Tag: writers

you gave me a bouquet of
weeds once as I was drinking
my third cup of coffee.
you had picked them from
our backyard when I wasn’t
looking.

you were smiling with teeth;
big, and I loved
 you.
following that the day was not as
pristine or worthy of
photographic memory,
 but I don’t
always choose what stays,
what goes, what lingers
in between the building of
new thoughts, the removal
of the old, the magic it
all makes.

I had changed into a sundress
and walked down the stairs
slowly because I had bent over
 in a way that tore something
 inside of me:
a nerve or muscle.
I mustered up enough breath
to say it feels like I pinched a nerve
and am having trouble breathing.
what should I do?

you had to be somewhere
soon, I knew.
you looked up the staircase
 on your way out
the front door and
simply said: I don’t believe you.
someone else drove me to
the doctor and that doctor
confirmed I strained my back,
 prescribed me Flexeril
 for the pain and wrote me
a note explaining to my internship
why I wouldn’t be in that day.
I laid in bed, waiting for the
drugs to subside.

you came home
and attempted to justify
why you always felt
deceived by me.
I lay numb,
relieved
of feeling anything as you recited
everything I’d ever done
that bothered you.
you weren’t sorry,
it’s Thursday, and I feel
nothing for you
now.

“Thursday”

0

I was giving her a shower.
I’m there for two hours to help with
personal care:

make sure she brushes her teeth,
settles down with a word search,
remind her it’s Tuesday.
after towel drying her so they could put on the
hemorrhoid cream,
I handed her a comb
and began rubbing lotion over her legs;
smooth like a child’s
the veins were still tucked behind flesh:
invisible with a firm,
earned elasticity.

you must have taken good care of yourself.

I enjoyed rubbing them.
years of tall glasses of water
running through those hidden blue streams
electrifying her cells,
tightening the gaps that so many of us
 have       she chose
crackers with avocado instead of Nutella,
early retirement on fluffy pillows,
watching the dawn cut the sky,
flossing,
deadlines and
filing nails.
she was just so full of tranquility,
days worth spending,
assets,
responsible parables,
a mother who taught her how to bake bread ,
crack eggs and iron hems.
 she contemplated and said:

I like your dark eyes.

pacing the harbor with a flask
and a plan to really “do it this time,”
a hoard of sycophantic worker bees
who show me what their insides look like,
sleepy evenings that end in the bottom of
everyone, mislaid plays written in
 spilled finger paint,
sprinkles of tobacco on the seat,
thirsty kidneys,
a camouflaged abuse that taught me how to
 cower at words, a man’s
love and
bedroom hair that screams,
 cries that  freeze beneath my cheeks
before they learn to creak
turn to moans
melt on tongues
when touched in heat.

my eyelashes hurt.
my wrists feel like stone.
my spine is crooked like
the broken flute they cracked
out of temper when I wouldn’t
play  the right way but
my legs are tall, ancient
and rough like
sequoias; uprooting and
walking forward.
it’s day and I’m awake
but my head is full
of horror.
I face her,
southern and
polite and
touch her shoulder

thank you.

still so full of
nights.

“eyes”

0

but to you there’s no difference between
decimation and the resolve so you’re
palms out begging for it
and here comes the reaper
wearing your blood.

you are God-drawn,
celibate,
obsessively
testing yourself and
wrapping lovers in
protection.
what white eyes you have
even in blackness,
even in malice you take
the time to care:
line their wrists in violet,
mugwort, alyssum.
crown them in tourmaline,
rose quartz and apophyllite.
              it’s your gift we’re after
hear them clap.
become the madness for
them; deliver asylum and
I love you.
it is always me on the hearth
learning chants and you
tall, wickless and
unburned beside me
so I can’t see unless I
set myself on fire
and you remember the
bind you’re in.
what it’s all about.
I already said:
     it’s the titles you should
        be looking at.
“this unfolds reversing” or “in pyre”

1

 

you can shake your fist at any
foaming coast but her
break remains unscathed,
her scorn in
waves,
her calm in
tides,
wet snarls pacified in
moon-swept stages
depending on the time of month,
the climate or the
stage.

you are barefoot:
some pedestrian gesture of
 worship.
shrine.
avoiding the shells and
ghost crabs that litter the beach
at gloaming.
you’re wild and roaming
 again seeking to slice wrists
with guilt and urgency,
pretension,
steal the scissors from his girlfriend’s
pocket.
                    what’s it like to be a hypnotist?
take a seat.
notice your veins rock,
glisten with munition.

life’s a seething blade
and you wear yours deep in your lungs.
the ways you have learned to assuage
are more permanent in placement
if you face it when you
say it.
write it on the page.
have them sing it with
vexation.
have them say it out loud and
curse themselves.
you watched your hands become tributes
to iniquity so you ask your feet
to become your fingers
now,
nothing from your mouth
going forward.

watch your toes curl in the sand
before you start wading.
you are practicing the dying art of
self-restraint.
you are practicing
prayer, overdo
amends.
you are seeking a quiet rest
inside of  yourself.

you are seeking the
 sudden wreck
that laid you.

