11262015

Scratched out from a silent womb
I've grown into a tumult:
ever-buzzing roar and whine
of tortured stone, and groans
of men heaving rock. Even in 
the quiet hours before the
engines start, breaths not mine, 
dreams not mine animate my heart. 
What has this crescendo consumed?
I scratch into the womb of
me to find the silence to be.

Cactus

prickly like
a sudden poem
a heart that breaks
a life undone. My fingers
to know the pain of you
reach. And there - the many million stabs - 
I gasp and pull away to find a
tiny thorn trapped in the labyrinth of my fingertip, 
maze of my identity - and now, the pain, too, me.

011313

is it the gray month

is it the winter rain in the cavern of her
breasts cracking
stone where it falls that makes her break and
say

i'm old
and i'm alone oh

if only if only

i could take the coldness from her
i'd lay it like a shroud over the sky and lick
her ragged forehead till it was smooth as milk.

after a dream where i couldn't say no

I was an
I-negated self:
my body the medium of
artists who
drove instruments into my legs,
fondled me like clay
then burnt me through to hold my shape
my voice driven to my gut, throat packed
with tracks - quiet laughs and
empty conversations with girls
I might have loved. and when my mouth
was visited by a fleshy worm
i kept it shut and closed my eyes
and lay me back
a statue of a lovely sleeping naked lady
or a lonely man's doll.

i had a dream where a woman demanded
"did he tell you the lie? did he tell you the worst lie?"

My growing up was no-less,
stripped to silence,
but it rattled in my belly and
rose like a gulping scream against a pillow
pressed to my face and now
I bellow! now
I wail! now I
guffaw!

some days the pebbles lying in the sun like dead fish, smoothened
down by the beating waves
will scorch the feet of those who walk on them

and one day we won't be pebbles but mountains, strong and firm and full of
echoes of words we could never say before.

an august morning

The air is cold -
isn't it delicious? This
morning with the
savage city groping my
eyeballs, I blink and in that blindness shiver
the trees just under my
skin. Is it fear or anticipation of
the end that sets them trembling?
Men drive their stone stakes deep
but the earth beneath my frozen feet keeps
the beat of a defiant tune like an uroboros tape reel that
repeats:
The cold is delicious - isn't it air?
These are the moments I am me.

Today's poem will be a journey to the heart of the hollow earth

travel the arid surface of a 
page until your pen finds just 
the place; then
drill!!
take no caution! take no care!
dust don't
dig or
not dig - it's breathless,
deathless - dig? so dig!
break those pores apart
exclaim, what a work of art!!
inject ink jets in lifeways
call it an effortless play in the sandbox
with baby pails and shovels
search and abandon the search
abandon the
humanity. Who needs it? What an artist!!!
oohaahoohaahooahhooahh
oooh wait! what?! oohaahoohaah
muscle?! blood! oohaahoohahh
heart??!
WE THOUGHT IT WAS HOLLOW DAMNIT THE EARTH'S CORE IS ON 
FIRE WHAT NOW

on a summer evening

on days I love being alive,
i worry i'll get carried away with the wind,
rise from my toenails where
i hang around like fungus ironically
commenting on the smell,
move through my intestines,
wind upwards through the ribs
and get to know my heart
a little. Then I'll float right through
this skull of mine and fly

like a strand of hair, twirled between
the fingers of some ancient, loving spirit,

on a head of 7 billion hairs
that've all felt the wind
and thought poetry of it. 

So i resist beauty.

i don't comment on the stars
although they still my buzzing brain; i try not to mention clouds
though I would like to dangle my feet off one and 
wonder at the world spinning and blinking; i think, but never say,
that we are all notes of the sweetest song played
upon the strings that hold humanity
together like a gift from the universe; and i would never, ever, ever,  tell you that
my love for you is as deep as the ocean,
though it is true. Poets are supposed to be new,
poignant like a death adder strike (so i've heard)

and i worry it's just not very edgy or new
to say "i'm glad to be sharing a wonderful world with you."

trajectory of a broken poet

I salted my wounds, took
mystery from the moon and
spread it like a scab over
the heart but,
so doing, i
lost my art. 

Drafting

Who here hasn't

worked her veins into

an arid argument

outline?

The blue bin is bursting

with so many rough draft heart-

ideas exchanged

for evidence of

what makes existence good.

But what makes existence

good?

And so I uncrumple

the discarded bits of me to re-

consider. My work is incomplete.