On an idolatrous planet
a gold vessel waits to be filled with something better than itself.
Throngs love themselves.
A yellow leaf on a lonely planet
crunches beneath a confused boot.
Tag: poetry
Love
What if love is a yellow gel pen?
Bright, beautiful, illegible?
And if you have left your vision in someone else’s well,
what then?
Cinderella
Seasons of castles, cathedrasl, fortresses
go by.
Pride with his transparent wings buzzes outside the window.
What if Cinderella was as awful as her step-sisters?
The mortar between the bricks says,
Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Beneath the cathedral floor princely hands wring desperately
to extricate themselves from a promise.
Ghosts
Inside the house there are ghosts gnashing their teeth,
whispering into the baby monitor.
At the other end of the house I freeze
hear the voices amid crackles of static,
stop folding towels.
She is the final holdout,
but the bread has crossed over to our side.
Fair Weather
My friendships are all pastel.
Neat
Trim.
Tidy.
If I do not hold them close by their mint fingers,
children in a meadow of death,
they will fly away.
Mania
Frazzled fire
licks me frenetically.
My mind is the Monday after a holiday weekend
that meandered into a new month,
and the paperwork in me chafes and squeaks.
Behind my eyes I am filing.
I have begun 178 projects.
177 are exactly what I have been needing, what I have been waiting for.
1 is even better.
My eyes,
my hands,
my judgment ache,
and all I can hear is agitated paper.
Scrape scrape scrape.
Watermother
My watermother holds my heat for me
ambles through my mind reminding me
Hair won’t comb itself.
Yellow cables radiate sunshine and trigonometry.
I think about all the weeds in the sidewalk cracks
of the neighborhood where I grew up.
One woman planted roses,
A confused cloud asked no one in particular,
What does it mean to rain?
Watermother is tender.
She helps me take off my aluminum slippers,
my slummy makeup,
her mind an ever-growing equation like a cancer.
She
The machine is a tap dancer,
is silver,
has nightmares of rust.
She wears the moon on her face in a chalk.
She glows purple when she is near wisdom.
She glows purple among the trees.
The ribbon in her hair is forked,
tastes danger on the horizon.
And the robot who has been terrified to bathe for years
clicks his heels ever closer,
curious and cold,
while the ribbon hisses poison in her ear
Femme
Soft flesh
Pressable everywhere,
Pleasurable everywhere
To be teased and tickled everywhere.
Cornerless,
Sublime,
Full,
Generous,
Gentle,
Forbidden.
I am her and she is me,
sashaying in a voluminous dress,
100 percent feminine.
I fall in love with myself,
a monologue of fingers and sliding and heat.
Forbidden
Her name is Tracy and she looks at men all day
on screens and streets and books.
She is made of desires women are not supposed to have,
her sisters rendered blind by modesty.
Her dearest friend looks only at the swirl of turquoise
feelings that envelope her man
and never the back or the shoulders that Tracy hungers for
at every party,
unwrapping him from his suit while her friend prays over the meal.
And what no one knows except the pantry of his brain,
is he longs to be kissed by her lashes,
loves to be seen as a thrill,
as a man sees a woman
and a woman is forbidden to see a man.
Miniature Moon 