Tag: poet

Only Jesus and I See It

The flavor of his chocolate pie is deafening. Today is marbled, a muse of comfort. Or maybe elegance. I’d like to say comfort and elegance can “coexist” like it says on those stupid bumper stickers, but for me they seldom can. Around the table, saints with no stigmata. But the barbs in my brain break free frequently, and deep in my husband’s psyche, a wound tears softly, as though my husband’s essence were perforated. His halo is turquoise and silver and shines like the sun. Only Jesus and I see it.

Time

Time is seldom sober, and he trips a lot. He tried to pick me up in a bar once, and I told him I had a boyfriend. He didn’t know the boyfriend was poetry, but silence is sweet like fudge. Now, Time loops over my arms in an embrace, pulling me from my quaint little dollhouse – and I tell him I’m not interested. He slides his slick tongue in my ear, licking my discontinued brain, and whispers, “ I have my way with all of you eventually.” Gradually, the dollhouse recedes as I enter a place where Time is meaningless.

Depression

Beneath a violet sky, I tap my slippers together 3 times and end up in DC. It isn’t home. I wish I could untap my slippers. But it will have to do. The day unfolds like a receipt, a radicalized holiday that smells oddly hairy. This place withers my soul, who really ought to be tougher by now but is battered and worn by shifting storms of mood. The day weighs 25 pounds – not too much to carry but enough to ensure I’ll be tired. Depression fills me formlessly like water, filling up the cracks and crevices of my body and mind.

Prose Poems Scare Me

Idiosyncratic ice, sculpted by wind and sun and cold, seals the world like lamination. You can see it if you look closely, a thin, almost wet sheen on handrails and sidewalks. Underneath ice, my heart is a room everyone walks out of, saying, “The yellow walls were garish, and the music stilted.” In my yard, a carousel filled with the dying in their Sunday best. The ice protects the world from cold wind with cold water, and I find myself mulling over the concept of wasted desert effort. Prose poems scare me. They’re so true that no one believes them.



My Novella

The eccentric novella brewing and screwing her way through the sizzling synapses across my brain is hard to catch. Pick up your plot and follow me! The sun over my house judges my unproductive, polychromatic day. Language was my first love. I try to harness my words as they sparkle defiantly, trying to escape the little woman controlling my tongue, who snatches them up and places them on it to be conveyed. The novella, being an angry, unwilling confederation of words, tries to escape. She puts up a fight. She’s feisty. Still, the woman in my voice box, the one I abuse, dictates her from plot to syntax into the phone. Afterward, I answer the phone and hear the rush of my own blood, a private sea. And somewhere, the eternal hammering of nails.

The Circle and The Sphere

The little circle marbles down the glass streets of my imaginary universe. She is purple and mystical scented and smooth and spoiled. The squares till the fields, picking despair off crops that will be burned by an army of disenfranchised futures. The triangles, red in their harshness and love of good wine, stand on the porches of their crystalline cottages, watching our little circle travel. Until she meets a sphere, and she blooms with possibility.



My Old Personality

Feral, calendar scented clouds claw their way across a luxury ultramarine sky. Twilight – and the storms are tucking in for the night – typhoons sleeping off shore, waiting to pounce during union working hours. I sit on the porch smoking memories of multidisciplinary Mondays where every day was a synthesis of time and color. I am not on speaking terms with line, but texture knows my home phone number. The used Mondays are aromatic like my old personality, years before my diseased mind wiped my name off my birth certificate. What is the most effective way to move a mountain through my veins?

My Heart

Rushing rivers of reverse psychology spill from pharmaceutical sources. I used to be a gummy bear. Now I’m just juicy. I have to believe that Language, digging the shallow grave in my yard, doesn’t mean it for me, but he constantly sneaks up behind me with measuring tape. My hollow chest contains a snow owl for a heart, digesting always a scurrying sin that squeaks on the way down his gullet.

What Was I Made For?

I wash my hair as most wishes do, with sea spray. My alabaster legs stick out at desperate angles as I trip in the surf.  I think I was made by a 22 year old for whom graphic design is their “passion.” Or perhaps a logger, running from the ancient aliens in the woods. Either way, my eyes slice the fruit of man’s labor like an orange, dividing it up among the jackals. My hands are oxygen, a dream of sublime strangulation. My name is the river flowing backward, flooding her banks. I am a wish, a need, a woman varnished and unverified.