Tag: witch

I took myself
to the welfare office,
not even getting lost as
I’m prone to do.
          why can’t you just figure it out?
I live right down the street.

my shorts are stuck to my thighs,
and my neck is drenched.
I wipe my forehead with my hand
to her disgust.
“It’s unseasonably warm for June”
I begin and elucidate the drawl,
smile to beg for my Access card back
but here comes the recalcitrance;
she asks me for something
I don’t have and I
smacked my lips the wrong way
so I snacked on my servility
inch by inch as I
inched my way
back to “our place.”

months later,
I lose a diamond necklace there.
there is nothing more satisfying
than losing things or
shaving my head or
throwing away the clunky pepper
spray that women wraithed into chains
and hung from their hips
as if fear and trepidation
and weaponry have
ever kept me safe.
someone told me failure is perspective
but all I see are cops
pinching women with latex gloves
and all the little shrubs
that line the block look like
workers shaking their heads at me
      leave
or,

get on with then.
I am  throwing coffee grounds
into a leaky cardboard box,
our first CD is scratched  and
on top.
I’m on a bed that lifts
with one giant sigh
and no top sheet and
no frame.
they said risk meant courage
and I say you fucking
left me here
into your voicemail.

I’m eating sprinkles with a spoon
in a freshly inherited
two story townhouse.
It’s the sixth of June
so I got weeks to make
next rent.

“grace”

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the second one I called
was Hecate.

I am on the floor
in the stained glass
room with the brown carpet
and the yellow walls
and the paper flowers:
bright orange, white, red,
dusty and a sprinkle of
musk from the places
I shoved them and my
dripping skin;
eighty eight degree body
flailing impetuously
flattening them.

I am flipping over index cards.
the coral & lime sheet is lined
with shells, some broken
 and rocks, pieces of concrete I
remember picking up in Maryland
when I saw the perfect house.
a ceramic lemon bowl is full
of dirt from the catacombs,
a burned scripture,
red jasper.
my fingers digging
at the bottom,
tips filthy,
jagged, can
cut.

today we are reading up until
we are forced to stop:
is not easily angered
which means I have gotten
past does not envy
but I have not gotten
past temper,
or
I am indeed a wrathful
cunt so
the second one I called
was Hecate:
have purpose,
a patent resolve.

and I always pause to look
 in the mirror,
not unsure. just a
tremor. old reflex
to watch my eyes change.
part my hair,
look past something;
my facile understanding
of this and
my dolorous step.

we break men.

crushing debris
between my fingers
into a nanoscopic
form settling
permanently on my
floor or carried
everywhere
I go on my soles.

“the incantations”

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I put my headphones in.

begin to spin the happy thought
into years; of us.
your brusqueness
  it’s just one breath
syncopated with whatever song
I assign it like I walked
into a film set; replay a scene
of you coming back and
behind me, your mouth
hot with acrimony.
your hands rough in
both touch from the ungloved carpentry,
spackled with white paint
and the way
you take my waist.
I hum out loud.
the loop is what I have to
worry about.
the way you press your teeth
to me.
        it’s just one breath.

“the men”

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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”

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carried with her
a weapon: her keys in hand,
a 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
someone else’s house.
i’m tepid but halfway up
the steps, how do you
get away with that?


I just never finish the story,
she said, half turned and I
hung there like a
Christmas ornament
on the front porch
glistening in her iris.

“How guys save me in their phone #12”

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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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information is power so
I ask the time and place
and day and I hold
back some ecstatic clapping
for the willfully delivered
 emblem that I now braid back
into me.
I feel most secure in holding
someone by their neck and
forward and possibly in
creeks of ice asking
are you pious, son?

but never believing,
I strum my chords at night,
fanatical.
once missing, now
draped in beads of
declamation, afloat.
I’m white like creeks of ice
you lay your head upon and
cough the yes, I am devout.
I become the pew for them.
I become the papacy.

you become the tether tight
laid across my city bench,
suddenly engrossed in rosary
again.
as I begin to watch the men
dig holes into my
ground like clocks to measure
the dagger of a willful
mind devoted to one outcome,
you press your hands into
the ice to feel water
rise up.

“the pupil”

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what does all of this
mean to you?
she waves her hand
to no one. 

you say it’s important,
ask me to tell it in
“linear order”
but how can I get away with
things telling stories like
that? and besides,
I have survived time
and cage and aged
in linear order.
my proof
    (flex a ripped tricep)
is endless strength,
brimming veins
that have learned how to
vibrate, hum, cluck,
even whistle when your girl
walks by me       I’m
a snake

through her core
and now all you see is a doe
gored in your forest and
I got to eat the whole orchard
I asked for.
are you lost or
just quiet, just hiding
from the butcher inside
it?
 you know I’m dense,

ice cold, flush with
forked tongue ready to puncture
someone,     i’m lush;
maintaining a sense of
dam and containment
even in my most berating
fits of temper or panic,
I manage to remain
frozen these days
like a cracking lake
you say I am
sharp and

bitter.
but underneath my skin,
that blue-lace casing,
a carnise river:
little tributaries to
the turning of the world
in linear delivery.
and you say
full of rage     and I say
ok, just wait,

you and I are from
the same place
and I start to pace
the block once more. 

III.

0

 

sitting on the edge of the bay
 on a borrowed blanket,
I was vomiting up
 an Everclear Slurpee
and some sort of philosophy
about the closing of the day;
 the way it moved
death,
like an itinerant wave
that followed me
everywhere.
the tide crept back
and I heard you cough,
felt myself starting to drown again
and then your hand on my thigh
and then nothing at all. 

pain subsides in very
miniscule amounts
of time
if  you don’t
repeat the
 story. 

do not repeat the story

“how to be a river”

or

sit in it.

“how to be a lake”


and turning to you again, I
implore you to pick a title and
stick with it.   for me, I say:
do you like warnings or do you
like to drown?

I think at some point
you have earned the right to say
I know already because you lived it
without acquiescing to
authority so I asked
to see it first:
the river’s mouth,
even though they said
I’d never make it.

“warnings”

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“I have no future plans,” I began calmly.
      I am arms outstretched
walking nowhere but with
ardency so
I am labeled,
whimisical and manic
like a wound up
fairy, the character that
keeps the music box

spinning
that leapt from its
little gold coiled post
sprinkling glitter,
growing nerves and
ankles that bend flat
to walk to run to
crawl

people like me because I have no plans,
am honest about it, and
have wings that carry weapons.    I
hear in a distance
   someone repeat it

I use intimidation as a tactic to seize opportunity


Well, I also use black magic

“seven of cups”

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