Nicoteen Dream

I’m sorry that I wasn’t pretty enough

to make it that you could put

the cigarette

down;

make it worth it

to you.

I’m sorry that I apologize too much

but I can’t help being

sorry for being

when woman is what it is I am

currently imposed by the flower

the wheelbound man in front of the car hospital

never would give to me now

that I burn in shame-hell.

I’m sorry that you will never read the letters

in my messages, because if you did

if you listened the way you do when it’s sound instead of dances

of form on space

emptiness on pixellates

if/then you would hear-see

that really i could have been

but now that i’m not

pretty

i guess i’m not

but I always sort of thought

that didn’t matter to you

or at least not as much

since you were the sand of Normandy, rosequartz-gold alloy

since you were the thing in my lined paper breaking

the lines, graphite

hearts exploding & stories untold still

i want you to tell them now

please don’t say don’t say you never will

Ghost Reef

In meandering among these carelessly preserved forms

I try to imagine them a hundred years ago, when they weren’t

still alabaster michelangelos

yet wild dirt throbbing the still-unsanitized song of a million million life-bits:

The windows of this orphaned cathedral

meatened with grappling tentacles

pokened through with antennae

sniffling for crumbs

The mumbles of this closed-eye desert

blossoming with winking hands

weaving tendrils into a sky

not sacred but broiling with stars,

squirting squelching searching

for a mooring to love and decompose.

I have flown here I have geared up for the sistine of the skeleton, the godly quietude

of crumblings blank so any prayer may come enscrawl itself before

we resurface for breakfast

But I linger past my regulator’s threshold for the homeliness of the ghost-flesh

clouding meaning against my view profaning

reflection into asymmetry giggling

against the echo of my inner earbones’ temple

I long for a savager imagination still

able to sprout the grittiest details, the edges

of the gossamer dresses

of a fish tingling the ocean’s jewel as it’s dispurifying

with inclusions of weedy pulsing living

minutes

And I drown down here still mourning

my own grown-up mind atrophied

netted to a blindness I can almost not find searching for what almost isn’t there

Imagine tears becoming one with salt water,

an incident retainting the ruins with rot

and therefore life

Image credits in order of appearance:

“A major coral bleaching event took place on this part of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. (Photo courtesy of Oregon State University).” By Oregon State University – Bleached coral, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50490719

“A colony of the soft coral known as the “bent sea rod” stands bleached on a reef off of Islamorada, Florida. Photo credit: Kelsey Roberts, USGS.” By U.S. Geological Survey from Reston, VA, USA – Bent Sea Rod Bleaching, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37906340

 

Two Billion Heartbeats

The island I live on is sinking and no one is doing a thing.

Every morning rises one minute earlier than the last

minute earlier, still I heave to

red skies and lumber outside

of my sleeping-shack and gaze

at the scissors of silver

cutting closer and closer

the sheer golden thigh of my

slivered gold beach until they bite

at my toes and the soft underparts of my

house which trembles

more and more each day

waiting for the pitch to arrive that will shatter

the glass. But because disaster is still hanging over

and not beneath

us, we stand and look

at the sea

like you look at your thirteen-year-old daughter

like nothing is different, like your metal detectors don’t recognize

the slice of red beneath the eye,

like you drive her and drop her

at school every day and let the tide

traffic your hours back.

They say

we are born with two billion heartbeats

to spend as we wish.

Fall in love and tumble

uphill and feel the edge

of a cliff and heaven kissing inside

your heart

and you condemn yourself to an early death.

But, build yourself a windowless tower and sit watching cooking shows hour by hour

and you will enjoy a plentitude of years

each gray as dishwater, six feet shallower.

Every heartbeat closer than the next.

In the red morning I cannot cry

as I watch the grand boulders that were my thighs

collapse under the acid chains of foam

as I feel the body

I am inside

sinking heavier beneath two billion unmarked stones

As I take another bite of oatmeal, another sip of sky,

Gazing into those bitter-salt red-rimmed eyes

Seeing nothing important.

Image credits in order of appearance:

By Makemake at the German language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=301667

By Alejandra Edwards – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21846171

Noticings

The French verb for “to love” is aimer. That’s one letter away from amer, the adjective for “bitter.” Chocolate grows geographically far from sugar, without which it is only a bitter brown seed. Scarred hands of laborers nurture the repugnant plant, not knowing the miraculous puberty it will undergo once it is plucked dead and past their horizon.

Congealed shark cartilage breathes silently within skin creams on mirrored bathroom counters next to white starfish the pretty woman doesn’t understand are dead.

