May Poems (8)

Gray May 1st

I wait for May to
burst like a pomegranate seed and
dribble down my lips; today's just
the pith.


in the shower with a thought of you

mist whispering, swirling
against neck; water licking
skin, nibbling; threat
of burning tumbling down
spine; I mere
sigh, melt settling into you.


forecast

clouds bumble in, soft
white like marshmallows, hiding
hearts of hot lightning.


what it is (II)

the quiet of a
flower opening and your
gentle eyes that smile.


loneliness

not in your eyes like dusk
not in your touch like sleep
not in kisses like dreams I gladly drowned in, but
when you left - god

like a star's first waking blink into
nothing, wide-eyed I
drifting cradled in her smile.


05242016

bones that swell and pop
lungs that bleed from screaming
palms collecting journeys for another life

before these, your face is the sleeping moon
and I'm enchanted by craters, waiting for your eyes -


i am so hungry

I am so hungry
for the missing bits of me,

the fullness of a belly
unbuttoned. Hungry for poems

I can't read, for how my
tongue can't twist

anymore and all the million words my mother
plucked from pain. Desperate for memory,

I let your evil jungles split my
brain and licked into the cracks,

smacking my lips: hungry
like you almost.

Almost.

But in the mirror where I go
to swallow myself whole,
my eyes on me are not like yours.

Bless them for what hunger can't take.


05252016

this grey morning-
forecast of split skies-
this day that waits, teetering like a boatman in the fog-
I am by the window braiding words to keep thoughts from flying-
tucking worries behind my ear-

after the fact

No nightingale,
no pain transformed to beauty,
Cracked tongue lodged in this human throat,
I croak broken notes
to sing of you.

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.

textual frustration

Some men will strip themselves like
dead fish and lay their spines in 
my hands: They want me to stroke their bones, 
I think. I'd prefer if they were octopi
with fat purple tentacles I couldn't fight shoved into 
me against my whimpering objections. 
But no. These men are 
pens: I suck their ends and 
crack them between my fingers when the words won't 
come. 
Is there no load to degrade my hate? 
Is there no man that can break my hands 
so they'll never write again?

Madame Popova

**Based on the life of Madame Alexe Popova, a serial killer for hire whose sympathies lay with wives of brutes. She committed some 300 murders of husbands in the span of 30 years, until she was reported by a repentant wife to the police, to whom she remorselessly confessed her crimes, claiming that she'd freed "unhappy wives from their tyrants." She was executed in 1909.**


Madame Popova heard, 
with heart breaking 
beneath a rigid-faced guise,
the woman before her who spoke
through tears, aching 
of bruises and swollen black eyes.

When her tale was all told, Madame Popova rose;
with pity and fury she said,
"No more will you hurt. Take courage, dear lady!
Your troubles will lie with the dead!"

Madame Popova invited the lady
and her "troubles" to an afternoon tea,
and into the cup of the latter 
she slipped 
several drops 
of arsenic.
Then the lady thanked god to be free!

Three hundred such incidents, three decades later,
blindfolded, face turned to the sky,
said Madame Popova, "I do not regret
the liberty of any tyrannized wife."


Thus, guiltless she passed from waking to rest.
The firing squad put a hole in her breast
and she breathed
not again; that was
the end
of the Madame Popova's life. 

stung

i'm a pungent

flesh-rose flowering

between lips that dreamed

itself nectared by

you, awkward, bumbling,

that forgot it is, too,

a brain strung to a

foot that could

so easily crush

hairy little balls

like bees.

Fridays

Friday nights, downtown
detonates with
the laughter of
women wobbling on heels
to fall head over
and there’s something defiant in
their hemlines high up the thigh,
skin glaring over necklines, assertion
in the tipsy stupidity of these
bodies between bodies
ricocheting. How tight
they’ve been wound up, I think,
how desperate their escape
every Friday night
like clockwork
on dynamite.

Woman Before the Rising Sun

Inspired by Woman Before the Rising Sun by Friedrich (1818-20)

The evening star is
an aphrodisiac of amour
de soi.
In its primal glow, the woman knows
her darkness, and her beauty, and
de-lights,
wings cra
cking through her marble shell, the
breaking of a spell
man-cast. She
lives. But too soon

owls roost; wisdom sleeps.
Today quits the cradle of humanity.
Morning casts its curse anew and
the woman is contorted into

expectation, a grotesque form
encased in stone, her heart

seems not

to beat. But

the woman merely sleeps.