Parisian plastic and crisp churches
Line the rain with loveliness.
At the edge of wet and dry reflections fly free.
I am painted with velvet sound,
eating my turpentine soup.
How lonely are the days baked in my face?
The Scent Radius of a Rose as a Unit of Measurement
The scent radius of a rose as a unit of measurement.
My smile weighs too much,
crumbles off my face.
I’m sick of fried hair and unstoppable worry.
My secrets hate me and my eyes betray me.
On the beaches are boxes of life
watching the great red shipping containers float on the horizon.
Simply put
I have no allies I have not bought
And I drink old snow.
Disdain
You are a systemic failure,
a weed I will use to make a poultice for my feet.
My jaw is slack and exhausted from talking to God,
my ears reverent from listening.
Sunlight colonizes the window glass,
makes cities we can see but not feel.
Innocence Threatened – Xhosa/Afrikaans Project
Poem in the original English, followed by translations to Xhosa and Afrikaans and back.
Blue light chases me.
My soul is cold,
spirit still dreaming.
In a meadow I roll down the hillocks
over and over,
my little sear suckered skirt frilly
over my still narrow hips.
A movie an angel might wish to watch
or a pederast.
Translation and edit:
In the meadow I roll down the hillock
my short skirt ruffled.
On my stretching back now,
a starlet with one hell of a fan.
Submission 2
The sun salivates.
What I know about the submission?
I’m all hardware and no market.
Art to me:
My rib, you know the war.
What nation can be fed by my fall?
Submission
A salivating sun
licks a sailboat lost from harbor.
What do I know about submission?
All steel and no magnolia.
Eloquence runs from me.
From my rib you can take a war.
What nation can be fed by my falling eyelashes
that this fluid angel warps around my form?
The Way Things Are
Your neighbors know you better than you do.
My hat is me-
black and white and full of
Hamptons zeitgeist.
On an irritable coastal crag a gaggle of
children considers drowning while their mothers read an Amish romance,
while their fathers surf with mirrors.
Wrens
Wrens build subdivisions in the sky blue earth lid
A mirror to my own gridlock of houses,
land with sharp corners.
To be free to be freewheeling,
with nothing to fear but sharper teeth and
gravity
is a life I do not wish for.
I Was a Rock Star
Lights are scarlet away and foamy.
We have a vast space in the night.
Do you remember how my feet
burned with happiness,
my bones black with jealousy?
I was a rock star on the asphalt.
Night Road
Scarlet lights chase away the foamy,
ebony space of night.
Does the road remember my feet,
their burning wide imprints hunting for homeopathic
happiness?
There was such a searing black pain in my bones,
glittering and sharp like the starry rocks in asphalt.
I hauled pain with me like water in those
uncivil days.
