Pink Ghosts

Pink ghosts make HIPPA violations.
A bed is growing into me.
One ghost whispers you are going to die
And another giggles.

I know I say
But not today and not tomorrow.

Walls hum.
My pills confer with my blood.

Pills are day makers
And skin often wants no hours dragged out of me.

Better to die like this, my sunburn peel once explained to me,
Young and perfect.
A museum of possibility.

Instead I gorge on sweet filled pills
And make mondays

The clock admires me.
Pretty ghosts titter.
My head screams. When the pills make days my head tries to send them back.

A hand holds my hand.
The morning binges and the evening purges.
Another day dead another in birth canal

Persuading new residents is such a drag,
Hissed the rosest spirit.

The Narrator

The narrator is mopping the floor with my tears,

which for him fall like rain through a hole

in the roof.

What promise this day had,

born at the height of the malleable moon.

What now,

since favor, faith, and fancy have

disintegrated?

The narrator begins with an article

that will barely clothe me from the cold.

Outsonneted

I have been outsonneted by a suction cup,

Clinging to my window like a starfish to the sea.

Lately my similes get away from me,

Dogs always unearthing hideous bones in

My backyard.

The curious climate of my moist mind

Is most conducive to marigolds, azaleas,

The pancreas.

My face is all sugar,

My tongue a cola.

See the stained glass the suction cup holds?

Memorabilia from an unremembered saint.

Pharmacological Fog

Recapturing yourself will be easy.

White still in the bedroom,

structure from private, necessary snow.

dreaming of silence.

Your mind is a playground of artillery.

 

Capturing the sense of yourself will be hard,

Lost 2 feet tall in a field of chaff.

The women have needles and no yarn.

A man sits toward the curdling sun,

his face a mouth.

 

Sound your siren song

A gentle offering of wisteria wishes

and sulking letters.

Give her a sonorous rope to tie round her wrist

a little balloon bobbing desperately toward mass.

 

The Scent Radius of a Rose as a Unit of Measurement

The scent radius of a rose as a unit of measurement.

My smile weighs too much,

crumbles off my face.

I’m sick of fried hair and unstoppable worry.

My secrets hate me and my eyes betray me.

On the beaches are boxes of life

watching the great red shipping containers float on the  horizon.

Simply put

I have no allies I have not bought

And I drink old snow.

Housewife

Grateful skirts swirl in a breeze maybe meant for them.

Design is Holy,

is enamored of its Designer,

is a crossroads of means and ends.

A housewife manufactures sunshine in her laboratory,

the beakers from the store always having a sale,

her thesis supervised by green,

and critiqued by her children.

After 20 years who will know whether the

skirts were mended or replaced?

Just that they were infused with laughter

and smelled like mother in the living room

living with her eyes full.

 

Translated into Afrikaans and Xhosa, then back:

 

Skirts twirl in the grateful air
they were meant for.

Design and the Holy Spirit,

are enamored

of each other.

Is the intersection of the cross where it all begins?

The woman who produced the sun in her lab,

is studying all the ways you make happiness from the mundane.

Her thesis is green from watching her children.

After 20 years will you know that

the aprons can be repaired or replaced?

You will appreciate the humor.

She won’t.

 

 

skirts and gratitude for the atmosphere,

either of them.

Design and Holy Spirit,

make enamored designs,

are the ends on the cross.

The woman who makes the sun in her lab,

Her laboratory in Delaware furnished by a company

in Hong Kong.

Her thesis supervision is green.

So is the clock looking at her children’s energy,

their youth,

her youth.

After 20 years you will know that

the skirts can be repaired or replaced.

As you appreciate the humor in

And sort mothers by whether they baked cookies or used the microwave.

In her eyes you live fully,

live fully alone.