Beneath a violet sky, I tap my slippers together 3 times and end up in DC. It isn’t home. I wish I could untap my slippers. But it will have to do. The day unfolds like a receipt, a radicalized holiday that smells oddly hairy. This place withers my soul, who really ought to be tougher by now but is battered and worn by shifting storms of mood. The day weighs 25 pounds – not too much to carry but enough to ensure I’ll be tired. Depression fills me formlessly like water, filling up the cracks and crevices of my body and mind.
Tag: writing
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.
They ask, “Do You Have Any Suicidal Ideation?”
Lyrical breezes swirl over a Van Gogh landscape, unsure how to define the words, “ Give him your marrow.” My frustrations were vented and flew up to the sky like a bright yellow balloon, happy and eager to be heard by the clouds. Then…..well, they popped, of course, their remains falling imperceptibly to choke the natural world. My smile must be put on a leash and dragged into work sometimes. If walls could talk, I think they’d say, “She tries to be useful, but finds her presence redundant.”
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.”
Fearsome and Hard to Believe
Crusted criticism flakes off me like the delicate, fragile layers of a fluffy croissant. My sugar is building snowmen, selling death door to door to the depressed and broken, offering itself a sacrifice. In a cold place, my body will be sleeping. The cliffs carouse beside the sea. I miss my husband while he rubs my back. I am cheerful, living like lightning. Burn bright, then in a flash, gone. Nothing left but a faint, sticky smoke. I do not need criticism. I need the white sacrifice of a discipline I could not understand – like it’s been 36 years and after He saves my life and seals me I still say, “No one loves me,” because unworthiness is in my blanched bones. The sunshine is, to the shadow, fearsome and hard to believe.
My Novella
The eccentric novella brewing and screwing her way through the sizzling synapses across my brain is hard to catch. Pick up your plot and follow me! The sun over my house judges my unproductive, polychromatic day. Language was my first love. I try to harness my words as they sparkle defiantly, trying to escape the little woman controlling my tongue, who snatches them up and places them on it to be conveyed. The novella, being an angry, unwilling confederation of words, tries to escape. She puts up a fight. She’s feisty. Still, the woman in my voice box, the one I abuse, dictates her from plot to syntax into the phone. Afterward, I answer the phone and hear the rush of my own blood, a private sea. And somewhere, the eternal hammering of nails.
The Circle and The Sphere
The little circle marbles down the glass streets of my imaginary universe. She is purple and mystical scented and smooth and spoiled. The squares till the fields, picking despair off crops that will be burned by an army of disenfranchised futures. The triangles, red in their harshness and love of good wine, stand on the porches of their crystalline cottages, watching our little circle travel. Until she meets a sphere, and she blooms with possibility.
My Old Personality
Feral, calendar scented clouds claw their way across a luxury ultramarine sky. Twilight – and the storms are tucking in for the night – typhoons sleeping off shore, waiting to pounce during union working hours. I sit on the porch smoking memories of multidisciplinary Mondays where every day was a synthesis of time and color. I am not on speaking terms with line, but texture knows my home phone number. The used Mondays are aromatic like my old personality, years before my diseased mind wiped my name off my birth certificate. What is the most effective way to move a mountain through my veins?
My 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.
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.
Miniature Moon 