Oval orchestras illuminate my mind with their music. In the high notes, short shadows of fear and doubt and my biggest regrets. In the low notes, my sorrow paints Ave Maria with interpretive dance. Action painting is fun but requires no talent. There. I said it. Now a raven will peck my pupils out with pure, putrid spite. Women are never allowed to step out of line. Ever. And it’s not the men that are holding us stagnant. In my honeyed mind, a hive of sisterhood not many of even the sharpest sisters can break free of. How can a woman be liberated without the approval of women? Intellectualism offers me a beer that tastes like piss and dissertations, and I gag. Get this flagrant minutiae out of here. I want God sized truth, to dance my way away from this lunging sisterhood of desperate bees. Bees that attack. Bees that die while they wound you. Bees that dance their way to a manna of social acceptance I can only dream of. It is the year the valleys will glow in the dark. What do we do now?
Tag: poem
I Was a Marshmallow
Sincere silence is honest with me, unlike the electricity that wiped my inner hard drive partially clean and diluted my mind. The futile nature of remembering my life smells like a campfire dying in a cold rain. I miss 1999. Not anything about my life in particular that year. Just the world before society lost its collective mind. In the beginning, I came home and slept from the anesthesia. In the evenings, I was a marshmallow. But then I was hollow, unaware of anything but a voice saying “What would you give to raise a child in a world that no longer exists?” Glacial mistiming of fertility and luck. The world ends in an orgy of rage, and we all drown in the torrents of tears. I cannot build my daughter a raft. I sink.
Soft Shapes
Rollerskating on the moon has been my ambition since I died. It was a sunny day and no one heard the Aspen trees whispering, their taffeta leaves rustling in a language that predates man by millions of years. The lake watches me. The clouds, ever jealous of the soft shape I fill empty space with, watch jealously. In a paddle boat, ghosts of birthdays past and future argue with one another.
Verb Hunting
My language cannot contain me, and yet it is so vast I have not explored much of it. God, sailing across a sealing sea, rejuvenates me for the hunt for the perfect verb. Anesthetize. Bludgeon. Simmer. Restore. Radiate. God, grant me some kind of inner backing. I peel away in the wind.
The Language of the Damned
My visual language is a spicy hellion. Flowering trees mean, “release me from the nuthouse.” If the buds are pink, I’m being badly psychoanalyzed by a therapist who I’m sure is a walrus inside. Clouds mean luxury. My body is undefined and unquestioning. Yielding to pressure. Sumptuous and yet plain and smelling of petrichor. Images are ideas incarnate. Poetry is a snapshot of my mind’s eye as it roams the dying earth, sprinkling water on the tulips as I pass from field to field. I want to farm flowers, syllabi, and the blue of the blessed mother’s veil. What a business woman I would be – not dressed up and with too many places to go. Why not have a monsoon at my expense? Dance in the incandescent rain. The damned watch from below, their bodies shimmering in a heat too intense for comprehension.
The Nuthouse
Windows to concrete. Ghosts of sanity smoking together as though huddling against the world. Maneating sedatives prowl the corridors looking for victims. You will not shut off my personality. You will not condemn my name as unfit. The hunted can hunt. My 9 year old self watches, anxious and disappointed. I peer around the corner, braless and determined. I’m going to dance like a ballerina to any tune they play because I have to get out of here. My soft soul can’t survive it.
Limiting my Limitations
Frenching with ardent snowflakes was my youthful pastime. Once, in high school, I danced like no one was watching as the snow gently fell, but I was in a courtyard surrounded by windows, and everyone was watching. Early hypomania, before mania bloomed in my mind like a cantankerous blossom of energy. My ankle is derelict. I can’t walk far. But my mind is at the edge of the solar system, stepping out into a blistering future of stars.
Casual Thrills
Psychedelic sunshine slits open my dark inner chambers, piercing my side. I leak glitter – beautiful and cheap like talk, like casual thrills, like loss. The wind is loving and cool in my hair. In my psyche, a desert with an oasis of blood. This will be my punishment.
Prairie Like Tinfoil
Jilted raindrops storm off from the clouds. The prairie wrinkles and crumples like tin foil – and it’s just as shiny. Angels play Uno under a lone tree, who helps one of them cheat. I walk toward them but will never reach them. The prairie has other plans, as does the dragonfly shimmering beside me. I’m pretty sure he’s just Death singing a lullaby only I can hear. My soaked slip sticks to me like the music of my husband’s deft fingers. Lingering in the cool air, half evaporated ghosts of truths long lost.
Sail Away Sail Away
Neon nefarious nepotism among the clouds creates chasms of lightning and love. Deep in the gorge, I make a boat out of a pallet and an umbrella. The umbrella is purple. So is my grieving spirit. The river will rush through the canyon into my veins. The rain nourishes the curving river as it cuts around red rocks. I hear it coming closer. I have my boat. I have my bruises. I have no reason why. The river lifts me up. I am 37 34 25 21 19 and then 9.
Miniature Moon 