Tag: poet

Life in an Old VHS

I live in an old film. My sight tears and glitches sometimes, the curves of my form wound in a vhs tape. If you play me back in a time machine, you’ll see rain flying up from the ground – sapphires taking petrichor and tiny fossils of light with them. The producer of this film is smoking by the turnpike. The director melts water and keeps an old ledger book lined with my hair of every time I don’t show up to live.

Glittering Desert of Diamonds Ruled By The Worst of Us

Seas of silty green glitter carry life like a gloat to the unexamined shores of the Present – a glittering desert of diamonds ruled by the worst of us wearing designer bags. The new life will sprout transparent like ghosts, but immovable like a disapproving father. It will reflect life, envy, wealth, inexperience.  New money aesthetic laid like a costume over a third world spiritual plane of poverty. We can all dance the Charleston and drink our grandmother’s wine, but our prayers bounce among our children like deflated balloons and  the rent has come due on our bodies and we have nothing but glitter and smoke.

Semi Precious Revolvers

The rainbow of my shape shifts between sunshines and valleys in this cosmic horror of suburbia. Turquoise and emerald chains tether me to reality.  I am a landscape of soft legacy, of marble layered in fleece layered in velvet layered in silk. Leaves fall all autumn and the royal blue of my cold nails. Music here tilts radically left and downward at 30 degrees. Least believable turtles I’d ever seen, I answered when the radicals asked for my vote with their shining semi precious revolvers. Sound initiated me into the rolling sea of the dead crashing on the  mauve shores of regret.

Ekphrastik Poem – Identity’s 1st Painting

Sooty clouds leak a fine dust that turns into sliding beds of black silt along the murmuring rivers of my mind. Rowing in one river is my husband, setting sail along the shores of my body, stopping in the inlets and the dive bars that are my eyes. In the next river, a poem sunbathes with a rubber ducky, drinking cough syrup. I always have loved the flavor of cough syrup and the slick scent of dry erase markers. On another riverbank, little Lisa penning novels in gingham dresses. The novels are in gingham. Lisa is in a shroud of loss. My memories ride rough shod over the rough volcanic landscape of my consciousness, periodically plummeting to their deaths in unseen lava tubes.








Clear Concealer

I wear an identity of glass like it was some sort of designer bag. All my ideas splatter like paint balls against the fluorescent spaces of my spiced up brain. The light lingers lovingly over my porcelain, ghostly skin. I match whatever environment I need to camouflage in by being transparent and thereby concealing the truest, bluest parts of me. In truth I hate it, but everyone tells me glass will be rare and valuable soon, so I better keep the cracking coat of clear concealer.





Liquid Rainbows

Patron saint of leprosy and lepidoptera, please pray for me. Your prayers are perfumed prettiness in the heavenly atelier of our most brilliant Lord and Savor. Who made the colors that coat our lives? Who inscribed code into our flesh and blood? None but Him, His hands soaked in liquid rainbows. My skin is getting old. My face is going viral. My face is a virus, a label I wear to hide my soul shivering in her thin blue shift, nipples cutting against the cold like diamonds. Faces are a contoured means to a flattened end in the catalog of human memory.

Woolen Fortress of January

In the woolen fortress of January, gunmetal skies and home chilled on the rocks, bathed by the sea. I was born to granite and snow. The birch trees lining the lanes of my memories have a thousand eyes peering out of them. All of them look into me, red eyed windows to the abyss staring at my soul and counting the wrinkles. January is an old, brittle friend whose joints croak in chorus with mine along the craggy coast. Though January leaves me every year, I can never seem to disentangle myself from his cold, lingering fingers.

Holographic Sea

My voice is like butter – high in fat, churned like a holographic sea, the fish glitching out in technicolor. The red ribbon that wraps around my waist was given to me for this journey. Howling, my ego holding her elbow after smacking it on reality. Reality has fish eyes. I will sail across an ocean for my love and give him sugar and sea.

Smellevision

I sniff my smellevision 4 days in the future, and God embroiders my backbone for me. The future is all geometry and piss poor planning. My cotton hands are soaked with sunsweat. The leaves of grass drip with it. I know I have to survive tetris as a sphere and it won’t be easy. Two demons play jenga in my front yard, and no matter how they play, I lose.