… to feel
hungry and full at once
stuffed to the brim and flooding out emptiness
will that child come back
running down grey sand
her cold blue dress biting at her heels
like dogs with foam for teeth
& i’m frightened of her
because i have been inside
once, her desolation & despite
the dull pain at once i screamed and swore
that i prefer
still to feel …
when you see a flower
skydrift
towards your face
it paints your whole eyeball ticklish-
-ly and you fall
in love and as you start to hold it
you realize it’s falling
breaking off your fingertips falling
inextricably
falling
towards the center of dark-deep gravity
falling for the fallacy that is individuality
but it’s your flower
and you care tremendously
and you know exactly what’s vaguely down there —
monsters with mechanized mandibles, metal threads
of windpipes snapped —
but gravity is more alluring than your
possible
so there is nothing you can do
but watch it fall
and die a little bit inside
as it kills itself outside.
Please don’t rhyme “suicide”
with any side i can see which is
every side, though some sides
are fictitious. Being killed (even vicariously)
is a somewhat inconvenience, and
September is coming.
Yes — but — We’re safe now.
From otherstate, strangely, the cage of my body
seems more like a vermicelli nest.
Yes, but we’re safe now.
You’ll never know how important it was to me
that you had got the chemicals right this week so i had the right to be
weak
i could not write nor think but i did speak
yes but we’re safe now
the words like cake on a lizard’s tongue
rejected. i hurried to scrape them up
from the concrete with my eyes and not my words
Now you’re scaring me…
i’m sorry — i didn’t mean to — but now at least you see
the other side of that toxic mirror the migraines can freeze into
being
my bones close around me like doveswings in the crockpot
you think they should put you — the hypothetical you — in prison for being
an asshole but i think it’s better
you be
and right
when the darkness was ready to finish the ceremony of my grounding
you notice that hey it’s a goddamn fucking beautiful day
and despite this i think words might be okay
and i still don’t believe that yes but we’re safe now but i do believe in this day
too big to crash
in like my ribs around
the light wrapped cold in cloud
your good bad words lie in my pocket
medication for nextrain
Image: “RainBow ː)” By Mohammed Sbai – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48708212
You can find the first chapter of this story here.
Every rock is beautiful when it’s still rough and closed and you think
there’s a chance if you break it you’ll find jeweled meat within:
something to crown the waves with,
something to tell her you are married to her though she won’t care.
Every diamond is corrupt, more corrupt
than an ingrown toenail in a senator’s bed-cranny.
You are so fucking critical.
I know people are dying tonight, people more valuable
than me: rare species, burning libraries, collectible hermaphroditic bi-tonal
lobsters. All lives matter? I never said that.
I’ve never had a cat lie to me and claim he loved me
if he meant claw in my arm I got claw in my arm and that’s a language
we all can understand without need for purity.
I’ve never had a sea cucumber wrap my wrist in more ropelike shit
than other wrists due to its size or color.
If someone is dying tonight
with no social security, no complex language and no brain
then and only then will I mourn.
That’s a lie: I’m walking paralytic in the dark
praying for one of those other shadows to be unhalved
to come and plug my orifices so no more salt water can come out
by default: I would fill him with my ocean
and he would make it matter with stars sparkled
against no-corners pelagic.
A jellyfish can live a million lives
and never miss one
as it dissolves
into blue
nothing
With our precious heads, our necks collared by jewels and crucifixions
our heavy brains inside our heavy skulls, our heavy coats
we forget we are mostly water, as is the planet
beyond our tiny cities
beyond edges
into forever,
untouches, unasserts itself, the blue
ocean
You should write about this, the teacher in my head scritches pencilly on my inner eardrums. You should download every face and glance, every word and what it really meant, every unknown you meet and spreadsheet them and massacre a blank page make it bleed with named names with impossible truths
You must take notes: Lexie melted into a hospital bed
and calmly asked the nurse for assistance
Giancarlo was beaten into the Utah sands
from whence reached up a shattered hand, searching
for a father in the clouds
as they rained toxic dust onto his rusting
Jillian says forgiveness is the greatest gift but
Beatrice says, to fuck and back with that shit
white as cobwebs, cotton candy, black as night outlining
a figure left behind.
Humans: we are all so burdened by the pain
that we inflict upon ourselves
that our taxonomy decrees
but it is our species who invented taxonomy, yes?
We are the most broken things
on an earth being constantly broken
by things larger than we can imagine, by fired rock and the clash of bullets
hurled from Saturn’s wing, by the steps of giants
and the final crack
of their jaws upon the hardened dirt.
We humans are the bearers of the immensest pain
not because the pain came to prey on us
but because we stretched our neural
paths and bumped into walls
and we chose to study them
while building an eternal
ceiling, sealing us in
something out of
nothing
blackscuffedshoes
whatsapagoda?
fireexitonly
window allowing entry
to unknowns who skid or scooter
past in rain-sun, unknowing.
Claustrophobia is
beads-of-breath
cord-in-jugular
the empress drowned in a bath of ugly
why-i-am-inside-a-glass
whileeveryoneelseisjusthappyit’sover
autumn pianos let me breathe, breathe, breathe down
the staircase (descending thirds? Pachelbel inversions?)
unlooking in eyes
pls dn’t look at me
b/c in the jacaranda parade
of applause, the summer trust-lines
between so-many-eyes I am
swept like stew in the storm of a spoon
the-empress-in-the-bath-naked-on-the-Internet-in-suicide
walk the tight-
-rope of my sinews
nothing new
i’m-running-out-of-room
no one sees me
still i’m begging
no one
to not see
me
cr-
-ush-
-ed
btwn
musics
Something raspberry as lips
whispers into the gush
of my being.
