I am tucked in beneath my lid,
the jar lined with velvet.
Tag: poetry
Alien
Blackest black-purple
my voice returns to me
dragging shackles.
What vertebrate ghost did this?
A legacy of ice floes through
my life
High tea in hell.
They look so refined.
I close the broken window.
The wind turns back.
After the fire
ash sifts through the air
looking for something left
to land on
finds only my hollow hands.
My voice climbs over my tongue as
a weary and alien being.
My artistically rendered
silence leaks from my nailbeds.
The sky is black,
black purple,
and I am invaded.
Benzos
Bending benzos,
bows over my fraught mind.
Madame Rainbow,
Messieurs Blood and Cloud.
Somewhere in the city
Freud soaks my jaws
in alkaline water.
My tongue has always been
a working girl.
In my perspiring frontal lobe,
a waltz coated in epoxy.
Madame,
You have wrapped me like a gift
regifted.
Messieurs, I must dash.
My fun is running away
too fast!
Loaned and Leased
In some paisley antithesis
to paradise
a swan defaults on her loan.
When water is rented
and love is leased,
how can we have enough
spoons to gnaw our way through
magnified day?
In the kitchen,
patience burns tea
while virtue gets drunk on
the last of my Italian wine.
The swan will not leave the bank.
Her babies are buried there.
Below an investing, rippled surface,
a fish surveys the
inescapable purveyors of loss.
Velveteen Girl
The velveteen girl,
skirt of swirling fire.
While disease lumbers
through the memorial town,
and a lasting sleep
settles like dust –
She waits for a new
beginning,
one lonelier and brighter,
toast of the town
with the crusts blazed off.
Some Idea About Birds
Supermarket cool,
I saunter down the avenue,
acknowledging height with a nod.
Perched on a chain link fence,
bleeding,
some idea about birds.
I wept once,
and the bluejays turned a
mysterious shade of wisteria.
Spectral women love the glitz
more than me,
which is to say they don’t love
me at all,
which is to say I love glitz.
In my own plastic Paris,
The shops sell angelic wings
sewn with glistening webbing.
Yesterday’s neighbor
smiles benevolently on me,
her eyesight restored,
her loneliness a cloud on
her daughter’s rooftop in
the city of breath.
I am a trespasser here,
A bird in the stratosphere.
Into Battle With The Dark
Watch the stars evaporate,
future burning rain on
an apocalyptic world that sounds
unnervingly like ours.
From my furry tree
I send legions of lightning bugs
into battle with the dark.
Dark Blue World
Dark blue world with
a turquoise brooch,
lend me cerulean serenity,
cobalt coal.
In a grunge sweat I awake
to my graying life,
see my watery windows blink,
your image like an oil painting,
then a satisfied sea,
next a poison frog.
Each blink my view of you morphs,
though your honorable navy
shades swear you have never changed.
You glide beyond the reach
of my clock,
ticking away as it tends
to do while the universe is unreachable.
In the vastness of your blue,
in your sapphire essence,
chewy caramel change is king.
Before and After
Before and after –
the pillow blissing out on the loveseat.
Crystalline water perspiring in
the well-loved glass.
Candles giggling while the
fire dances seductively.
Then a snuffing of flame,
emptying of glass,
eviscerated eider down.
Then a polished, unremarkable bone.
Netherworld Named Living
In the great blue fire
covering the city of ghosts
like a well-loved receiving blanket
a wisp of smoke is birthed
from a frigid heat.
What is her name,
this queen of the reaping?
She is a gossamer phantom
with sky ambitions.
While flames whisper through windows,
she skitters in and out of the
bluejay’s lungs,
recycled.
On the fiery airstrip,
the dying plane resembles a tongue.
Her voice is a soft sigh,
a sort of escapism from exhaustion.
The fire climbs through the
ghostly metropolis like a
twisted ivy,
unconscious of her seed rising
to drift elsewhere,
air for a tree in some
distant netherworld
named Living.
Miniature Moon 