Category: poetry

February – Or Limits.

The ghost of February
Rummages through my garage,
Unearthing thousands of decayed dreams.

February is ice blue
Is lonely
Is unhinged.
Climate Control
Battles with her every year.
But each year February dies
And her ghost
Is a pick pocket on the beach I grew up on.

When she comes to my home,
My pink dwelling by the sea,
She searches for her brother,
January.
I do not tell her
But I buried him
And selfish ambition
Under the Norfolk Pine.

One of my dreams is delicate,
Lacy,
Shy.
Her I named Aurora
For the lights I long to see
At the ends of the Earth.
She almost turns to dust in February’s
Damp hands.

February takes a shine to her and asks me,
“May I?”
I acquiesce.
She wipes away the frost
On her eyes,
And sachets out of my garage,
My little green dream chattering away at her.
May my tender little dream

Go where I cannot.

Doors

Domesticated butterflies
dust my curio cabinet.
Feral dogs howl outside my door.
Why is every door in this house
blue and covered in teeth?

I collect crystal,
smiles,
foreign flags.
I teach a curriculum
of careful altruism
to my class of invertebrate Thursdays.

I understand the lascivious sunset and all her erotic, neurotic colors.
I, too, am a walking box of crazy desire.

This house is a department store
specializing in drapes.
This house is a mismanaged dream.
This house is a disease
that makes you ten years younger.

I thank my butterflies,
And I feed the dogs.


Kitchen Knife

In the crisp, cropped morning –
gold daydreams at the edges.
I hurry to class
fantasizing about books,
about the secret haven of birds,
about a candy leopard.

The future ripples like
accommodating grass
with each turn I make.
Each choice is a wind setting out
over the plane of my uncategorized existence
like a ray of light.

What lies in the center of beauty
but a fawn sleeping soundly,
her mother still 3 days away
from the hunter’s gun?

Amiable maps will reveal
the road to catharsis,
but hide the rambling path
of permanent joy
that I have to cut into the brush                     myself with a kitchen knife.

Tendrils, Fence, Sneaking around after dark

Tendrils of ivy are hatching in God’s drawings of the South. The South is a forest green. New England is blue. The mid atlantic is cream.

Fake things bother me. Even fake blood.

The spirits were behind the children, not in front of them. 

Trick or Treat!

Sorry, nothing left.

I snuck under the fence into the field, hiding from the horses. If you stood at the crest of the hill you could see Blacksburg, Christiansburg, and a bit Radford twinkling in the dark. Somehow we spooked the horses, and I had to flatten like a piece of paper underneath that electric fence again ASAP to get out of there and escape.

Performance

Performance is the worst possible backseat driver.
Performance puts in long hours,
But quite frankly it’s needy.
I want to go right,
But I can do things better on the left,
So I fly left.
My little metrics pusher guiding my wheel.

Performance is born of pride and pressure.
I, Little package of blood and bone, need to find my own place to go.

Subcommittees

My subconscious is a group project with many subcommittees.
Hopefully there are people much smarter than me
Making some of these decisions.

As it stands,
I have my hand in an oil can
While building a house from matches.
At night I fear silence so I whisper my anthems to God,
I spend the day trying to be a kite-
And then burning every kite in a 10 mile radius because I’m mad I failed.

The wind in the conifers beckons,
Yet the subcommittees have all voted no,
And I cry in my yard

and don’t understand why I do

The Eaters

The day is clean shaven,
Presentable even,
When the city eaters and their svelte gray machines
Enter in through the back M- across a complicit river.

When the streets failed under the filmy force,
The people had nowhere to walk.
They stayed in their apartments and watched the world burn –
Carefully-
Because the landlord didn’t secure the railing

Once the grocery stores were chewed up and spit out
By an Eater called Fin
I fled to sleep.

Red

Desiccated red like a rose picked apart
By the sort of angry young man who would tear the wings off a butterfly
For free.

Red speaks to me in a cracked voice.
She was a sultry with a temper.
Now her skin is a desert.

She tells me to avoid the heat of summer and grasp spring-
Before the boys become men by the river

I lay in bed at night thinking about that rose
And her love for me.

Medical Textbook

If patient has a red ring around her throat, use antiseptic.
Love rashes are contagious.
Hands clasped means she will die waiting for a train
If you don’t mend her before you send her
Back into a susceptible world.

Cauterize the eyes. Seeing only hurts the patient.

Put a shunt in her cheeks.
Saliva leads to kissing, to being terminal.