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.
Tag: Prose poem
Prose Poems Scare Me
Idiosyncratic ice, sculpted by wind and sun and cold, seals the world like lamination. You can see it if you look closely, a thin, almost wet sheen on handrails and sidewalks. Underneath ice, my heart is a room everyone walks out of, saying, “The yellow walls were garish, and the music stilted.” In my yard, a carousel filled with the dying in their Sunday best. The ice protects the world from cold wind with cold water, and I find myself mulling over the concept of wasted desert effort. Prose poems scare me. They’re so true that no one believes them.
We Exceed Expectations Here
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.”
Snow Owl for a Heart
Rushing rivers of reverse psychology spill from pharmaceutical sources. I used to be a gummy bear. Now I’m just juicy. I have to believe that Language, digging the shallow grave in my yard, doesn’t mean it for me, but he constantly sneaks up behind me with measuring tape. My hollow chest contains a snow owl for a heart, digesting always a scurrying sin that squeaks on the way down his gullet.
Lisa Elsewhere
Cylindrical sisterhood rattles down my childhood lane like a can. The wind was never my friend. My feral blood echoes its request for a sedative. The life within me is hot and knows no peace. My sister rides a unicycle, holding hands with everything we mean when we say, “I had a good time. Really.” My bones slide safely from my skin, prop up a Lisa elsewhere who chews snowflakes for their originality and drinks the blood of the Lamb.
Our Civilization
Irrational idols feign indifference at my gestalt gesticulations toward the divine. I am always ensnared, like a rabbit, the fox behind me frozen in terror. I used to embroider while my daughter sewed. Tonight, the lighthouses will go dark, and the sea will scribble out our civilization.
Biggest Regret
Red code of dawn for love letters from Hades. The grass is always greener -or sharper- on the other side. The machine buzzes in my head, strips memories from me like old wallpaper. Treatment, they said. The forlorn math of always being emptier than you should be. Suffering souls singe. Early in the morning, I drove over the alligator river. Not I. My husband drove. And I went. I was a cave. A crayon. They broke me, but I still color. I just can’t see lines anymore. It’s all a disarray of color and exultation and expectation, and everywhere the smell of terrarium.
We Will Never Reap
Unattended sparrows sow the fields with lavender. The fragrance betrays the eroticism of the fluffy clouds, looking down like a lover on a world that doesn’t know it’s asleep. When through the pearlescent gates the ocean begins to pour like a spilled drink, I made a raft from my studio desk, with an umbrella for a roof. Beneath the waves, Leviathan with centuries of teeth and an appetite for the twisted. The lavender will wash away. The warped odor of regrettable flesh will be all that is left. I sail to a rippled shore covered in sunbathing dreams.
On the Cusp
The bluebirds nest on the cusp of my awareness. What is beyond my awareness is bright light and new colors. At my dark periphery, morose shadows of old pleasures, crumbling to ash in the weight of God’s judgment on them. The baby bird will fly away soon, to the morose forest choking the back of my throat. Regret is heavy, and it sucks in many to its great gravity.
November is Coming
Velvet encases me like a casket at this party I snuck into. My dress is filled with frills and thrills, a slinky black little thing exposing my soft porcelain thighs to the crushed purple velvet. Death is LARPing as October, and no one knows he’s in costume. Ghosts glow glacier blue and just as cold. November watches from behind the velvet curtain, ready to wash away childhood and joy. November with her blue eyes, onyx hair, and burns all over her body from a thousand candles.
Miniature Moon 