He casts his net among the rocks.
Broken jaws chatter beneath the water.
Two towns over he is a baby licking
his mother’s paintings.
Today he is a glass hunter
All shine and no stick.
Tag: writing
Water
Look up water.
See what books,
so fearful of the subject,
refuse to stay.
Flowers gasp to stay afloat.
His desires spirit him away.
His desire to finger the piano,
her
with or without her face.
The touch of her mind on the water
regal red.
Life and I do not care who we have.
He is
crunched afterbirth.
Anorexia
A forbidden food is silly
but demonic and understandable
on a Tuesday when you clock in
(If people can turn clock into a verb for such
nefarious purposes, they need to stay away from my sofa and window.)
and you feel five feet wide and are at least 1.
Chocolate bars are exotic and exciting. Do not listen to
the pizza. He will charm you out of your 2s and into 10s.
Eat your salad.
It wants to die,
is dying,
wants you to follow along.
Ignore the demeaning soda. It hates you.
Your teeth whither.
Why are all the women in bigger sizes so much smaller than you?
Your bones shrink at the reproach.
Beauty and Lust
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.
Diseased Disease
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?
Like Marilyn Monroe as a Housewife
A congress of confetti has decreed
every wind must blow up.
The ground breathes.
I look like Marilyn Monroe as a housewife,
standing in my yard with my dress billowing around me.
My husband sees me with his eyes shut.
Hands open.
The hours I have given him clump between his fingers like cat litter
I will wash them with aloe.
I will dry them in silence.
Our daughter has been sequestered with the sequins
and she has sewn a shining dress.
See her straddle the breeze.
She learns from me.
Untitled
Eleven mirrors watch videos of sky.
Clouds breed above the enemy.
What sleeps inside my teeth
that my hunger has become so fragile?
My face is a tapestry unfinished.
Below the town a garden planted by boys
grows velvet tumbleweed.
Diary of Radiation
Diary of Radiation
The color of water, I race slowly and win.
See how I die without fanfare,
taking millions with me?
I adore the breeze.
I covet the air but do not need it.
At the crest of unbelief my candle bobs along
on an inflatable saucer.
Summer in Asphalt City
Simmering air
warms the neighborhood.
Watch the eloquent vacuums roaming their halls.
The roofs are in love with the trees.
This is where lightning dies its death
no faster than you’ll die yours.
The Poet’s Way
Lately I feel vague, uneasy stirrings inside me of unrealized inspiration. I have not written fresh poetry in weeks. I am going through a dry spell, which is not abnormal but still disconcerting. Writing is usually one of the constants in my life, and this prolonged period of creative silence is disturbing. A writer is someone who writes. I identify as a writer but have not been writing. Something doesn’t add up.
Part of the problem is that I need more poetry to read. Reading stimulates creativity and imagination. To that end I am going to find two or three new poetry books online and order them this week. I have to look online because so much of what they have in the bookstore I have either already read or it is much more mainstream than my taste. There are pretty slim pickings for poetry in most bookstores, at least the book stores around me.
I need to start using Goodreads to help me hunt down good books, too.
If I really want some inspiration, I need to take more of my current poetry and run it through Google translate in Xhosa and Afrikaans. That is an ongoing project of mine, to translate my poems into these two languages and back again to English and then edit and revise my results. I can get some really fascinating results from doing this and I love to play with language. It was inspired by a South African pen pal.
Sometimes I get flashes of imagery in my head or bits of phrases I want to use, but nothing cohesive has come together. Poetry is never far from my thoughts, but I just haven’t given birth to any healthy lines.
Sometimes a little bit of creative silence can be a good thing. It gives you a chance to collect your thoughts, process the world, and provides you time to live life so that you actually have something to say. Writing is an act of communication and rare is the person who truly has something to say 24 hours a day. Sometimes I come away from creative dry spells completely re-energized and ready to tackle lots of interesting imagery and conflicting ideas. Letting my writing brain sleep allows it to awaken refreshed. But this dry spell has gone on too long and I need a sort of bootcamp to get my creative muscles taut and toned again.
To that end I need some sort of discipline and something to ignite my mind. What I will do:
Read read read
Look at images for inspiration
Try handwriting some poems to end this block.
Reread Twyla Tharpe’s book on creativity.
Read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and see if I can pick up anything useful.
Continue to work on waking up earlier so I have more time to write.
Talk to other writers about maybe having a support group.
Use my Mastery app to log time writing poetry.
Be willing to write work that isn’t my best just to get something down on the page. Great artists/writers, like great athletes, need to practice.
Miniature Moon 