Once Bitten

Fireworks of pain in my fecund teeth
Advantageous chalkboards fill with unmoored drawings
In kid script
Of dragons and lagoons and devils.
Open red. See the wet birds waddle out cheep cheep.

Alarming threads sew me a bag for my head
In this titillating twilight.
Once I was 21 and I buried myself by a birch tree.
Then instantly I was 23 and I was born,
Having gestated under a plaid lamp.

I can barely bite but oh how I am bitten!
Hurt a cataclysmic light in my eyes.

World of Color

A world of color is rich,

is all I need in this fog as heavy as maternal malevolence.

What I need is a glass of hot pink,

an elixir of glowing purple,

a tincture of pool blue,

languid and electric.

My atrocious capsules of snow lay beside my ginger ale

on my bedside table

while a documentary on contemporary

art stabs me in shades of black and white,

Sound muted.

She

She is stove-mouthed

and thinks hideously.

Between her teeth are scrolls

from cities asleep.

Death cartwheels on my lawn

mostly to impress her,

And because in his spare time he has a pinwheel fetish.

After dark she will write my eulogy and

I will thank her

and never know her name.

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.

22 Pounds of Wishes

I have 22 pounds of wishes hidden among the weeping wisteria.

The flowers by the pond have been melancholy a long time.

I drink with them.

Look at Lily’s tattoos.

Kind of abstract, don’t you think?

I’ve been told some people are really into that.

But the roses and I share the best laughs because we know it is not about pattern

but all about color and that soft, sweet texture on the fingerpads.

Meanwhile the snapdragons do deep, twisted math at the waters edge

and I drop a wish in the water.