I got drunk at the DMV with John Berryman, and we toasted to unkempt memory until the police threw us out on the murky street and the rats laughed. The only license I have now is license to kill. Houseflies mostly. I printed the certificate myself. Beneath a red umbrella, a demon watches us enviously – able to enjoy others carousing but never able to carouse himself. Berryman looks at me with a poem in his eyes and my mind records the wine dark music of his shredded sanity against the petrified blue screaming of my own.
Silky Pink Wishes
Silky pink wishes dab blush on my cheeks. Prettiness ages like fine wine. I cannot drink. Water clasps my throat like a necklace, and I remember running on the beach in nothing but my frightened girlhood and a few inches of fabric I called a bikini, darting like daylight away from the dark and desolate vultures who stalked me. In my mind, that girl strolls now. The sea takes a little over her as she lolls by the ravenous shore, but the vultures fear her and keep their distance. Layered in comfort and rest, she holds a pink parasol to keep the aging at a steady rate.
Gomorrah
Excellent tornadoes rip through this city of ruby blood and ivory bone. With precision, they cut down every den of vice including mine. The ravens used to visit me daily, bringing their gifts of scrap metal and creepy stories. The city is toxic now, like a lover that beats you and you stay because there is nowhere else for you to inhabit. The world is inhospitable and layered with the soot of all the good things the people have burned. The ravens do not come – choosing to eat the popcorn God throws for them as they watch Gomorrah burn.
Sail Away to Paint it Black
My personal cloud plays Enya as it leaks across the middle years of my life. I can’t say where the road goes, but this packet of ambien and tourmaline justice is going under my tongue. I danced on a blue velvet stage once for a hunter who at the end of my dance decided to kill me. But when he shot his arrow the stage collapsed under me, and I fell through to a world where the crimson edges of knowledge fade to black. Light a candle for me on the lip of the conquering darkness. Take my life and paint it black.
Party for 2
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.
Miniature Moon 