Tag: poem

Once Bitten

Fireworks of pain in my fecund teeth
Advantageous chalkboards fill with unmoored drawings
In kid script
Of dragons and lagoons and devils.
Open red. See the wet birds waddle out cheep cheep.

Alarming threads sew me a bag for my head
In this titillating twilight.
Once I was 21 and I buried myself by a birch tree.
Then instantly I was 23 and I was born,
Having gestated under a plaid lamp.

I can barely bite but oh how I am bitten!
Hurt a cataclysmic light in my eyes.

December 28

Three feet behind Christmas

December 28 is trailing.

She needs a haircut desperately.

Her younger brother lives in New York.

Feted,

on the social circuit.

 

Dec 28 is sallow,

reminds her neighbors of a really long line.

I got her a job licking stamps at the unemployment agency.

No one sends her envelopes out.

Yet in her spare time she wins poker tournaments.

Her face hasn’t betrayed her in years.

Church

Church of memoir

of discovery

of chants.

Cloistered in my name are ten lives

I did not live

in favor of a sublime 11th.

What is better than best?

What can joy can be discarded for ecstasy?

The taste of salt lines my mouth

when I look back.

 

 

translated to Xhosa, Afrikaans, and back

Church of Love

 

I find joy

while I lay cloistered in my ten lives.

Auroras swirl beyond my reach.

They will not live.

There is a reason I am so inordinately fond of 11.

What is better than a lot?

 

Why have I ignored peace?

 

It tasted of salt in my mouth.

Power lines guiding me back home.

 

 

Church of Love

Separate the gaiety from the joy.

Lonely in my ten lives,

they live,

it is as though they live without me.

How do I dispose of gaiety?

Of me?

22 Pounds of Wishes

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.

 

Burning Suburbia

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.