Tag: poem

Depression

My thoughts are gridlocked.
Red travesties everywhere,
Blue regrets blurring
Into a wistfulness that tastes
Of honey and old soap.
The dark force is here again,
Its claws reaching from my
Quivering core to silence
The voice I have watered daily
For 30 anxious years.

How can I trample someone
With more arms and legs than I?
Depression as spider winding webs
All over the courtyard of my once ebullient mind. 
Creativity needs me like the sun needs
Photosynthesis-
Which is to say she doesn’t,
But I need her desperately.

Peel the purposeless purple prose
From my prodigious mind.
Help me unearth truth,
Swimming as she does
Beneath us all
In the water table.

* Please ignore that the first lines are all capitalized. I can’t figure out how to fix that formatting problem on WordPress or in Word. It will be fixed before my book is published. This is a rough draft.

Inelegant Death

The man trapped in a rain drop drowns when he tries to smell it. The letter I wrote to you last year is pinned to a ray of sun called the Exorbitant Cuddle. My letters make mayhem with the luscious cosmos. Two drinks in and the year was drunk like the Communion wine. There is no end to the sort of suffering that will pull your heart out through your crotch. Only inelegant death, thriving.

A Party

The wine soaked air curls
Around my hips,
My hips that once bore life
And now bears only blood
And the thrill of empty promises.

The jeweled sky pays homage to Van Gogh
While I chat with the lyrics and rhythm
Of a song I liked once.
This party has an impressive guest list.
Ambition
Lust
Greed
Credibility
Their wives eye my knock off bag
Skeptically.
It’s not really a cloud purse,
But it is made of a fine sewn mist.
I hold my head high.
I produced a rose in 16 million colors.
No one here has done that.

The night is younger than I.
The breeze is crusted with carcinogens
And no one,
I mean no one,
Wants to talk about it.
My husband puts his arm around my waist
And I remember planting the seed,
Praying for a flower I could only dream of.
Now the rain is acid,
Tastes like sour candies,
And I fear for the future of flowers.

February – Or Limits.

The ghost of February
Rummages through my garage,
Unearthing thousands of decayed dreams.

February is ice blue
Is lonely
Is unhinged.
Climate Control
Battles with her every year.
But each year February dies
And her ghost
Is a pick pocket on the beach I grew up on.

When she comes to my home,
My pink dwelling by the sea,
She searches for her brother,
January.
I do not tell her
But I buried him
And selfish ambition
Under the Norfolk Pine.

One of my dreams is delicate,
Lacy,
Shy.
Her I named Aurora
For the lights I long to see
At the ends of the Earth.
She almost turns to dust in February’s
Damp hands.

February takes a shine to her and asks me,
“May I?”
I acquiesce.
She wipes away the frost
On her eyes,
And sachets out of my garage,
My little green dream chattering away at her.
May my tender little dream

Go where I cannot.

Ghosts

Ghost is a noun,
a verb,
A philosophy.
The spilled milk curdles
on a floor I have no time for,
as I float toward the sun roof.

I left behind a peril of poison
to enter this paradise.
So many ghosts march outside,
sliding past my windows
to a war I have left.

Sometimes you can take
your ball and go home,
but home is some place new and blue.

Tendrils, Fence, Sneaking around after dark

Tendrils of ivy are hatching in God’s drawings of the South. The South is a forest green. New England is blue. The mid atlantic is cream.

Fake things bother me. Even fake blood.

The spirits were behind the children, not in front of them. 

Trick or Treat!

Sorry, nothing left.

I snuck under the fence into the field, hiding from the horses. If you stood at the crest of the hill you could see Blacksburg, Christiansburg, and a bit Radford twinkling in the dark. Somehow we spooked the horses, and I had to flatten like a piece of paper underneath that electric fence again ASAP to get out of there and escape.

Red

Desiccated red like a rose picked apart
By the sort of angry young man who would tear the wings off a butterfly
For free.

Red speaks to me in a cracked voice.
She was a sultry with a temper.
Now her skin is a desert.

She tells me to avoid the heat of summer and grasp spring-
Before the boys become men by the river

I lay in bed at night thinking about that rose
And her love for me.

Medical Textbook

If patient has a red ring around her throat, use antiseptic.
Love rashes are contagious.
Hands clasped means she will die waiting for a train
If you don’t mend her before you send her
Back into a susceptible world.

Cauterize the eyes. Seeing only hurts the patient.

Put a shunt in her cheeks.
Saliva leads to kissing, to being terminal.

Love Your Neighbor

A highway with a necklace of beer glass.
I too am hemmed in by glass,
By broken mirrors and dashed bottles of wine and my second sight glasses a finished suicide.
Trucks come so bright,
And taxi drivers look with pity
As I walk miles in the snow without gloves,
Trying to get my new space heater home and turned on.
Then a man quietly pulls up next to me
And offers a ride.
His taxi is a minivan and I see his meter up front.
I told him thank you, but I have no money.
He said he wanted to help. No charge.
That is what we mean when we say love your neighbor.

Intersections

Clean diagonals are a favorite,
Chevron and parallel.
Parallels are easy,
Lonely yet satisfied
In a trip by herself in an untouched sliver of real.

Perpendiculars are problems.

Where two lines meet there is a point I can’t make,
An indispensable collision.
What happens at a point stays there
But the two lines on their way to nothing

Are forever changed.