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.

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.

Winter

Silver trees sparkle,
the diamonds of January.
The fireplace is a dear old friend
from a nudist colony.

The mystery is that
there is no mystery.
Everything is as promised.

There are commercial breaks
from the interesting.
Sales on refurbished hearts.
The galaxies speed away
From one another
as though broken by a cosmic
infidelity.

Winter is a parable
for surviving without Love –
that cheerful shyster with
echocardiograms tattooed on.

Lucid

I am quietly lucid.

I don’t say this to brag.

They say the only thing

A person can best the Devil in

Is humility.

Humility,

That soft yellow sheath

Over my glowing hot skin.

But sometimes my mind

Makes memories without me.

Other times she sneaks into my soul

And my prayers come out as cotton,

My hallelujahs thorned and unprepared

For the lustful day.

My mind plays,

Swinging between despair

And ecstasy.

Despair reeks of old fire

And dust storms.

Ecstasy writes my name

In pink pen all over Virginia.

I wish my mind was still enough

To watch children grow up.

They grow like bitterness between

The berry bushes,

Poking into the canopy

Like vines looking for something to strangle

So that they may survive.

I love all of them,

Though they chose mothers elsewhere.

Lucid Lisa loves lemon lime

Laser lights,

And she dances

(Hold on while she climbs

Back into her I)

I dance as though my feet

Were in love with the soil.

A sordid, sultry affair

Between earth

And her resident looney.

God has granted me a vision

Of aprons and crude stars

And I smoke my dreams

On my neighbor’s porch

While he mines for lobotomized diamonds

Crisp and certain.

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.

A Party

The wine soaked air curls
Around my hips,
My hips that once bore life
And now bears only blood
And the thrill of empty promises.

The jeweled sky pays homage to Van Gogh
While I chat with the lyrics and rhythm
Of a song I liked once.
This party has an impressive guest list.
Ambition
Lust
Greed
Credibility
Their wives eye my knock off bag
Skeptically.
It’s not really a cloud purse,
But it is made of a fine sewn mist.
I hold my head high.
I produced a rose in 16 million colors.
No one here has done that.

The night is younger than I.
The breeze is crusted with carcinogens
And no one,
I mean no one,
Wants to talk about it.
My husband puts his arm around my waist
And I remember planting the seed,
Praying for a flower I could only dream of.
Now the rain is acid,
Tastes like sour candies,
And I fear for the future of flowers.

Love Poem

This decadent night
Will be forever tattooed in my memory,
Etched in the finest folds of my
Often broken down brain.

The waves are opulent,
Flashing their white tips.
You are solid beside me,
A fantasy of a human being –
Silver hair shining under the starlight
Like mylar.

Dreams blow by us
Like coastal tumbleweed.
Breezes try to come between us,
But from now on 2 are 1.
(That’s how they do math in paradise.)
Your lips seek my yearning mouth
And you asked if you could kiss me,
And I said yes,
The exclamation mark hovering
Between us like a match.

February – Or Limits.

The ghost of February
Rummages through my garage,
Unearthing thousands of decayed dreams.

February is ice blue
Is lonely
Is unhinged.
Climate Control
Battles with her every year.
But each year February dies
And her ghost
Is a pick pocket on the beach I grew up on.

When she comes to my home,
My pink dwelling by the sea,
She searches for her brother,
January.
I do not tell her
But I buried him
And selfish ambition
Under the Norfolk Pine.

One of my dreams is delicate,
Lacy,
Shy.
Her I named Aurora
For the lights I long to see
At the ends of the Earth.
She almost turns to dust in February’s
Damp hands.

February takes a shine to her and asks me,
“May I?”
I acquiesce.
She wipes away the frost
On her eyes,
And sachets out of my garage,
My little green dream chattering away at her.
May my tender little dream

Go where I cannot.