Seeing through a window darkly, I observe a cloud killing his coolness and I say nothing. The last time I dropped a mirror I saw my essence in a myriad of fragments, and I wept. Cover the house in shrouds. I cannot narrate my life to this typist in a clown suit while seeing inside my tears.
Lame Shadows Limp
The lame shadows limp in the apricity of a well worn January afternoon. My after thoughts are too big for your seismic detectors. I sell seashells by the seashore, and you better believe I make a profit. Behind the green screen of life, a ghost of a woman with eroding teeth.
Specially Designed Paper Airplanes For Bats
The fountain of fire flows through my hemispheres of storms and femininity. The light shining from my eyes has one brightness setting – supernova – and even the air sizzles with the static flowing from my bountiful word garden on the back porch. On the walls of this acorn, paintings of death doing gymnastics. My portfolio includes specially designed paper airplanes for bats, graphic misrepresentation of the intent of those clouds over there, and some semiannual irresponsibility.
Necrosis and Neurosis
All afternoon the heat races through my circulatory system like a typhoon. My life is ebbing away. On an unremarkable beach, an unremembered explorer. The sun hovers like a smothering mother. My skin slobbers. What wild daylight must be captured and cooled for my necrosis and neurosis to heal?
The Future
Bleached culture lies dormant in a vault under a rainy jungle. It is all I can do to say my polychromatic prayers and wish for lilacs. Soon I will bloom – like a volcano from the core of an enraged earth, furious to be far flung in a space time continuum that stretches and bulges hideously. Hiding in the trees, birds of hell and bats of burden. There is no cleaning up what was done in the brutal summer of civilization except in blood.
Life after Electroshock
White, wilted, silty, and salty, forgetfulness washes over me like sand carried by the tide. In my head the whirring of a scarred conscience. In my eyes, festering wounds of imperfection. I have electrocuted myself 15 times and died each time. The body may die once, but identity dies little by little as memory fades. Still, my sweeter half carries me onto the nefarious beach. He opens his mouth and pours purpose into me.
Autobiography in Color – flash memoir and poetry
I was 11. I had a neon orange shirt from The Limited Too and dayglo orange shorts from the same trendy tween store, and I paired them together. I was aware this was an unusual fashion choice, but my goal was to inhabit, inbibe, imbue myself with, and commune with the essense of orange and the God who created such a juicy ecstasy of a color.
My peers made unkind comments. I didn’t give a crap. They could not see what I could taste on my tongue……the sweet, sour, explosive energy that radiates from any bright, energetic shade of orange.
They didn’t speak my language. Around the girls I wore my face that I kept in a jar by the door. I knew who it was for.
In college I carried a vial of neon, sunshine, pure yellow beads from a craft store. I had moments where I needed to hang on to that tantalizing and holy color of orgasms and joy. I needed to understand yellow. Yellow is a country of her own. A country whose borders I perforated to access.
As a child I knew obsession in blue. Neurosis came to me and I would not accept less than a blueing of my private universe with grape purple on the edges.
Now I glow pink and place my permafrost heart in rows of pink yarn stretching like cables along the pink, plush landscape of my body, and of the inextricable boundaries of fulfillment and the feminine as a community application to sainthood. My sisters are bees who sleep in flowers my man gives me under borrowed starlight, sublime and polychromatic. The community fountain of wisdom is clogged with bleached hair and 21st century architecture. Pink is the warm color’s answer to blue. An impossible range of shades from warm to cool, from vivids to whip tints. Pink is a private planet of primordial femininity. A woman is a flower who blooms planted with the right man.
Beneath my eyes, an iridescent white flows from within my innermost chambers and I must confront how I sparkle and glow in so many colors and rhyme with the childlike joy of snow.
New Life
The languid, languishing ghost of ice ages past relinquishes her grip on the mountains, and I am terrified of what comes out to play when snow goes away. Children ask profound questions. What color is disappointment? (Beige, child) Children ask stupid questions. Why am I here? I suppose it’s not the question itself that’s stupid, but rather who you ask it to. I’m here because Valentine’s Day was just around the corner and my parents were too broke to go shopping. You might be here because an angel sneezed. All I know is the cold is opening like a grand doorway, and bursting forth is an alien life that shimmers green and pink in the haze of inexperienced summer.
Just the Right Universe
You are an old oak tree – I am but a swing designing patterns in the breeze from your strongest branch. The forest is alive with the yellow agreement of ants and the soft green buzz of bees. The sky wears blue like a badge of honor, but I saw it go to bed with a slatternly purple last night. Our child rocks on me. You support our weight. In another life you were a river, I a fishing pole languishing on an old man’s porch.
Theocracy of Granite
When the pain of my sinner’s shell is sufficient, I will shed it in a desert of my own making and grow a holy cathedral over my delicate glass body with the worn out, crimson heart. Sin scours the sands looking for beasts of burden to shackle. In the bottle of a glass of Holy Water, the egg of a dove kept perfectly warm. I was born to a theocracy of granite in a land as old as rebellion. There I will return to lay my crystal foundation.
Miniature Moon 