After kicking one hand until it releases the edge, I realize I don’t want my godmother to fall into the lava sea beneath her after all. But at this point, with only five fingers connecting her to cool earth, it is unlikely I can reverse the pact I’ve signed with gravity in blood. I still have to try. I reach for her hand.

Learn more about products containing sharks and how to help save these vital and endangered sea archangels here: http://sharkangels.org/issues-facing-sharks/uses-for-shark

I also just found out about this awesome globally active organization working to educate people, establish laws, and carry out research and conservation activities to help sharks. It is called SOSF, the Save Our Seas Foundation, and it focuses on sharks but also works to help other ocean life. Find out more here: http://saveourseas.com/

Image credits in order of appearance:

“Boy collecting cacao from drying in Chuao, Venezuela” By Electrolito – Transfered from en.wikipedia.org, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1170862

“Pelican release. Pelican Island Pioneer Festival 2014 – Celebrating 150th birthday of Paul Kroegel, first refuge manager. Photos by Garry Tucker, USFWS.” By U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region – Pelican Taking Off, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45516717

 

Why Weather Reports are Pointless

It’s dark and cold inside.

Autumn leaves

sprawl along the wet-rat sidewalk

like gnarled starfish desiccating

beneath crunching rain and driving footsteps.

After

decomposition,

they leave signatures on the wet dried pureed rock

path:

a brown ghost-hand spangling, fingers straining

in opposite directions.

If they could candy-snap off

and fly away they would. Alas, like the chalk

they have to wait until

it rains again

outside.

 

Someone had written all over the

sunburnt dried pureed rock

in front of my tower that

You Are Loved

and other such contemptuous swill in pastel cough-dust,

green like mint ice cream half-digested,

finally rejected now,

jello-sweltering between grass spades.

 

It’s far too dark and cold

inside

I scream soft lyric melodies

(in my inside voice)

I expel my chiffon and fishbelly innards

(onto paper with pencil –

my weapon of choice –

the key out

of my room

is lost somewhere inside.)

It’s far too dark

to wonder

far too cold

about the possibility of

warm hands.

Flickering blood-hearted things

extract my

love through the hermetic window, leaving me

inside

a deep-sea diver’s shrunken head

a melting chalk sentence

the pierced ink sac of a dissected room.

The Point of No Return

The environmental engineers

wrench petrified tree-corpses from the earth

and form a community circle, each one thrashing the spine-ditched back of the engineer in front of him

while the engineer behind thrusts his own misery through tired arms, through charred whip-fingers, and lets it shriek silently upon the blushing, mushrooming flesh before him.

Meanwhile the politicians

split the bill for the last great brown bear, and over bear and wine

assign a rhyme and rhythm to midnight’s naughty list, casting chocolate bets

which senator or custodian will be exterminated first, a circus procedure

witnessed only

by the toxic light of the last stars.

It is the end

of the world,

scrawl sadly the researchers with their bare toes

in the sludge that coats the floor of the gas chamber

where wires spit extra minutes of life intravenously into their sinews, leaving

the taste of a metro clarinet in their mouths, devoid

of speech and soon to be of breath

while their hopeful sea star specimens glisten in festering jars, skeletons crêped with skin.

It is the end of the world.

We who slept in her cradle, whose giggles breathed the apple-crunching slaps of fish abounding her rivers, we who wrote for her the first poems

now have twisted our crib’s mobile into our mother’s noose,

now have kicked the screen door closed

leaving ourselves

on the outside and the dust-death on the inside

but we can’t live

alone in outer space;

we are not stars.

The end of the world is a devastating thing, which is why

the teachers and the police and the veterinarians cross

their hearts with timber bones, wailing for forgiveness at the deaf round face of a smog-hazed moon. They all will die soon.

But the last writers, impossible to blame for all of this

(for they were as useless as a golden frog

in figuring out the cure to sea star wasting syndrome; and can’t be held

responsible for the engineers’ failure to invent a fuel that wasn’t an anti-sun)

The last writers wait, observe from afar,

dry of the blood,

words unscathed by the air-fire that crackles their throats.

In the midst

of the decease of all those who could have made a difference,

the impractical writers, fate-forgotten, will scratch their chins with pens

and stay, useless

but for to document it all.

For a slightly more scientific point of view on the point of no return that earthlings recently passed, see http://www.alternet.org/environment/time-save-world

Image credits in order of appearance:

By http://response.restoration.noaa.gov/index.php, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1831004

By David Falconer, Photographer (NARA record: 1427627) (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons