Lybia tessellata

So in a roundabout fashion you helped me solidify my career choice:

by opening me up, enchanting me so just enough of the watercolor blood

seeped out of the meat onto your shawl-hungry tongue

then sending me snideless breathless down

broken armor, won’t say what else

doesn’t matter now

but after i knew you were finished with me & through for good

i googled “boxer crabs” & came up with so many tiny pixellated crystal darlings

dotted, fluttered like signatures without names, holding

their little stinging pom-poms like great weapons of tiny warfare — but not arms.

No arms at all. No words, no dropped calls

dropped babies (Portland bridge)

dropped kids (off at school)

Creatures too delicate to hold me up, i’m hoping, can’t let me down.

I want to spend my life taking care of them,

holding them in the palm of my proverbial hand though my real one must avoid

touching for fear of oiling wrongfully their shells

their life wrapped eternally like mine, in armor,

(like mine should have been anyway but that’s bygones now)

their existence bursting volcanic out of the intensity of shells

that are filled, one can presume,

with glass, and glass doesn’t feel.

 

Image: “Lybia tessellata. Taken in Kimbe Bay, New Britain Island, Papua New Guinea.” By Eliot Ferguson – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31234314

my eyes go lowercase when

i want you like i want music in my eyes

i need you like i need needles in my records

pine for you like a forest full of quiet that is not

silence?

Image: By U.S. Forest Service- Pacific Northwest Region – Watson Falls through Trees, Umpqua National Forest.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72713974

Sapiosexual

Her blue eyes rise like the sun behind an orange tree hanging by a thread between ocean sky and dirt.

He writes,

his eyes blackening like books behind cage-glass,

snapping shut

his journal at the slightest twitch of a gaze

on his shoulder.

He writes

about death, sex, mushrooms — all the things the art kids overdraw —

His words are unique in all the world

for being the world’s most insipid words, drunkards amongst his toxic socks

shuttered in drawers.

He writes

music on a computer

changing to lace, bones; to windthroats, freeways; scoring from roadside into northward

air on the wings of a Neapolitan

He writes

music on a computer.

Of all instruments.

He doesn’t know how to use English — he tells me in perfect English —

but it is getting better. He doesn’t speak French,

but he probably does

the way a wave does waftlike around noteheads bracketing skulls

too late to sore soft into the left sky-sand

the way a pen bleeds unbeckoned along a page of margined

desert taking flight between gaping graphite soars

Her blue eyes

rise like the sun behind an orange tree hanging

by a thread

between no and maybe. I know this

because we have nothing at all in common:

at least, more than he’d like to think.

 

Confessions

One of them was a towering redhead who knew

stories and lint-rivered dress shirts and alcoholic

rhinestone-denimed treadmill technicians

who knew as I drew

stems and leaves

on my thighs and knees

I was no flowering angiosperm.

He gave me a copy

of the book for my fingers to petal

with ink, and his smile dewed awake so sweet as if he knew

me.

 

Another of them was American as peanut butter flagging with stars

freckled with experience, he taught me some French

I already knew as he took me past the erstwhile cat

and the frat guitarists, past the low-key-style chat

and their lingua-shackled smiles into his bedroom

that was also a conference room for seventeen

and told me that my presence was jolie,

but not me. I told myself

 

Another of my confessions tripped

in shoes dipped in Easter’s first rainbow yolk

from the egg whose captive cracked too soon. Smaller than the voice of a child

yet taller than myself

and older than my interest in echinoderms

he flirted with me before every other girl in the room

the brighter Rose, the daintier Sky

the end of light apparent

as his need to feed a vegetarian

deep-fried tentacles of a once-free-fathoming

squid. At least I do not have to confess

to any assent to that repellent request.

a clarification

A pin,

I drop

into a wash of doubts

towers crowd the sun, tattle on

the errant cells which trifle off my toe-tips

making the murk less clear.

A pin, meant for pricking or sewing

I can’t drown, so clearly

I couldn’t care less what you think of me

in your great big human brains.

Claustrophobia is

 

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

Compliments

titter from my tongue the way the only pure emerald peacock thrushes from his branches,

regal mind too true and untwisted to insult the dusky quails that promenade on lower ground, hoping to pass under shining plastic feathers

more real than anything the floundering familiars who over-bubble with their constant words could ever conceive to say to you, my congratulations

– no, more echoes, enamored echoes trampolining from my heart’s rainbowed mirror –

mere thoughts, extinguished long before

the long road of my tongue

could open up

to open lips – and – heaven

forbid – speaking them

aloud.

5 Things the Shyest Girl in School Wishes She Felt Like Telling You

1. My quietness is mostly a matter of perspective. You complain that I’m “always quiet,” but it would be more precise to say that I’ve learned not to waste my energy trying to express my thoughts when you’re around. When a tree falls in a forest and all the other trees are blasting pop music in their ears at full volume… you get the idea.
2. Dear cute boy: I am terrified of attractive people. People who seem confident are even more horrific. My ultimate nightmare is someone who seems to have reason to be confident in that they are (inwardly and outwardly) attractive. Therefore I love you more than anyone else ever will and also I am too afraid of you to meet your eyes as we pass. Unusual basis for a relationship, but…
3. You will have to cut through a maze of thorns and try every combination of codes before unlocking the door to my tolerance. This is what the most aggressive and stubborn individuals do, and how I got saddled with the few people who call themselves my “friends.” If you really wanted to win my friendship, you would have already won it, no thorns necessary.
4. Thanks, but no thanks on the charity conversation about my weekend. I actually do have an inner life that burns bright enough to feed my intellect, unlike this dull scripted interaction you’re trying to initiate wherein you play the saintly popular girl and I play the loser who doesn’t even realize you’re only talking to me to be nice. Actually, if I wasn’t so damn nice, I’d just ignore you.
5. Like you, sometimes I worry that I’m worthless, or that I’m not sexy enough, or won’t get the right job and the right house and the right whatever. Like you, I may develop emotional problems or experience psychological isolation because all the silent voices in the averted eyes around me are telling me I’m worthless. What makes me different is that I know I’m worth something inside. It would be sort of nice if other people validated that, but my brain, my words, my music, my talent, my whatever comes from inside, and it’s valuable on my closed market of one. My currency doesn’t translate into your human-ranking, therefore it can’t be melted into a golden calf or fabricated by a color printer. Thanks for listening.

Image credit: By Carl Heinrich Bloch – Statens Museum for Kunst and http://www.kulturarv.dk, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19218035