In Newport, on the side of the road, my family pulled over to play by the sea. I took photos of the water with my little Instax Mini while my father in law watched my daughter. In an instant, the tide starts pouring in. I see my daughter alone on a jetty, my father in law nowhere nearby. I start calling to her to come back. She points to the water and starts to climb in to get back to me. She cannot swim. Frantic, I am sprinting toward her. The sea has claimed so much of me in my dreams. It will not take my daughter from me in what passes for real life
Tag: Prose poem
Be Real With Me
Your open face is a battleground. Behind your eyes, artillery. Every champagne glass will shatter the night you turn into a fish, and I will lap the champagne off the floor with my tongue like a kitten. Be real with me. The cold sheen of your lips tells me when you lie.
Zeitgeist
The zeitgeist is entertaining, is shredded, is mad. My mercurial hair flies in the breeze of a thousand white fragrances. This age has a stone and a sling shot. This age is not David, but Goliath. God will overcome this blood crusted century like a disease, sewing heaven from His hands like wildflower seed.
Prose Poem – Us
Her wet voice is the breeze among the lilacs. Her face turned upward like a graph, displaying shiny information encoded in cotton skin. My body is a bridge between two worlds. I dream of the sweet number tattooed on the past.
Vice – a Vision
I fill my prescription for vice and carry it home. The birds snub me at the sight of it. In the family room, a river flows clear as glass. I will inject insight in ten minutes. First, I must cool off in the freezer, my blood snow crystals protruding from my wasted heart. Letters float down the river, boat shaped thoughts from those abandoned on the shores of paradise with plastic strangling them. People in my taxonomy run up the current to bury our dreams, and then we die. Vice is heavy, fills the syringe slowly like syrup. I will glow with my own private, disinterested light. Cold light, liquid light, light around my bones. My sins a dark figure behind me seen through to as the light beams into me mercilessly. In the corner, dust bunnies paint my corrupted face without pity.
Succulent Batteries
China chips at a touch in this no woman’s land of despicable hungers. In the parlor, Good and Evil spurning their tools of trade. This text is a flashlight in a dark, resentful woods. This text is a bridge between the two factions of my consciousness. This text is an apology to the blue underside of memory. On the river, the dead decay loudly. But here in the house I give birth to baby’s breath. Good smokes pungent herbs on my back porch telling stories of his youth in New England. Evil sucks the juice from my most succulent batteries. Everywhere satisfaction is missing.
The Poem
The poem is feral, climbing under the bar and making a shirley temple with vodka. My body is bereft. My spirit sits outside myself flying my middle name on a ribbon like a balloon. The poem tells a tattooed man a story about that time she and____ burnt down the auxiliary doorway to Invisible Beauty. I grab the poem and she kisses me, her curves burning me. Fusing to my own. Tangential heavens speed away from the crime scene. The poem stumbles out of the bar. I stumble away from the bottle. We collapse in the meadow with the horses and she injects pure liquid ecstasy in her delicate veins. As her translucent skin bruises, I see the stars blink and then shut. Blackness overtakes us like old age, slowly then all at once.
Water
Rivers run through my names, scoffing at the idea of unified identity and advantageous silt. Along one river is a boat named the Unbearable Blue. Named for Memory’s daughter – a blue so deep it makes me ache. My heart goes spastic. Horrendous banana flavored vanity leaks out on the floor like an unsupervised ocean. Help. The sharks are here with their collection of teeth and wits.
Prose Poem
The well-off at the ossified marina count the crusty salt crystals. Orange corn poking from the windows of my old home dare me to grind my teeth on it. At the mouth of the bay of wine, bad memories teeter. The division between food and teeth is stark. The division of drink and thought soft. She strays from the wine to my old house and its belligerent farm.
Rough draft