Category: poetry

Number Jungle

Number Jungle

 

5 has keys. 5 jangles.

Closes cabinets with hips.

 

9 slithers up the glass windows,

copulates on the roof.

 

2 lives

in the succulent old birch tree,

sipping insipid syrup leaking as though from a sieve.

Trees hear each other cry.

 

 

Fighting with a chipmunk for nuts is 4.

4 with big teeth and base instinct

who made the terrain with his little claw year by year.

 

 

3 is a sucker for Romance languages,

estuaries that burn the thirsty livid.

 

 

See the gators muscle through the delta

unaware he watches hungry.

 

7 churns in the puddles

bites mosquitoes til they welt

 

8 carves slices of watermelon beyond the fence

 

spitting seeds

into

a

hole

in

the

ground,

listening to them nest and

fight,

content without toys

 

1 sings high in the breeze,

perched on a cell tower.

Unattainable music,

sweet sweat dripping from him

a rain of sugar.

 

 

Red Rhapsody

A melancholy running over the world,

trampled rows of arthritic wishes

trying to dust themselves off and carry on.

Dust feasts with minute teeth on a handbag.

 

God is a diamond, multifaceted, sparkling

rainbow colors, knife sharp, hard cutting.

And red He let loose in the world

to give us one drop short of enough to drink,

 

to leave us one inch short of His height

requirement, roiling within ourselves,

connected by an energy that knows us.

 

Perseverance and Suicide

Quarrelsome boas cannot decide who will

take my inner drive

and so it is passed back and forth like a dish rag.

 

I once did the dishes all the time but hid from the stove.

Now the stove, dusters, sewing needles all hide from me.

 

I remind my back to stop bleeding.

It is enough the knife slowly turns.

Don’t advertise it.

In that house we gave nothing of ourselves,

because we admitted to nothing.

I am a fish still alive in the pot.

 

Temperature rising.

Temperance gone.

I hope the hag cooks with good wine.

 

No.

I refuse to breathe the water,

absorb the wine

I am a woman for whom jetted tubs were made.

I step out of the vat

not even naked

with all the shame heaped on me,

and I strangle each snake for laughs.

 

Here is my drive

on the floor tired and pitiful.

But here is me.

Knives removed,

stripping naked,

drying off.

drying out,

deciding drive is not enough…

and I have more

Form is Function

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?

Designing My Own Destruction From Glitter

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.

My Disease

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