Is it still being intellectual
when I swoon into the cloudbank of créole musics, burn my fingers
on the ink of a sigh
of a tenor’s attenuate tremble attaining the top flight of laughter
in the sky, he is pure and weightless because there is no pain
in the self, no fear
I have to dance en pointe on a frying pan between onions and
memories as they caramelize
in the eye that lives on after the glass and retinas
are supplanted
by black dearths window-
silling over cheekbone blush? And how is it
that I can croissant, red goozing out the hole in my head
when the pastry brush was an amputated starfish arm?
And how can I shiver in the sun of perfect
afterday and fear
the end of breath and what
comes
after
a flip of the flat copper heart, an age on the price tag on my being,
being on the other side
of the glass that is unwanted
How can I fear balloons that would tug me into the sky
if sidewalkers below can see under my skirt for a minute
I’ll disappear soon, small as the moon, and never have
to confront them about it. How is it
that my name can be simmered down into a sweet
compote and spooned into the dreams
of my dreams’ drivers?
When is it precisely
(because i know it will be)
that this sweet crutch will crush down the drain and my body
with it
a spiderweb of cracks, a leg of lacks, lost
on the wrong side
of the glass
that is rejection
so very breakable?
And cream, there was whipped cream,
as well.
Image credits in order of appearance:
“This dessert buffet should be illegal.” By John Biehler from Port Coquitlam, Canada [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
“Cover image on the Music box by Polyphon-Musikwerke in Leipzig, Germany.” By Harke – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45714300
in an eggshell bedroom painted unicorn blue
in the carnival cave beneath the bed
he chopped off each branch as it grew towards browning
into a grown-up man. his Mother
called him for supper, but she dared not brave
the scarves of gibbon-songs streaming from corners
of his ceiling, nor the forest
of pinching crab-soldiers
strewing his floor.
there in his eggshell
bedroom painted unicorn blue
he axed off the flesh and bone as it sprung
as it tried again, once or twice, from his young
shoulders: the forested legs, the ganglion arms
the humiliating protrusion – a useless, fireless torch
between the thighs – no mercy, he sliced that off too
and when his scream in soaring over
the crevasse of
impossible
pain
dipped, its feathers craving a taste of the low waters
that whisper between walls of baritone-tenor,
then
the knife went to his mouth
the vocal cords gutted as if preparing to fry a trout –
and when
they placed the coffin six feet underground
before the dirt followed you could see
his lips blood-sparkled, upturned in a near
smile-
which should have been
impossible.
Image credits in order of appearance:
Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=971071
J. M. Barrie (as Hook) and Michael [Davies] (as Peter Pan) on the lawn at Rustington, August 1906. By Unknown, presumably Sylvia Llewelyn Davies – http://www.jmbarrie.co.uk, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2193622
They’re all coursing in a sort of
spider-broken river, sometimes bumping head-
-on then shake and move on,
eyes either evolved off the pointed face or hidden
under the brim of the cargo they carry.
Seeds for the winter? Sugar for the queen?
If you look closer, and if your eyes have not evolved
against your seeing, you will notice
Each insect gingers a different freight:
One onyx berry, leaking nightshade-sultry tears
illuminates the path of one as he goes
Another bears a leaf like a great green sail,
coveting the secret pearl
of empty opaline
dew that rests between its veined waves
A third lugs a broken heart – a part
of a cherry, the seed
Absent. The other half
Someone else’s baggage somewhere in the crowd,
nibbled and colonized by sugar-sucking
acquaintances, it is probably no longer recognizable
Except to itself, and even then –
If you look closer, really really listen you can see
This writhing stream of ants incidenting up and down
this sidelong stump of ancient tree
Each carries his deepest secret, each keeps her juice-aching heart
Safe from penetration yet plain to the eye
that has evolved to look closer.
If you bump into some body and some ruby prostrates
naked on the ground, don’t be alarmed
wait to stomp
until you have listened.
For broken twigs can twine around newfound limbs
You might hear an echo
Or discover a drop
Of dew, a pearl
Within your own closed doors
You thought you walked this empty street alone, didn’t you?
Image credit: By Thomas Quaritsch – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=554566
When you are born with a silver spoon, your little fingers are already looking
to catch tuberculosis
from some harsh edge which the spoon-factory might have overlooked.
You burst out of childhood’s balloon and you sort of papillon,
a wobbling sky-trill, until you find some wind to spurn you in one direction
or both –
You let the storm in your brain pound you
against the sweetest-sapped of steadfast trees, you sweeten the blood
that rolls down your diary margins with a splash of sugar-tears
against your pillow. You weep until prince charming
never shows up
on his high horse to lift you out of your illness.
Sick of it, one day you scrub it off
with cheap makeup remover and start clean. You fly away to search for
some never-ending nectar joint
in the hopes of forgetting
the troubles you’ve already hopelessly forgotten.
Revoked in return for a sturdy stride, the mature privilege to breathe and hide
even from yourself.
With endings, one size fits most.
You might take root in some mammoth-sucking
mud or in the clay earth kissed by politicians’ running shoes
When you despair on relocating your despair, you are, sadly, healed
So you pass your past illness on
to your best friend – all you can do now – then
Break it off with her
And thus the cycle is perpetuated. The scripture of brokenness, thus revealed.
Everyone thinks: I am different. I can rewrite my future, then,
with me, the system will be broken
but your heart knows
it already is.
Image credits in order of appearance:
By Ildar Sagdejev (Specious) – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4381329
By Thomas Bresson – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25184841
A Seaworthy Frigate 