Fuzzy snowmen smell like turpentine.
Why all this wistful wind,
this heavy quiet,
these creative snowmen dancing in slow motion
to no music?
Not inaudible music,
or even illegible sound,
but nothing at all-
Machines with no factory.
This snow covers a ghost city.
The children scattered and died.
Yes, I am freezing.
Would you like to dance?
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 devil is in the trees feeding off
birds and butterflies,
his grim business shattering in silver teeth.
God is in the trees spinning webs
Soft, silky, and verdant like a blanket of grass.
Spiders fear him.
He longs to draw me to Him,
to slip his gentle fangs in my hurt and anesthetize me,
suck out my misery and take it into Him
bleeding for me.
I am paralyzed
by her black black sewing
stitching me carefully in a case of
artificial sunlight and sodium.
Needles pierce me.
I used to fly.
I used to breathe.
Now I am hollow
and my blood flows somewhere else,
in a distant desert with babies
floating down my ruby stream in baskets.
See how butterflies here bring Dawn,
a wondrously big woman with her hands on her hips?
Welcome to the Life Center,
with sparkly resources to help you warm winter.
Are you a cartwheel?
A suspicious glance?
A still wind?
We can help you get back to work.
We offer many courses:
Earth Spinning
Bone Knitting
Light Painting –
and certifications in
Prebirth Fantasy,
Pain Sculpture
Freeway Fashion.
Visit us today in the Building of Roses,
at the corner of Air and Fire.
Gloomy, graceful ghosts
lounge under a beach umbrella.
They are nudists.
They are as frosted glass.
No sunburns will befall them
as they get drunk.
And carouse on the beach where they
washed ashore
I am snow. Not real snow. I am too thick and fat and warm for that. But I am equally fickle, white, storm tossed, blinding. There are many just like me swirling in this orb. And who I love is this boy. He is so little, his smile almost too wide for the edges of the plane on which we live. He is a good boy, quiet and sad. I know that if I am not his mother I was meant to be. Still, his life is thin, will tear at a touch, and he will slip out of existence like a mirage of water. I will be left tumbling over strange faces who may have that sweet jaw line or wiry hair, but are not my son.
Memoir of a Rhinestone
The light boils and boils within me.
I grin without skin
and color gushes out.
I was born in the dark and dirt.
Everyone around me was just like me.
Everyone around me knew they were special.
And some of us held onto that belief,
and I in my green translucency was not the least of them,
until buried in a wood of polished trees I saw
a green so pure,
so somber with the weight of effort and intention-
formed like a tooth of God,
and I felt my plastic disintegrate .
Diet Music
plays from the radio,
and my soul still picks daintily.
Is it afraid of getting fat?
So much that it usually eats
it has cut from its pallet.
Friends have been left in the cabinets,
community life in the
desolate freezer.
Color is calm,
though my soul still sneaks scoops
of pulsating shades at midnight.
What soul does not like a bit of electric blue
or Kelly Green
before running away with the dreams?
Perhaps my dreams,
shrinking beneath all my scrutiny,
cannot bear away
a more voluminous soul.
Amendment 1
The closet is sated. 600 pounds of clothes
nestle on shelves and in corners.
What have you said in the cunning tongues of cashmere and cotton
that you have not said with your strategic absences?
Be silent. Be naked. You have that right.
Amendment 2
Do you feel your fears nuzzle against your ribcage?
It’s time to extinguish the dark, you skittish lover.
You have the right to vacillate, but no right to time.
Amendment 3
Burgundy secrets slink behind the columns
in front of the house.
Do you smell something February and blue?
Follow your nose. It is your privilege to do so.
It is your power.
Amendment 4
The committee decided you don’t have a right to this right.
Amendment 5
Monitor the horses in Chincoteague.
Paint their hooves red, yellow, and blue.
Climb your ladder.
Watch art born.
It is your birthright.
Miniature Moon 