Follow the rubbery rainbows to the rambunctious roses. In the garden, my psyche sprints naked through the greenery. She’s too frightened to be embarrassed. In a cul de sac, a hunter of women with a skeleton in the trunk of his metallic black Dodge Dart. She is barely evading him, and he has more stamina. I turn to tending the roses, especially the pink ones. Then the neighborhood goes dark with a blackness so heavy it falls in flakes like snow, burning and refining my body.

Shackled sunbeams destined to die on the parched plains of our existence gasp a little just before they hit the ground. The sound is audible only to angels. I am an artificial light drooling over candles. My light is dusty, a little rose gold, disheveled. My God, God of pink peonies and purple pansies, strapped the ageless bulb to my heart. My heart beats because it is afraid not to. In the dark, Death holds a child’s hand.

Polychromatic blood leaks from the slits in my ankles. In another world I plant a garden of cosmos. In another universe I lay across my lover’s piano lasciviously. But in this world, my essence spurts out with the pressure of my body weight. Why did I carve windows to sinew and bone? In my ear, curled up and sleeping, my daughter dreams of some sort of purple peace I don’t understand. My love bandages me with magnolia petals, calling my windows “wounds.”

Thin, blue line of pain
Like flame,
Dancing.
What we have is a house of
Unrequited fury.
What we have is a box with two air holes.
What we have is a magician’s playing cards.

Cascading grief rinses me. Time has been crabwalking away from me drunkenly for decades.

My invitation to Light’s soiree was lost in the mail.

Roses whisper about me.

Shrubs are two faced.

My eyes are berries that the hungry
Can pick.

In my hands,

the shadow of an unearned stigmata.

Hope for the eternal bliss of purposeful suffering.

Blank space is a conduit for meaning.

I fill the page with myself,
My ruby blood shimmering with neon green viruses

That unzip my best idea
Like a double helix.

The blue balloon was not my only idea –

Covering in the caverns of my 8th birthday.

Nature always takes its due

Dew

Do nothing as the river rises.

We already know next time

we will be cleansed with fire.

My thighs are a miracle of alabaster silk blooming like a rose. My secret scent is rose, vanilla, and extravagance. The language of flowers flows monthly through the corridors of my core. Essentially, I am his dream he holds at night as he sleeps on a game trail by an angry river. Soft, yielding, sublime, and barely real. I press my faintly glowing flesh against him, warming him. He’s got a letter only my envelope can mail.

My body is a twirly slide. My body is as soft as a spring day. Stars are woven in my hair, holding my mind back from coating the universe in glitter. Women embroider centuries together in parlors of pearlescent priorities. They always have. I run my personality through the hoop that doubles as a halo in low light, my backbone embroidered on a cream color cheese cloth.

Raw reality sizzles over the thin blue flame of my imagination, charring some facts and leaving other truths underdone. In my celestial home, I sweep stellar crumbs off my dining room table and wipe down the windows with tears. I have velvet covered books on stargazing in my shining foyer, and guests from universes of universities. Light belongs to me. Darkness siphons off my life day by orbiting day. Malingering suns pierce the authenticity of cold.

My 7 faces are stacked on a shelf in the back of my closet. I try on two before I choose the softest of two evils. My eyes have nostalgic lens filters. In this reconstructed reality of marble and glass, I envision velvet cushions and burgundy shrouds. My name is a museum of sound fruitfully multiplying in the ears of angels. Across the street from my home, the Silence Store and Great Art Mart in a rundown strip mall. Delinquent ghosts skateboard on the crumbling parking lot.

Light shaped women promenade along the proletariat public space, a space defined by signs and porous desires. Water courses through me at 90 miles an hour, and the rapids are teeming with sizzling ideas. Poetry lives in the air. The crinkled dawn is so hard. Remember when she said, “I’m gonna leave you early for paradise?” It’s another day of you and me in ethereal dreams. The 90s pirhouette in my old house. My sister canoes in her mortal art. Time drags me towars death, but he pulls me with a balloon string as I ride in a laundry basket beside him, so I’m having literally the time of my life. I flow into Friday like a flower wilting its way through Autumn. At the end my seams are torn and my seas shorn in half like Moses has a bone to pick with my water personally. The fish here smell like failure. Addie swims through my synapses, pondering Walden Pond.