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.
Tag: poet
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.
Prayer of Tearing
Splitting wood, splitting atoms, splitting hairs. The world is falling apart from the bumbling, malevolent force of stupidity. I drank my dreams and burned my ambitions like a sweet incense. Mother Mary, help me to be more like you. Soon my sins will hollow me from the inside, and my name will be torn asunder.
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.
Modernism and Post Modernism
I make love to Modernism in the back of a black cat museum. Then I dump him and deflower post modernism, which is a whore in rayon. After that the clouds follow me back and forth from home to the store. My clonopin can breathe on its own and has 20/20 vision I can only envy. I am sick to death of navel gazing and semi autonomous whispers. What comes after contemporary art? Is it fudge or shit? We put visionaries eyes out and toast to the promising future of the ambitious dark.
The Claire’s to Victoria’s Secret Pipeline
Tart tulle. A world of black and pink. Girlhood is a vivid hot pink stain in the local psyche of ravens. A lipsticked maven sells beauty to the hungry future ghosts of beauty. They sell you your youth while you’re young and have it anyway. They sell you beauty when you’re gorgeous already. The stars shine like the bright eyes of my younger self before I shook off extraneous need for approval. The Claire’s to Victoria’s Secret Pipeline is the first real graduation a woman has (after she gets her life giving flow). The travel from the land of glitter to the land of fishnets is brutally short. The ghost of a blighted field is scintillating and sinister in the lacy snow. After graduation, I lived according to the laws and regulations of my new hyper sex bunny land, but I loathed it because I felt like a rock where I used to be a diamond. At the core of the softness of woman is always the sparkling of gems. So I came to the valley between my mountainous breasts, and my heart erupted into a quiet, silk thing. No longer a fetish of myself but a real woman of flesh and gentleness. Snow fills my bones, my memories. Soft, pristine, clean.
An Exam Most Will Fail
Addled light beams curve around me as though I were winding like a mountain road and made of glass. Wherever I am, I am not. What is it to be in a place? I miss the homey vernacular of my youth. Customs coat us in sticky colors that ultimately create us. Row your boat gently down the stream. But life is not a dream. It is an exam most will fail. I get seasick. My legs are stems, and I am an amalgamation of flowers clamoring over one another to be heard before dark rolls in like a crime scene cleanup crew, removing my essence.
Miniature Moon 