The balloons have had enough of me and my parties. Their pity is gone, replaced with fury, and they begin to bob up against me on purpose. I don’t like the attitude, so I slip on my brass needles. Now they back off. Helium makes real cowards. I examine my rib cage. The contents are a box of instant photos in an old violin decaying in the rain. Have I really been a ghost this long? Is that why no one but Desire comes to my parties?
Futuristic Hellscape
Maroon rain terrifies the uninitiated in this futuristic hellscape of IRS and FBI and all the other 3 letter agencies of death and moral decay. The cyborgs hunt bunnies with lures of love, the sweet taste of carrots a distant memory. In the old city, remnants of humanity hawk their human wares. Behind me a lurid green ghost of electronic regret follows me everywhere, learning from my failures and noting them on a loudspeaker. Every time it calls one out, (numbered in the hundreds of thousands now) predatory basalt crows dive down and peck at me like philosophers of old.
The Nautilus Shape of My Indigo Heart
The nautilus shape of my indigo heart contains chamber after chamber of glowing ghosts, their scents trailing them like smoke. Ghosts of grace and hope. Grace swims like a flounder always away from me. Hope smokes hookah in a stained muumuu on the carousing beaches of my mediocre 30s. Some chambers grow roses, their red piercing my blueness, retrieving my innermost data from servers I sank in the ocean of omnivorous octopi. But the central chamber, perfect in its tiny finite nature, is the ozone of my being named Stony Place.
What Do You Believe?
The cloud scarred sky hangs over me, listening better than a diary. My pinkest purpose cannot be described in a LinkedIn post, but here it goes. Current position includes inverse star gazing and full frontal nudity. Lots and lots of kisses and laundry in an atmosphere pink with love. I come to add a touch of the sublime to the borderline profaned world of cannibalistic culture. Surreal dr office pamphlets tell me to combat depression with all the guns and ammo I have. The enemy lives in my skull, digging tunnels to my heart, making me shrink and whither. I fear I will lose my position, so I get on my knees and pray. Posture is a language between us and other sentients. What do you believe about yourself? About the God burning like a star before you, awe cloaking the scene like a light?
The Sea
Strolling hand in hand with my sea and vegan leather scented lover, I feel the sea’s jealousy. But many times I envied the sea for having my man, and more than once I dreamed she drowned me. My ghosts are all made of swirling salt water that tastes like tears. Haunted by a fear that threatens to overwhelm me and silence me, I thrash in my sleep on long nights. But tonight my lover and I dine on the pier and he gives me crab dip and hush puppies.
Pink, punk, lush, plush
My self is pink, punk, lush, plush. Deep in the neon caverns of my rebellious mind, a star studded cast of sins and malcontent. Arrange me like flowers. Prop me in the window to catch the sun and spit back out a million savory colors. Make me better than I’ve ever been. Better: adj. Softer and sweeter. Meticulously I tend my blooming thoughts. Relentlessly, memory flees.
Beauty, Evil, and I
Hot pink Beauty sips matcha, which I hate, but I love her. She teases my curves and curls and reminds me that the name God left for me under my doormat with a key to His heart has many syllables and rhymes with the way the waterfall refreshes. Beauty is generous and wants only to be loved. Evil cuts Beauty’s face off for his own purposes, wearing it as a ghoulish masquerade mask that everyone else believes. But light shines through the holes her eyes once loved, and she continued sipping her matcha, new, soft flesh growing in again – perfect and serene.
The Files – a Poem
Frosted feminine rage is rosè colored and glittering with diamonds cut into shivs. Children cry out from their unmarked graves. The men are sleeping now. Good men sleep while corrupt men slither around our youth, their fangs aimed at our children’s throats. The moon no longer shines his blessing light on what our nation does in the dark. The sun recoils, then blisters the truth as it sits in the light, beaten raw and waiting to be avenged. I slip a dagger from its sheath, and my reflection disappears from the mirror.
Language as Landscape
Language is an undulating plane, verbs shoving mountains upward like so many middle fingers. The adverbs sink like aging glaciers, the clear blue crack of their shattering as they melt under the brutal beams of a neon sun is a sort of music that graces the land. The notes blur and bend with the breeze over jungles of nouns. They tumble over each other, producing their own thunderstorms and ambitions. Pronouns are lush and thick like rivers meandering like women at the yacht club where a dumb boy and a dumber me ran among the fireworks. I is fluffy, is chartreuse chenille and hot pink fleece. I tells stories in the shade of an understanding tree that recount the story of color from the perspective of a blind man. You is a mass of muscle and expectation and hope. We….I don’t talk about those bastards. But They..talk about a complex, red backed, many horned beast! It prowls the prairie looking for I’s to shred and dismember. Language is a world of plush pleasure, rich soil being recycled over and over by thirsty and verbose crops, and hunters of magnanimity.
The Conscripted Bees
The conscripted bees dutifully praise the flowers, letting floral lovers touch through bee as medium. Fluffy bumblebees. Wise honeybees. They all gather around a Georgia O’Keefe painting salivating. I myself am a salacious painting of yellow, and I shake my head no. You can tell bees that flower has no nectar, but as long as the sweating stamen sticks out, they will pant for it. When the painting has been stung by disappointed bees, sunshine flows through the pin pricks like needles of light. The bees return to their vocation, licking the honeycomb anxious children leave behind.
Miniature Moon 