Tidal dreams of octopi slip-slurping over slippery stones in pools of liquid crystal flood my mind. Love is prehistoric and present. In the dead of night, my lover will come to be on a magic carpet remnant from Floors R’ Us. In the honesty of daylight, something with seven more brains than I have listens to me spin my yellow yarns, wondering why my stories are so simplistic.
Noble Clouds
Noble clouds rehearse raining over the desert of my pill baked mind. My mountainous psyche has been worn down into an everlasting plain by endless storms of malcontent synapses. My spinal cord is a belly dancer. The rain here stops when the books close. My identity is a red umbrella on the streets of Beijing. My identity is a daisy plucked from paradise by my lover with his textured hands. My identity is a bicycle wheel with playing cards stuck in the spokes. Soon the clouds will kill themselves above me, emptying their desperate passion for the old proverbs over my facetious face.
The Performance
Held together with ribbon and twine,
Our childhood selves in pink gingham
Rehearsing for a musical about my 12th
Chromosome,
Who watches in the audience, less than
Delighted with my performance.
I held your hand crossing
Boulevards of performance and
Cheap accusations of raw penance.
You were half my size,
Smelled of croissants I
Never ate in Paris.
Chromosomes are a particular bunch,
Critical and essential.
My voice sounds like a plastic bag
Caught in a fan,
And my genes hiss from the
Dark dense visions
Of my warped mind.
We will grow up,
Smell distinctly of possibility,
And then flourish in fields of tulips,
Ripped apart like two galaxies
Dancing beside a black hole.
Being
Being –
Celestial noun,
Rough neck verb.
My name crawls up the walls
With the lizards,
Dripping sweat off the S in Lisa,
In this tropical suburbia of hungry humidity.
To have. To hold.
To be bold.
Pleasure sunbathes at
the periphery of
Armageddon,
Glowing in the radiant light
Of mass death.
The work of my hands will burn.
The work of my tongue
Will breed like bunnies
In the salted bogs of blood and memory.
What is it to be a being?
Is this skin case enclosing
All of me,
Or are my more sacred components
Blowing in the billowing breeze,
Bereft of body?
Soul,
In your cantankerous wisdom,
Fill me like a breath,
so I remember
Myself.
Haunted House
Degenerate locks allow me passage into a haunted house of my own making. The ghosts here were all embroidered by me. The slamming doors are a trap beat rising from the fiercest fire in hell. Folds of memory, folders of poems. What is left of a lace life unraveling. I cannot leave. The pain will devour me like a woodchipper, from the toes up.
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White, watery worlds of cleaned thoughts roll away from me in this universe made of my flesh and bone. The fear in my prayer. The tearing in your chest as the last leaf falls on a planet I cannot remember. Stifled bruises show up at the most conspicuous moments. I am my own gravity, drawing my love and my baby toward me eternally like a bowling ball in a water bed. All else rolls away until I’m left with a thin, shiny film of memory eternally falling into itself.
The End
Falling
My hair
My jeweled name.
My breath leaves me in a hurry.
To life I’m more of a situationship.
Leaves leaving lavishly,
Their crispy crunch
Preserving the forest floor.
In the distance,
Monsters with lanterns seeking fugitive wrongdoers.
Silhouettes of maples shimmer
Breeze divine – breath of God.
Will you enter through the vine choked garden gate,
Or through the scar in the fence on Cemetery Lane?
I fall through maps of treasure.
Silk sky caresses me the whole way down.
Space envelopes me,
Soft and lax.
When I land
There will be fireworks of gold and blue.
Crusty Tuesdays
Crusty Tuesdays stick flyers about a month for sale in my old, chipped mailbox. I need a deal. Math has been chomping in my periphery. I threaten him with my angry blood. Rage washes over the periwinkle, petrified plane. Take my hands. Sew them to the monster you keep chained in your office behind the ad soaked computer monitor that logs your wasted time. I feel I am not real, which makes me true and evanescent. I’d like to buy a month. September, perhaps, savory and amber. Or July, polished until it gleams. But my funds cannot be found. Money hears my name and prances off to another pretend person.
Sparking Joy
Clotted stars jam space up, sweet and sticky as it is. The blackness of the universe is a front for the rainbows running rampant beneath our neat reality. I threw out Jupiter because he didn’t “spark joy.” My husband charging a car battery, sparks sparkling around his hands like sycophants. His hands build my name, a ship that gnaws at the unending sea, our home of seashells and topaz. At the end of time he pushes my wheelchair through fields of angry poppies, the stars above us bickering about who gets to immolate the screaming earth.
Scarcity
Hardy tulips in their frivolous, life saving splendor punch holes in the frigid Earth. Life begins with a shriek and ends in a whimper. Scarcity is the justification we use to beat one another to a pulp, and then strain out the personalities and clumps of hair for a juice that will go down smoothly. I’ve always liked my juice pulp free, as though to avoid looking at the once living cells that produced it. In the Garden, a deer delights in the warm friendship of a field mouse. Oranges grow at the periphery. And in this world, people are harvesting one another’s energy like a crop. The tulips sing their purple and yellow song into the purple and yellow birth of Spring.
Miniature Moon 