Memoir as A Dress Outgrown
For so long gone I have been a good casing
Like for a bullet hard and dreaming of skin.
I am sleek and shiny.
but no matter the forces against me
I don’t know how to give,
so when the bullet inside me
became molten,
too much material for not enough material
I knew I would be shed,
flying backward to your eyes.
I feel ineffectual,
Insubstantial,
but I know I am beautiful
the way she watches my silken shine on the floor
the way she fingers my creases.
Cheddar fire and
wood smoke lull the senses into luxury.
Barbecued hours are sweet and tangy.
Laying here your silence is meaty,
your want moist.
The house is but a beautiful carcass
you bought from a taxidermist,
covered in cherry blood and the sweat of chocolate.
Everything is warm –
the flavors, the evening,
you when you ask the question
I am designed not to hear.
The grill is breaking his fast.
Do you really need your shirt?
Diet Music
plays from the radio,
and my soul still picks daintily.
Is it afraid of getting fat?
So much that it usually eats
it has cut from its pallet.
Friends have been left in the cabinets,
community life in the
desolate freezer.
Color is calm,
though my soul still sneaks scoops
of pulsating shades at midnight.
What soul does not like a bit of electric blue
or Kelly Green
before running away with the dreams?
Perhaps my dreams,
shrinking beneath all my scrutiny,
cannot bear away
a more voluminous soul.
She is Juning at a pale farmhouse table,
a gingham table cloth singing to the rhythm of the breeze.
Sunlight sinks sonorous into her dark,
scintillating hair.
Her breath,
her summer rainbow of colors,
her cornucopia of warm feelings –
joy, ecstasy, bliss,
and their pastel coated cousin contentment,
blend in a sweet yellow hum
hovering around her.
He looks at her.
this woman of glow and pure yellow sound
and he wonders how one can contain
heat,
happiness,
music.
The clock has gone awry,
running backwards and sideways
so that 3 slides into the darkness of nine,
and then back out to the simpering light of four.
See me between the seconds,
holding myself in a ball,
my 20s leaking out of me like sweat.
Pink sabers stab a volume of Ashbery
and I shake the crying alphabet out of the pages
as soon as I am done checking my email.
I have three from God, but they look lengthy.
Maybe tonight before bed. B nudges my thigh.
T and F comfort each other,
latched for dear life. N bellows,
and C tries to slip under the table
unnoticed, but I catch him.
I want to reassemble them, create an audio montage
of the aural imprint of love
because I see its notes, high and low, everywhere
Republic of
Dirty minds
Dirty hands
Dirtier laundry
Red faces
Red eyes
Red accounts
Depressed minds
Depressed progress
Depressed lives
In the end they did not take either road
because neither had a sign
and they were not told to.
Amendment 1
The closet is sated. 600 pounds of clothes
nestle on shelves and in corners.
What have you said in the cunning tongues of cashmere and cotton
that you have not said with your strategic absences?
Be silent. Be naked. You have that right.
Amendment 2
Do you feel your fears nuzzle against your ribcage?
It’s time to extinguish the dark, you skittish lover.
You have the right to vacillate, but no right to time.
Amendment 3
Burgundy secrets slink behind the columns
in front of the house.
Do you smell something February and blue?
Follow your nose. It is your privilege to do so.
It is your power.
Amendment 4
The committee decided you don’t have a right to this right.
Amendment 5
Monitor the horses in Chincoteague.
Paint their hooves red, yellow, and blue.
Climb your ladder.
Watch art born.
It is your birthright.
Serendipitous find of leather
on a day that had no verve.
I become fashion.
I am worn by the lost crowd
moving with their backs together
from day to lustrous day
counting the costs of mutual identity
behind their eyes.
I like the scent of my old leather journals,
of my own eye thoughts.
Purple is in a ghastly mood and I am tired of putting up with her crap.
She calls me crazy,
refuses to be seen with me when I step out my door in my tiara.
My eyes are diamonds and my lips are freaks, I tell her.
You will have to live with my fashions.
Purple peels right off my dress and down the road,
And suddenly I am a museum of skin
beneath the glass of a transparent dress.
I shimmy.
Blue leaves his porch and says,
You need someone who will treat you right.
Miniature Moon 