Tag: poem

Glittering Desert of Diamonds Ruled By The Worst of Us

Seas of silty green glitter carry life like a gloat to the unexamined shores of the Present – a glittering desert of diamonds ruled by the worst of us wearing designer bags. The new life will sprout transparent like ghosts, but immovable like a disapproving father. It will reflect life, envy, wealth, inexperience.  New money aesthetic laid like a costume over a third world spiritual plane of poverty. We can all dance the Charleston and drink our grandmother’s wine, but our prayers bounce among our children like deflated balloons and  the rent has come due on our bodies and we have nothing but glitter and smoke.

Semi Precious Revolvers

The rainbow of my shape shifts between sunshines and valleys in this cosmic horror of suburbia. Turquoise and emerald chains tether me to reality.  I am a landscape of soft legacy, of marble layered in fleece layered in velvet layered in silk. Leaves fall all autumn and the royal blue of my cold nails. Music here tilts radically left and downward at 30 degrees. Least believable turtles I’d ever seen, I answered when the radicals asked for my vote with their shining semi precious revolvers. Sound initiated me into the rolling sea of the dead crashing on the  mauve shores of regret.

Pureed Future Tense

Ceramic cerulean blood scrapes through the veins of the aging skin of my face. My expression could strip the veneer off the 21st century. My breath is vaporized blood glistening like rubies. The violins playing in the cemetery smell like rotten verbs and pureed future tense. I pretend I am not a tangerine. No one believes me. In the violet, violent hallways of death, my silhouette bearing another like a casket.

In The Tide Pools

In the glistening tide pools, an octopus polls his neighbors about the upcoming tide. “For or against?” he asks. The tide comes regardless and the octopus pulsates purple with anonymity. In the glossy horror of the sea, ghosts bathe in hot vents with life forms the living will never sea.  The tide does not care for the fish.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ekphrastik Poem – Identity’s 1st Painting

Sooty clouds leak a fine dust that turns into sliding beds of black silt along the murmuring rivers of my mind. Rowing in one river is my husband, setting sail along the shores of my body, stopping in the inlets and the dive bars that are my eyes. In the next river, a poem sunbathes with a rubber ducky, drinking cough syrup. I always have loved the flavor of cough syrup and the slick scent of dry erase markers. On another riverbank, little Lisa penning novels in gingham dresses. The novels are in gingham. Lisa is in a shroud of loss. My memories ride rough shod over the rough volcanic landscape of my consciousness, periodically plummeting to their deaths in unseen lava tubes.








Sewing Buttons on Sunshine

I’ve got to sew buttons onto the sunshine. It’s a lot like trying to define myself in the language of flowers. The roses are red from pilfering the blood from my veins. A red umbrella taps into my wrist and the rain is as rubies glittering in the uncooperative sunlight. Feel the burn. Not communism. Asphalt. All of my childhood days not running barefoot have caught up to me, and I must pay for this particular batch of sin all at once. Lay off the iron. Bring on the buttons.

Clear Concealer

I wear an identity of glass like it was some sort of designer bag. All my ideas splatter like paint balls against the fluorescent spaces of my spiced up brain. The light lingers lovingly over my porcelain, ghostly skin. I match whatever environment I need to camouflage in by being transparent and thereby concealing the truest, bluest parts of me. In truth I hate it, but everyone tells me glass will be rare and valuable soon, so I better keep the cracking coat of clear concealer.





Liquid Rainbows

Patron saint of leprosy and lepidoptera, please pray for me. Your prayers are perfumed prettiness in the heavenly atelier of our most brilliant Lord and Savor. Who made the colors that coat our lives? Who inscribed code into our flesh and blood? None but Him, His hands soaked in liquid rainbows. My skin is getting old. My face is going viral. My face is a virus, a label I wear to hide my soul shivering in her thin blue shift, nipples cutting against the cold like diamonds. Faces are a contoured means to a flattened end in the catalog of human memory.

Woolen Fortress of January

In the woolen fortress of January, gunmetal skies and home chilled on the rocks, bathed by the sea. I was born to granite and snow. The birch trees lining the lanes of my memories have a thousand eyes peering out of them. All of them look into me, red eyed windows to the abyss staring at my soul and counting the wrinkles. January is an old, brittle friend whose joints croak in chorus with mine along the craggy coast. Though January leaves me every year, I can never seem to disentangle myself from his cold, lingering fingers.