Tag: poetry

The Poem

The poem is feral, climbing under the bar and making a shirley temple with vodka. My body is bereft. My spirit sits outside myself flying my middle name on a ribbon like a balloon. The poem tells a tattooed man a story about that time she and____ burnt down the auxiliary doorway to Invisible Beauty. I grab the poem and she kisses me, her curves burning me. Fusing to my own. Tangential heavens speed away from the crime scene. The poem stumbles out of the bar. I stumble away from the bottle. We collapse in the meadow with the horses and she injects pure liquid ecstasy in her delicate veins. As her translucent skin bruises, I see the stars blink and then shut. Blackness overtakes us like old age, slowly then all at once.

Veiled Woman

The memory disease is tiny,
Born on the wind like pollen,
pus scented.
One inhale from frail lungs,
and the disease enters like a rockstar.
Makes its way through the splendid cavern
that is the body,
til it reaches the brain
I wear a veil over my hair
to conceal my secrets.
What is sacred is veiled.
The Tabernacle.
The woman.

Beneath a mirror sky
Daughter upon daughter dances.
The meek and the bold
Both drowned in the Flood.
Sometimes,
In my dreams,
A gigantic wave towers over me,
Watches me,
Waits for the right moment to come
crashing down.

I wake to the sounds of
A deceitful beach.

Same dream for 10 years.
One day the sea will ensnare me.

I veil the sun,
Bar graphs,
Music.

The seagulls on this beach
hunt whales.

The sun,
Jealous of my youth,
Paints me the texture of old age.

What is Holy will be revealed
at the Emerald throne.

The greenery gets a vote.
In the old shed I call girlhood,
a slingshot and a rock.

Mother Mary was sighted
at the Thanksgiving parade.

Prayer settles on me like dust.
I cough half remembered scripture.

At the seashore,
a locket with a picture of
myself
(A red dictionary of moods),
and Christ
(A fisher of Men).

Winter

Silver trees sparkle,
the diamonds of January.
The fireplace is a dear old friend
from a nudist colony.

The mystery is that
there is no mystery.
Everything is as promised.

There are commercial breaks
from the interesting.
Sales on refurbished hearts.
The galaxies speed away
From one another
as though broken by a cosmic
infidelity.

Winter is a parable
for surviving without Love –
that cheerful shyster with
echocardiograms tattooed on.

Vision of John Winthrop on Meeting His 2nd Wife 17th century

Her Protestant hair
The birth place of sultry stars.
In the beginning, there was God.
At the end,
There will be God
Humans are the intermission in this part of time,
Wrinkled and frayed as it is.

Ethics bloom in comfortable places.
A day’s work, a moment’s pay.
She is an elixir to the dazzling day.
She is a wayward bird
She’s the last good thing in an ubiquitous iniquity.

The curtain is falling,
Time winnows wood.
Hell prepares  dormitories.
Rapturous butter yellow light,
Then, the last gasp,
Voices vivisected as though
Pushed through a sieve.

Hold hands
While you have them.

Lucid

I am quietly lucid.

I don’t say this to brag.

They say the only thing

A person can best the Devil in

Is humility.

Humility,

That soft yellow sheath

Over my glowing hot skin.

But sometimes my mind

Makes memories without me.

Other times she sneaks into my soul

And my prayers come out as cotton,

My hallelujahs thorned and unprepared

For the lustful day.

My mind plays,

Swinging between despair

And ecstasy.

Despair reeks of old fire

And dust storms.

Ecstasy writes my name

In pink pen all over Virginia.

I wish my mind was still enough

To watch children grow up.

They grow like bitterness between

The berry bushes,

Poking into the canopy

Like vines looking for something to strangle

So that they may survive.

I love all of them,

Though they chose mothers elsewhere.

Lucid Lisa loves lemon lime

Laser lights,

And she dances

(Hold on while she climbs

Back into her I)

I dance as though my feet

Were in love with the soil.

A sordid, sultry affair

Between earth

And her resident looney.

God has granted me a vision

Of aprons and crude stars

And I smoke my dreams

On my neighbor’s porch

While he mines for lobotomized diamonds

Crisp and certain.

Depression

My thoughts are gridlocked.
Red travesties everywhere,
Blue regrets blurring
Into a wistfulness that tastes
Of honey and old soap.
The dark force is here again,
Its claws reaching from my
Quivering core to silence
The voice I have watered daily
For 30 anxious years.

How can I trample someone
With more arms and legs than I?
Depression as spider winding webs
All over the courtyard of my once ebullient mind. 
Creativity needs me like the sun needs
Photosynthesis-
Which is to say she doesn’t,
But I need her desperately.

Peel the purposeless purple prose
From my prodigious mind.
Help me unearth truth,
Swimming as she does
Beneath us all
In the water table.

* Please ignore that the first lines are all capitalized. I can’t figure out how to fix that formatting problem on WordPress or in Word. It will be fixed before my book is published. This is a rough draft.

Water

Rivers run through my names, scoffing at the idea of unified identity and advantageous silt. Along one river is a boat named the Unbearable Blue. Named for Memory’s daughter – a blue so deep it makes me ache. My heart goes spastic. Horrendous banana flavored vanity leaks out on the floor like an unsupervised ocean. Help. The sharks are here with their collection of teeth and wits.

Inelegant Death

The man trapped in a rain drop drowns when he tries to smell it. The letter I wrote to you last year is pinned to a ray of sun called the Exorbitant Cuddle. My letters make mayhem with the luscious cosmos. Two drinks in and the year was drunk like the Communion wine. There is no end to the sort of suffering that will pull your heart out through your crotch. Only inelegant death, thriving.