’t
have the letters but my head
without caffeine remembers and
time brings
maturation.

What I’ve always needed:

the deepest place I can go is
completely still.
Still, you don’t mean a thing to me,
nothing means a thing to me.
When I speak, its merely compulsion
to expel whatever memory of feeling
lingers.
And love?

I want this thing gone.

“love?”
flick the ash to my  right side
ive taken up spliff again.

I’m walking the block with
my syncopated thoughts.
the beat is long chord
& repetitive.
there’s a specter of a man
in my headphones
at all time and today he wants
to know what he means to me.
I tell him.
I want love
unencumbered
by actuality.”

sometimes I do ceremony.

I stick only to a daily morning
ritual and try to strengthen
some resolve with consumption.
I feed the cats, clean their
litter box, then stretch
and write my dreams down.
then I walk the neighborhood
to soak up attention . 


sometimes I just let things pass
like cravings or
weather.
we do that for others;
carry our grief quietly.
bury things deep
within ourselves.

 I feel the root rot and darken
without altar, water
or speech.
you walk in and
I’m here now
growing into a black
and robust trunk.
you walk in and look
right at me
but I don’t know
where to begin.


I begin to grow,
unfurl, hum
softly.

“datura moon”

carried with her
a weapon:  keys in hand,
disarming speech pattern;
accented and d r aw n out
drawl,  a couple y’alls
and no reason to suspect
her about anything.

I never tell a lie,
she said
leading me to
some house.
i’m tepid but halfway up
the steps, not even
inquiring the sudden need to mention
but the practicality:
and  how do you
get away with that?


I just never finish the story,
she said, half turned to the door
and I hung there in the frost air
hooked like an ornament
on the front porch:
slowly twirling, decorative to her
and glistening bright off her iris.

and not sure if I held any more meaning than that.

“How guys save me in their phone #12”

been picking at my lip
again. old childhood
habit–squeezing
corner of my
mouth for minutes at a time
so it forms into a blister.
digging my nail into the blister
just for the feel of it.
sometimes poke it with a safety pin
as i stare into the mirror.
watch it get fat and black.

my mother called it“pleasure pain.”
masochism is a desire for salve,
relief from the pain  and often
finding yourself blindfolded  in a
blade-lined hallway.
  you gotta feel your way out.
the little girls say.
he’s also  saying a lot so
I just nod a lot.
besides the impulse to
jump off a bridge every
day, I am not totally sure
why I am here.


“do you have any plans to hurt yourself?”
he asks in earnest but in a way that
he never looks directly at me.

im hot and walked for miles so im
a bit stuck to the vinyl,
sweaty and squirming but otherwise
pretty, presentable and
what’s done is done.
but I don’t say anything.
just shake my head
and bite my lip.
lift my thigh slowly to
feel the stretch of skin
and pray for some other
thing to take me.

or for the little girls to stop
but they’re snickering now.

“Belladonna”

for some of us,
freedom was a legend;
a cage of smudged windows
a foiled pine for everything.
crippled twirl,
pace around the apartment
with a wand in hand,
repetitive crescendo in head,
tennis elbow from the instinctual
bend.

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 until  the day is finally warm
and facing them,
tear through the tether
unbridled in exodus, unimpeded
and ready to transform into grand ideas,
take off without interruption
like the little girl’s
nascent scorn; 

now grown,
an envoy of acrimony
and the blue-black tones of
home, I pause here to ask myself
before I commit to the
flight,: what does metamorphosis
really feel like? 
there is a visceral reply:
  my skin
tearing at the thread of
each inside, each wound
and stretching wide
for me to see,    wide
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)”

my hands are currently stinging,
ungloved and pallid and I do
this daily, these walks with my hands out.
I never wear gloves and I never put them in my pockets.

often times I blink,
realizing I’m not somewhere I thought I was.
sometimes feeling I’m back on a street
in Virginia.
kids always watch me. 


they’re the only ones that see me muttering
under my breath,
fingers curved then moving
like I’m counting
my thoughts as they digest
they smile.
they don’t think the same as adults
and can see secrets. I’m crazy. I change my route mid route passing them,
deciding suddenly to get coffee from a different place.
I  had been to the other place three times this week
and I don’t want anyone to know me.

to seek me meant
pleasure in ineffability,
a loss for words perhaps
out of fear of my retaliation
and to remain hidden
from some parts of the depth
of me and from the world with
me. I prefer the furtive
curl against another.
the unutterable and silent
worship
drives this depth
and the others and
you and me
like rifts adrift
like that, the moment
I turn my head.
I like to live,
eat, sleep alone
and move the country
this way; solo,
home
a solitary war
between
picking up impulse
and
deep, deep reflection
upon impulse
control.

I’m so sensitive
though
that if I settle into
think and spread
the cards like a fan,
I’d feel it out
in five seconds
eyes closed.
show me,
she said.
show me one year
show me two years
show me three years.
flip it and
it’s the King of Cups,
again.

plus I’d pick the right
song to match.
get the numbers to flash 3:13,
my lucky bet. “duplicity”

of course i would never kill
a child.
I continued with her,
but the question was
how do we make something like
the death penalty less of
a moral argument?
and the only way to take morality
out of law is to write clauses that
outline exactly what will happen
and under what circumstances and
then without reneging, go and
enforce it every single time.

these are authoritarian things.

but I didn’t agree with any of it
so I felt like battling me
was moot but I enjoyed the spectacle
and had, for no reason, invited
a male friend to join me in
class that day.
I too was interested in
motive but we cannot prove
intent truly without
absolute confession.
and even then, we may
doubt what we hear
if it doesn’t align with
what we want.


“events #2”

she was pandering to my 
emotion, calling this episode
a real child.

she said you said kill everyone.
I never said kill everyone, I said
if the law is  x=x then it’s x.
I could see her reaching for
the feminine in me
whichas far as I could see
was straddled and leaning back.
confident enough to be the first one
to volunteer for the exercise,
which I remind her, is not
examining the morality of the law
itself but to remove debate around it
so that it may be better enforced,
without outcry and fairly.


when I finished nine hands
went up. we were a class of eighteen.
unsure of why
I volunteered for the exercise
first, and given the freedom to begin
with any declaration, why I chose to
examine how mass assassinations

could really kick things off to accept
blindly that some people are
executed. and some people ought
to be.

the argument was not over
until all counter points had been examined,
the professor said.
she was tall and smiling when
I spoke and I felt thankful for her
defense of me any time she reiterated,
I was correct in re-summarizing the
exercise for each of the
nine hands that went up,
consuming the bell with a
theoretical society that arbited
punishment blindly as the statue
alluded to also,
the society we have tried to
have now is composed of
criterion like that. 


I was eighteen and glowing
and enjoying the attention
with zero conviction about
the death penalty.
and when it came back to
her, and she presented it again
after many others had spoke,
I am sure I said,
to be perfectly frank,
we would HAVE to
kill the child in order
to make the law work.

and then I just kind of laughed
because the exercise itself asked you to
first pick a side and fight for it;
not to defend the death penalty
but to remove morality from law
having the freedom to remove all
structures of law around murder,
I could have created a punishless state
in which murderers walked free
or a Hammurabi and it is with the
same amount of callousness that I
have begun to plant
nightshade around your house.

probability being like

you probably like to touch

things like me

and thinking it

to be Queen Anne’s Lace

giving it to your girl

for Valentine’s Day.

“Valentine’s Day part #1”

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