Three feet behind Christmas
December 28 is trailing.
She needs a haircut desperately.
Her younger brother lives in New York.
Feted,
on the social circuit.
Dec 28 is sallow,
reminds her neighbors of a really long line.
I got her a job licking stamps at the unemployment agency.
No one sends her envelopes out.
Yet in her spare time she wins poker tournaments.
Her face hasn’t betrayed her in years.
Bind me with rain,
Give me soothing comfort as
fraud from the driver between my legs
makes me hot and unclean
during sleep.
What strange guests await in the sea before the house,
gaudy on their local ships?
Give me good help and put me down
in the park.
Let me produce vines to depend on the place.
There is no sense of operation.
And the strangers come.
Their teeth have been refined.
Their hands are swift.
Yellow reads the Kama Sutra
to write a new edition.
I admire her.
She admonishes me.
Lately I have rotted like wood,
muddled like a puddle.
Where is my orgasmic frenzy of doing
and being done?
I’m miles away from my dreams.
They have been hunting for valid reasons.
The humor of how we were born in the same year,
It really needs a song,
And she did many things right,
While I have sat as dust to the left.
Your ambition is so close to you,
your success made from your rib.
In a novel you are the hero.
I am miles away from my dreams.
They went hunting for more fertile grounds.
Funny how we were born of the same ferocious year,
The same want song,
and you have done so much
while I have settled like dust into the stillness.
In the indispensable dark
A radio waits
Fuzzy with signal.
Can you hear my hunger in the static,
The sound of my teeth gnashing overlaid
With the crackling
Like music?
Church of memoir
of discovery
of chants.
Cloistered in my name are ten lives
I did not live
in favor of a sublime 11th.
What is better than best?
What can joy can be discarded for ecstasy?
The taste of salt lines my mouth
when I look back.
translated to Xhosa, Afrikaans, and back
Church of Love
I find joy
while I lay cloistered in my ten lives.
Auroras swirl beyond my reach.
They will not live.
There is a reason I am so inordinately fond of 11.
What is better than a lot?
Why have I ignored peace?
It tasted of salt in my mouth.
Power lines guiding me back home.
Church of Love
Separate the gaiety from the joy.
Lonely in my ten lives,
they live,
it is as though they live without me.
How do I dispose of gaiety?
Of me?
Gangrene sweet, my room
is awesome.
I catalog dust,
evil,
flowers.
The watching window would melt my shy desire.
I stoke the fire.
Behind cold glass I burn.
The quality predictions
are grainy.
My name used to be July.
My clothes want butterflies.
I was born to rise.
The sky,
jealous,
buried me in his mire.
The color of water, I race slowly and win.
See how I die without fanfare,
taking millions with me?
I adore the breeze.
I covet the air but do not need it.
At the crest of unbelief my candle bobs along
on an inflatable saucer.
Miniature Moon 