Oval orchestras illuminate my mind with their music. In the high notes, short shadows of fear and doubt and my biggest regrets. In the low notes, my sorrow paints Ave Maria with interpretive dance. Action painting is fun but requires no talent. There. I said it. Now a raven will peck my pupils out with pure, putrid spite. Women are never allowed to step out of line. Ever. And it’s not the men that are holding us stagnant. In my honeyed mind, a hive of sisterhood not many of even the sharpest sisters can break free of. How can a woman be liberated without the approval of women? Intellectualism offers me a beer that tastes like piss and dissertations, and I gag. Get this flagrant minutiae out of here. I want God sized truth, to dance my way away from this lunging sisterhood of desperate bees. Bees that attack. Bees that die while they wound you. Bees that dance their way to a manna of social acceptance I can only dream of. It is the year the valleys will glow in the dark. What do we do now?

My visual language is a spicy hellion. Flowering trees mean, “release me from the nuthouse.” If the buds are pink, I’m being badly psychoanalyzed by a therapist who I’m sure is a walrus inside. Clouds mean luxury. My body is undefined and unquestioning. Yielding to pressure. Sumptuous and yet plain and smelling of petrichor. Images are ideas incarnate. Poetry is a snapshot of my mind’s eye as it roams the dying earth, sprinkling water on the tulips as I pass from field to field. I want to farm flowers, syllabi, and the blue of the blessed mother’s veil. What a business woman I would be – not dressed up and with too many places to go. Why not have a monsoon at my expense? Dance in the incandescent rain. The damned watch from below, their bodies shimmering in a heat too intense for comprehension.

Psychedelic sunshine slits open my dark inner chambers, piercing my side. I leak glitter – beautiful and cheap like talk, like casual thrills, like loss. The wind is loving and cool in my hair. In my psyche, a desert with an oasis of blood. This will be my punishment.

I am your cloud, your muse, your curving texture of unequivocal light. Everything in me is designed for you, darling, from the tender, disturbing flower of my mouth to the soft places you rest your hands. The mountains ask what will become of us, but we know. You were born to dazzle, I to sparkle quietly. Together, we will light a path for the one most precious to us, a path to help guide her through the darkening world.

Oval altitudes trip over my map of crushed velvet oceans in sapphire blue and cheesecloth in green, the ever wrinkling land. In my mind, a black sea brewing. Ships cross the oceans, zigging and zagging among hurricanes of my private, inexplicable fury. I place my finger on an old island, drowning it. My life is waning like the moon, a cold, cream colored abyss of dimly reflected light from a sun far away. The tide pulls away from every crumpled continent all at once, leaving them to parch and perish. The rich blue sea reaches up to the moon now, as if to say, “ We exceed expectations here. Especially exorbitant ones.”