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.
Clamor clatter calamity
a huge purple spill
generous to an idea getting drunk in the corner.
I am an absence of air.
Paris writes me telling me not to come.
Many things have fallen
into the gaping O of love.
My sick senses stretch like a violin note over
a ghostly concert hall.
Halls are caverns.
I have a hall inside my city
And he waits there.
He has a bomb wrapped like a gift,
I the suction of quicksand.
Synthetic oceans tug at my private world,
The glorious ripping tides from two pink moons.
To ameliorate is pink.
What swims beside my boat,
wheat colored, round toothed, bipedal –
that I cannot recognize as one of my own?
Beauty has frost bite and is just
going to live that way.
The stench is aggressive.
I have been living whichever way is out of sight
from Age and Lust.
Beauty and I go way back
to a year I only remember as a pile of sugar to play in.
Skin scrubs keep Age away.
The truth is Beauty and Lust have never met,
though some think they are a couple.
Lust’s eyes are inverted in her face,
her longings contorted and her hearth
cold.
Drowsiness in my mind,
putting harmful ideas into my hands
Why can’t I get rid of the mind and slander?
Is this my way?
Does gold feel that it has nothing to do with divorce?
with callousness?
with loss?
It’s in the sea.
Forget?
Remember rage?
I have been mistreated by myself in italics.
I was mistreated in italics.
I was in italics when I was mistreated.
I have threatened myself
And been threatened by people who loved me
with knives for hands.
I cut everything.
Life is a hallway.
God this hallway is a mess,
my clothes strewn everywhere.
I carry a Neon bible,
Dance at every wedding but my own,
Collect slivers of rainbows.
What are the tire irons doing to my yard?
What idiotic amniotic creature is devouring my space?
I will roll up my dreams
And smoke them.
Sometimes I feel confused about my goals. I want to get a book published, or do I? Am I prepared to play the game of submitting to contests at $25 and $30 dollars a pop? Most presses use expensive contests now to publish books.
Maybe it would be best if I tried to get a second chapbook published, and self publish a poetry book. If you self publish you don’t get literary acclaim and you don’t get to experience the purifying process of working with an editor. You do, however, get control of your book and to release your work out into the world without waiting for a middle man that might never come through.
I guess the truth is I hate submitting my work. I don’t mind the rejection letters. I just hate the process of struggling to find a press that even seems like it jives with my work, and then writing a mind numbing letter and inane bio. I know I should do it, but when I get free time I want to write and revise, not search and submit.
Every field has its dues that must be paid, and poetry is no exception to that. But sometimes I wonder about alternative paths, like blogging or self publishing. It doesn’t hurt to try. Or do I need to buckle down and start submitting again?
The dance is lost in translation.
My feet are visionaries,
The floor a diary poorly kept.
To the right,
A sprinkle of justice.
To the left a topographic map of indecency.
Give me all your semicolons.
My story is not finished.
Give me shoes of air.
I wish to dance in my own language.
Slim sunsets sink slowly.
I am a lemon. I am a thorn.
I hurl.
Water finds me grotesque.
Sometimes I sit under hospital beds
and eat away at lives
like bitter battery acid.
Was it because I loved you that I siphoned your contentment
or because I have a funnel where my heart should be?
Miniature Moon 