Tag: spilled ink

your house was yellow.

my house was blue and
a ten by ten box;
a cage and me trapped,
torn between watching them
pack up their stuff
from their own pact to self
and me, dripping virile,
pushing them out.
we needed a spark,
I pounced and

shortly after,
 the railing tumbled on my
sprinting ankles,
the basement rattled and the
floorboards dropped
filling the place with the kind of emptiness
that is so dense
 it smothers.
smoke smells a lot like
 ticking minutes
if we scented time the way we
spray each other.
I hear a bark.
hope the turtle remembers how to
duck and cover.
the cat’s sure got it.

remember me as a black-winged fury
hovering over your bed at night because
there will be nothing left by dawn
except some burning blue
cedar wood and a cheap comb
that found its way buried in the dirt.
the photo albums gone,
dusty cookbooks charred,
vanished remote controls stay hidden
and the asbestos and fiberglass ceilings
imploded despite our fear that was the
thing that would kill us.
I am left with a cancer
that gnaws through the joints
like packs of rats chewing through cables
to take the attic back.
and I need this.

I really miss your hands on me
and the convivial cluster of caterpillars
that swallowed the bark
the day in the orchard
when you held me in sullen incubation
before the devastation of the forest,
before I made way for us,
the start,
the parting and somewhere
an empty crib stays unfurnished.
someone starts an engine.
the varnish is melting and so am I.
      God gave you a chance and
        an unfinished smile.
a smoke alarm malfunctions
mocking your reluctance
to just grin and bare it,
to just open up your arms
and catch me when I jump;
             but first here comes the fish tank
catch me with all the fit I threw.
we all look like burnt books
blowing in the breeze
and now, I too,
am wafting with the exhumed memories.
before my legs even hit the dew,
you watch me dwindle to a million floating pieces
in the cradle of tar black trees.

you see the contract ascertained a certain
ephemeral appeal
and I’m too thirsty to complain
about anything but the heat in here.
hold your breath and wait
for some other current to take me.
        baby

there are no exits.

“chrysalis”

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nice figure.

sharp glances,
obsessed with her wrinkles in
passing window.
thirty three years old and can’t seem to
thwart her own self persecution,

said she liked ass play
and pegging and
doing things in pieces.

“how guys save me in their phone”

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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”

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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”

 

 

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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.

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God gave you an
unfinished smile
to pay for
and you are
lucky God makes
pacts with
predators.

I am what?

I said your
mouth is dripping blood
again and you lied
about what you
are.


“forms”

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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
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”

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I believe in altar.

The opposite of destruction
isn’t creation; it is
stability, longevity,
ground.
It is mired in the Earth.
It is steadfast.
It is wings
with purpose.
I had insisted on burning every
bridge, every baby,
every body that came from a fit
of fervent execution.

Play Oya,
the moon dared.
I hoisted myself on the stake and
displayed my plotted empire in pieces
dancing to the flicker of my
ardent fire parade.
Previously, my life had
been of lingering malignance,
but it had no fangs to suck
the bleak from my veins.
I turned black
and sidelong
with every corner.
Now, I am
moving in giant
fit of blaze:

I am the forest catching wind.
I am the scream of the first tree falling.
I am the silence of the spark’s eventual dim,
the mess in between;
the burst of orange, the hara kiri,
the gray cloud of obscurity
where nothing can breathe,
where nothing can leave without
serious damage.
I am the stampede that warns you.
Everything that tried to stay in the comfort of
my pine bosom;
 gone,
lay slain at my feet.

And me,
incendiary and flying,
rising from the ash in a
crown of bone
and teeth.

“the stakes”

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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”

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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”

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