Three feet behind Christmas
December 28 is trailing.
She needs a haircut desperately.
Her younger brother lives in New York.
Feted,
on the social circuit.
Dec 28 is sallow,
reminds her neighbors of a really long line.
I got her a job licking stamps at the unemployment agency.
No one sends her envelopes out.
Yet in her spare time she wins poker tournaments.
Her face hasn’t betrayed her in years.
I have been haunted by the voice of Autumn
taken the wind for a weekend lover,
argued with the reeking river.
I live in a castle of mattresses
and I take it sweet and slow getting out in the morning.
Bacon fries itself in the kitchen,
doing such fantastic somersaults in the bombastic grease.
The residue of angels drapes
like fine linen
over our hands
our language
our thighs.
Death and I do not care what time it is.
He is a delinquent
I am night’s dilettante.
A lighthouse is afraid.
The gray sea is a dancer and a whore.
Stop feeding the birds along
the craggy shore your dinner.
They are waiting for you.
Emerald air ripe before the rain,
The lightning waiting in the frightened trees.
What if the smoke came before the fire?
What falls cool and nourishing but rain and salvation?
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.
Pink ghosts make HIPPA violations.
A bed is growing into me.
One ghost whispers you are going to die
And another giggles.
I know I say
But not today and not tomorrow.
Walls hum.
My pills confer with my blood.
Pills are day makers
And skin often wants no hours dragged out of me.
Better to die like this, my sunburn peel once explained to me,
Young and perfect.
A museum of possibility.
Instead I gorge on sweet filled pills
And make mondays
The clock admires me.
Pretty ghosts titter.
My head screams. When the pills make days my head tries to send them back.
A hand holds my hand.
The morning binges and the evening purges.
Another day dead another in birth canal
Persuading new residents is such a drag,
Hissed the rosest spirit.
Black sex sings like a siren against my white sheets.
What quilted questions can I answer,
with my tongue lodged in your pink lips,
while the sadomasochistic sunlight slinks slowly
through blue blinds?
The narrator is mopping the floor with my tears,
which for him fall like rain through a hole
in the roof.
What promise this day had,
born at the height of the malleable moon.
What now,
since favor, faith, and fancy have
disintegrated?
The narrator begins with an article
that will barely clothe me from the cold.
I have been outsonneted by a suction cup,
Clinging to my window like a starfish to the sea.
Lately my similes get away from me,
Dogs always unearthing hideous bones in
My backyard.
The curious climate of my moist mind
Is most conducive to marigolds, azaleas,
The pancreas.
My face is all sugar,
My tongue a cola.
See the stained glass the suction cup holds?
Memorabilia from an unremembered saint.
The floor is a guess,
is clear like water.
It is raining June in my hair.
My clothes are brimming with butterflies.
I am a sour after note to their beauty.
I was born to rise
to shatter sky.
Instead a jealous math
embalming me
fills me with mud.
Miniature Moon 