She steals steam after the summer rain,
rolling it off the asphalt as a carpet
she will lay in her den.
She was named by the tesseract
snarling in the backyard.
Instead of her period each month,
she turns blue
and Inspiration knows she is fertile.
You are so cuttingly engineered,
designed with impure
perpetual function in mind.
What does it mean that your gears shudder
torturously
at the turbid passion chewing a gash across her left hip?
She is a reluctant dreamer,
afraid of who she’ll see tonight
beneath her eyelids.
Outside you wait with muscles and wolves,
and a knife that only turns in the dark.
Your name is on a sealed record somewhere playing over and over.
Your hand is a voodoo doll.
Watch her bend when you close your fingers.
In the water.
Back out.
Control scraping itself on the rocky banks.
Itches attack,
discomfort with myself and with you.
You a drafty accordion with dirt in the grooves.
The water never ambushes me because I smell it near.
My feet tingle when it runs through the reservoir beneath me.
Umbrellas call one another collect
through clouds of curious rain drops
on so much ambition and ecstasy it hurts.
My ideas are drunk in the corner.
I lack spirit.
I have spirits.
Paris write me telling me to come
when love is nothing.
I will be held in my city,
and I will wait
between the lovers wrapped in their coats like gifts.
The road curls into
a ring I wear on my finger.
The humid spring air squeezes through
my open window,
fat
sweet
and loved.
Somewhere out there I am a baby
Writing great epistolaries in brooding vomit.
In the center of a field,
I’m ignorant,
sophisticated,
too generous,
my senses plundered
by clouds of venom
I can’t go back to the day I left
My universe of birth
and I don’t want to.
I rinsed the dust of it from my hair.
I glow pure yellow into the waking calendar,
designing my own destruction from
glitter.
A little thunderstorm runs around my feet
Then skitters under the sofa.
He is one of many.
I see them in my cabinets sometimes
and once walked into millions of them in the attic.
They scattered.
A feral book leaps off his shelf and
onto the lonely sofa I no longer sit on
because I cannot linger.
My disease watches me all the time,
nestled in my skull.
It will attack me from the side
Rip my smiles open and empty them out.
I work all day to stay on the move.
Light is always trying to hide behind the future
so I am constantly pushing millions of beams forward.
The shy scent of water cloaks me
as the desert outside the window searches for me.
More bones are always needed.
My disease sings.
My disease plays.
My disease paints the back
Of my eyelids with sand.
The thunderstorms feed
on my crumbling tears
She harvests roses,
rivers,
righteousness.
The world watches her sleep.
Birds peer through her window
like so many anxious dignitaries in a
court of intrigue.
She wears the scent of sun
in a vial around her neck.
He will hunt her better nature.
color his prayers with her name.
This is yearning –
to be jealous of the air
because it can touch her everywhere at once.
In his suit of wool and guilt
he watches her pick bouquets of breeze,
spinning in a plain of demolished satisfaction.
At night, he whittles mathematics down
to an immaculate paste of 2
and rubs it over his body
Tomorrow he will wait by the light
and draw her in with his want song.
I am terrified of ships,
arrogant as they
taunt ice
and pitch barbs at waves.
I know what it is to leak,
for the rain to flood my sneakers.
I know how it feels when the sea runs out
of my eyes,
violent, silent,
and the horrid salt leaves me thirsty for days.
Water plays the sheep gently in summer storms.
I too have been a lover strolling down streets wet
with leaked cloud
and felt almost thrilled.
But then I slept.
I dreamed,
and the water rose higher and higher,
crested over me and I drowned.
Now I watch the ports carefully,
listen to ships boast and jeer.
The water whispers its dark plans.
Sylvia and I
In the kitchen I drink
lemonade,
cyanide,
white zinfandel.
I love the way we share secrets,
the way we are secrets.
The children are at school
and I don’t know why.
You can’t be taught to be radiant,
to sew your smile on each dawn,
to pour yourself like perfume from a pitcher
all over the house when you are empty.
Let’s stir our drinks.
The ice is so officious,
teaching us how to die with grace.
There are no cookies to bake in the waiting oven.
We just can’t be that sort of women.
My ice clanks,
melts.
The room is paler.
We burn deeper
if not brighter.
Miniature Moon 