Tag: writing

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.

Ghosts

Ghost is a noun,
a verb,
A philosophy.
The spilled milk curdles
on a floor I have no time for,
as I float toward the sun roof.

I left behind a peril of poison
to enter this paradise.
So many ghosts march outside,
sliding past my windows
to a war I have left.

Sometimes you can take
your ball and go home,
but home is some place new and blue.

Doors

Domesticated butterflies
dust my curio cabinet.
Feral dogs howl outside my door.
Why is every door in this house
blue and covered in teeth?

I collect crystal,
smiles,
foreign flags.
I teach a curriculum
of careful altruism
to my class of invertebrate Thursdays.

I understand the lascivious sunset and all her erotic, neurotic colors.
I, too, am a walking box of crazy desire.

This house is a department store
specializing in drapes.
This house is a mismanaged dream.
This house is a disease
that makes you ten years younger.

I thank my butterflies,
And I feed the dogs.


Kitchen Knife

In the crisp, cropped morning –
gold daydreams at the edges.
I hurry to class
fantasizing about books,
about the secret haven of birds,
about a candy leopard.

The future ripples like
accommodating grass
with each turn I make.
Each choice is a wind setting out
over the plane of my uncategorized existence
like a ray of light.

What lies in the center of beauty
but a fawn sleeping soundly,
her mother still 3 days away
from the hunter’s gun?

Amiable maps will reveal
the road to catharsis,
but hide the rambling path
of permanent joy
that I have to cut into the brush                     myself with a kitchen knife.

Tendrils, Fence, Sneaking around after dark

Tendrils of ivy are hatching in God’s drawings of the South. The South is a forest green. New England is blue. The mid atlantic is cream.

Fake things bother me. Even fake blood.

The spirits were behind the children, not in front of them. 

Trick or Treat!

Sorry, nothing left.

I snuck under the fence into the field, hiding from the horses. If you stood at the crest of the hill you could see Blacksburg, Christiansburg, and a bit Radford twinkling in the dark. Somehow we spooked the horses, and I had to flatten like a piece of paper underneath that electric fence again ASAP to get out of there and escape.

Performance

Performance is the worst possible backseat driver.
Performance puts in long hours,
But quite frankly it’s needy.
I want to go right,
But I can do things better on the left,
So I fly left.
My little metrics pusher guiding my wheel.

Performance is born of pride and pressure.
I, Little package of blood and bone, need to find my own place to go.

Subcommittees

My subconscious is a group project with many subcommittees.
Hopefully there are people much smarter than me
Making some of these decisions.

As it stands,
I have my hand in an oil can
While building a house from matches.
At night I fear silence so I whisper my anthems to God,
I spend the day trying to be a kite-
And then burning every kite in a 10 mile radius because I’m mad I failed.

The wind in the conifers beckons,
Yet the subcommittees have all voted no,
And I cry in my yard

and don’t understand why I do