1.

0

consult the oracle again.

wear what you want,
let these animals control themselves
my tiny ball of citrine says so
I put on my cat suit
and go for a walk
to catch tan in the new
big sun.   it was a long winter
of regression, needs unmet
and anchored in self by
a weighty repression,
lamps and the length of
my ire stretched, permanent,
coming undone on your pillow
where you wept in peace
until I charged back in
costumed in tank.

i’ve blown the tea lights out;
my presence is altar,
sit naked in the eyeline of the fan and
spools of smoke from bamboo incense
crown my head       I am showered,
manicured, my skirt is barely an inch of fabric
containing my pubic bone or
buttox so they’re stuck
to me like sweat hot salt  
sticks dripping down my skin.
I dab some tiger’s eye oil and jasmine
on my wrists,

brush their arms with
my nails, cut through centers,
stop absentmindedly to change song
 and let
their thighs press my thighs,
their forearms hit mine.
it’s the invitation I am waiting
for.    there are
ambulances wailing all over town
carrying victims of stroke
with blood rushing upward
forming an arrow,
the fletching pointing to their throat.
they feel the beat of wings
before they feel
my hands wrap their larynx
and the first thing they tell me:

you’re full of secrets.

“catcalls”

0

 

I carry tempest in my
lungs :a cold black murmur
that hooks it hums
in earthworms and writhes
to surface after rains
 winding street lamps to
devour them like dirt cake.
I hit the corner as
you are walking up.


the light goes out
and somewhere near
a tire screeches drowned
by the sharp inhale
you take when
a cyclist scrapes his tire
on a criss-crossed track
and spins into a tumble
that splits his helmet
on a bumper and someone
screams: are you ok?
and rushes over.
an older man pauses,
turns to you scratching
his neck and
says: this city is full of
accident lately; is it another
retrograde? laughs absently
and stands still on
the flashing yellow.
your hands are clenched
in pockets waiting for
the red.


I am walking slowly,
wearing cotton sundress and
consenting saunter.
my hips are wide,
lips are pursed and
I am quiet, light and
diffusive but mired in
 insides.
there are twelve dogs
with meat in their eye
nearby choking on their
collars.

I am wearing a blue alyssum
in my hair but
you will know me either
by my touch
if in enough of a rush and
close proximity to brush
an elbow with a thumb,
or the sudden sun I permit:
open laughter near your
chin, grabbing you
with force,
 inordinate apology
for the accidental brush,
moist I’m sorry spills over
my freshly-done, pink
velvet lips as we collide
in front of everything,
wait for green or
similar direction.
there are sirens in the distance.

you?
you will know me by
my fang-toothed smile.

“morphic resonance”

0

but i’m a martyr for this,
I crave repercussion;

even self-abnegation
needs an audience
or else it’s just plain masochism
                  lonely and acerbic
without the gentle recompense,
the moist poultice,
the final amends:
the touch of her
sadist’s fingertips
after she laid her.

all cathedrals use pain as payment
and my crucifixion,
while self inflicted,
is just as spilling
brook and baneful.
my bloodletters will wash
 the splashes from my feet,
take their time
with each laceration;

stitch
my gashes
into temples.

“Lilith”

0

 

they couldn’t take the
wanderlust,
the exhausting sadness,
 all day naps,
three week periods, and
not even a fake smile but
always a goblet.
moonshine as promised.
I was a little
overgrown gerbil:

dependent, sitting in my cedar-scented
piss in a lounge chair in the backyard
picking pine needles out of my knots;
hollow but for some force fed
swallows,
rum-coated water,
stale lines and organic vegan pop-tarts.
a shriveling income and
hooked in my dejection;
my lifeline,
my blooming red moon.
centuries of howls and hands like
needles doping me
so I’m easier to ride,
and my braided tongue
lolling,
trying to unwind,
just licking up all the
shit
you fed to me.

with love,
you said.

“best wishes”

0

I wish I had more words for
 “terrorized.”

just another verse
picking at its stitches,
grunting from the dark and
taking educated guesses at the Rorschach blot
that spreads across its skirt.
but writing with cadence,
inflection, downplaying
it with rhythm as you
try to capture the humiliation of
all the little violations
that add up to today
without one strong word
or accurate verb
to describe the way a knife
sticks for a second and you moan
the wrong way.

what sounds better to you?
I say over coffee, trying to
finish some titles.

“besieged” or “PTSD”
or simply
“raped?”

“the act of naming things”

0

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