Category: poetry

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

Third Eye Witnesses

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.

Dark Water

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.

Lemonade and Cyanide

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.

God is Salt

I love stickers.

I run everything through my sticker maker.

I forced my flip flops through,

then a starfish,

a river of my hair,

a beach chair.

 

My scrapbooks brim with beaches, ballerinas

and heart attacks.

 

What won’t you run through my machine?

What won’t you laminate and stick with me?

Is God hovering just above the water restless?

 

God is salt.

He is always salt.

He fills the sea with delight,

cleans the air,

sows the fields.

 

He giveth.

He taketh away.

He notices neither.

The Life of White

Beneath the whitest pearl sky

the scent of pink lemonade wafts.

The sun is glass.

 

Fields trimmed in lace.

Hoards of human paraphernalia

burning, under the magnifying glass.

 

It’s the life of white to destroy in gentle tides.

 

The bitter angels in us,

the blacker angels outside.

 

My blood pearls. A necklace to wear.

My spirit in my high heels. Give me a scotch.

Give me talcum powder.

Embalm the fog that veils my name.