I have 22 pounds of wishes hidden among the weeping wisteria.
The flowers by the pond have been melancholy a long time.
I drink with them.
Look at Lily’s tattoos.
Kind of abstract, don’t you think?
I’ve been told some people are really into that.
But the roses and I share the best laughs because we know it is not about pattern
but all about color and that soft, sweet texture on the fingerpads.
Meanwhile the snapdragons do deep, twisted math at the waters edge
and I drop a wish in the water.
Blue light is not chasing
my soul.
Shades of slate and gun metal pursue me
in a way the other women wrapped in their profiles and friends
would understand more than they want to believe.
Our spirits dream while we say,
How much? That’s too much.
I have to have her there by 3.
We need to get away. It is never just us.
In the suburbs I drive over hillock after hillock
again and again,
for bread and milk,
my fingers searching beneath my skirt for something so dirty it is clean,
so corrupt as to be pure.
The sweet blue west calls me.
A vision of endless land is seared into my eyes.
Why take this seasick sailor
and set her in the lovelorn Prairie
where emptiness is everything
and loneliness is nothing,
only to drop her from a thunderous cloud
in a crowded coastal city
to drown?
I have been haunted by the voice of Autumn
taken the wind for a weekend lover,
argued with the reeking river.
I live in a castle of mattresses
and I take it sweet and slow getting out in the morning.
Bacon fries itself in the kitchen,
doing such fantastic somersaults in the bombastic grease.
The eleventh sky watches me.
Clouds are my enemy.
Hunger worms between my teeth.
My face is not finished with you.
Beyond the town the boys
cultivate storms.
A world of color is rich,
is all I need in this fog as heavy as maternal malevolence.
What I need is a glass of hot pink,
an elixir of glowing purple,
a tincture of pool blue,
languid and electric.
My atrocious capsules of snow lay beside my ginger ale
on my bedside table
while a documentary on contemporary
art stabs me in shades of black and white,
Sound muted.
Clamor clatter calamity
a huge purple spill
generous to an idea getting drunk in the corner.
I am an absence of air.
Paris writes me telling me not to come.
Many things have fallen
into the gaping O of love.
My sick senses stretch like a violin note over
a ghostly concert hall.
Halls are caverns.
I have a hall inside my city
And he waits there.
He has a bomb wrapped like a gift,
I the suction of quicksand.
Beauty has frost bite and is just
going to live that way.
The stench is aggressive.
I have been living whichever way is out of sight
from Age and Lust.
Beauty and I go way back
to a year I only remember as a pile of sugar to play in.
Skin scrubs keep Age away.
The truth is Beauty and Lust have never met,
though some think they are a couple.
Lust’s eyes are inverted in her face,
her longings contorted and her hearth
cold.
She is stove-mouthed
and thinks hideously.
Between her teeth are scrolls
from cities asleep.
Death cartwheels on my lawn
mostly to impress her,
And because in his spare time he has a pinwheel fetish.
After dark she will write my eulogy and
I will thank her
and never know her name.
Clear candles overwhelm me with a thirst for light.
I love transparency,
translucency,
transmissions from stars.
What is it about the see through
that is so luxurious and soulful?
Miniature Moon 