I used to want tobacco to breed on my little purple lungs
but I’m just fading under the sun without
wanting much at all.
Touch my fingertips and turn to water on the sidewalk
Little puddle people fading under the sun not wanting much
but a little moon too.
Where were grey windows when
You came around? I took your eyelashes
and gave them to the bees because we’re all dying anyway
So play, tip toe around the clock
I’ve got three keys and one lock and the honeys
all gone To sinkholes on Chinatown
Three times I’ve slowly licked the ash left on marble
well I regret telling you more than doing it.
But I don’t think about it too long.
Apr 21, 2016
Apr 21, 2016 at 9:19 PM UTC
Yellow suits. He wore yellow suits. To work, to mourn. He wore yellow suits and his teeth were yellow too. But only if you could see them. Those silly dancing teeth poking through his tiny lips. He licked him, curling his lip, and I watched the wrinkles come and go like passing waves on his yellow face.
He plucked five dandelions from the garden I found him in from their plastic root that sat next to a yellow balloon. I was on a sidewalk first. Then stepped in. I saw his yellow suit. His yellow suits. Yellow suits.
I stepped in through the black ribcage that held this garden away from Irving Park rd. Well it wasn’t much of a park. The stones had names on them. And years on them too. The trees were big and I fell in love with a single ant. I dipped my finger into the maple of the tree and brought it to that man. And his yellow suit. He sat on a stone with the word “Emma Jennings --- 1953-1989”
Well this rock was young. And really didn’t look like much of a rock at all. Mr. Yellow Suits wasn’t looking at that or the dandelions he was stepping on now. He was staring into the green grass. I walked up to his shoulder and smelt his ear who had three stray brown hairs and placed that juicy ant on his shoulder.
“Yellow suits” he said, pushing the cuff up on his left arm. I smiled and placed my fingernail at the bottom of his prickly grey chin. I pushed his face up, “of all the yellow things to love”
Apr 14, 2016
Apr 14, 2016 at 8:13 PM UTC
Every toe, like a daisy picked and planted,
their roots wrapped around my bones
and licked tips in translucent pink.
I place each sole on slightly dusted
wood board floor before hearing
the window pane being beaten
by hail, my vanilla skin riddles itself
in jealousy. I felt lonely
like only the rain wanted me
and not even the piano on the stereo
could save me. Where was God now
but rendering herself on the slightly
more stable existence of window
panes of dark brick Chicago complexes?
I was supposed to ****
her a long time ago. Not because
she never loved my toes but because
she did, and she loved them better than I did.
I remember when I’d lose my fingertips
in God's chest bone and they'd disappear
like a song I loved but was never the same every time
I heard it. Kind of like classical music.
I never remember the composer's name
but I knew that tune.
I pulled the green string holding
my dress together and let it fall. When I die,
don’t let them keep my clothes. I was somewhere
between letting that dress dangle by the single nail
I forgot to pull from the window sill, hang myself there,
still living so much anyway or sailing my big toes across
the linings of the wood, spun on them, let my threads pull apart
against the wet sill; dripping half opened window.
But then, to both these thoughts I stopped.
I just stood there naked.
Until the sun came over my neighbor’s roof.
Until the window was dry.
And there was nothing left to be jealous of.
Feb 12, 2016
Feb 12, 2016 at 6:28 PM UTC
I wanna fall in love with someone who plays
the blues like floss between his toes
baked under the sun, steps away from a lake
we called a sea anyway. We sat
their four days, the sand packed under
our breathing vertebrate
the sun never set; only dripped, dipped
its golden fingertips into pleased, green ripples.
He'd watch with me, his rolled up jeans,
pressed pink cheeks blowing against
that harmonica, fingers white, pressed.
I rest on my hands on wet sand, tiny grains
of sunny diamonds. I sang out
to the redheaded halcyon --
to his slender beak:
pierce my gentle heart!
Jan 28, 2016
Jan 28, 2016 at 1:18 AM UTC
her bare uncold body stood on red ice but not breaking
Europa's gentle surface; delicate patchwork of Angelite Rose.
She was covered in butterflies who crawled and kissed her,
******* gently on her paper skin dressing her; peach-fuzzed legs
tiptoed across, antennae exploring her belly and her neck as if
she was a blessing from Them -- Them, and the Moon Bugs,
and The Cosmos, and the stretched sunset wings on the veins
of Pieridae who tickled the behind her kneecaps, fluttered and boasted
to Their Moon, Thirsty Europa, about Her. She was a house never sought
but found between the fragile glass mountains, who, spitefully, were unmoved
by Jupiter's glow in the horizon -- the sky was half red. She laughed
at how silly it all seemed. "Do you hear me?" said Morpho swimming
to her eardrum moving from the gentle hairs of her collarbone
like scarce grass. Morpho's electric blue wings that made Lo jealous
and the red ice crave more of galaxy insects. His slender, tender body
as slim as the legs he pressed into the curled hairs around her ear, "Or am I silly
like unmoved mountains or the air you used to be able to breathe?"
Nov 11, 2015
Nov 11, 2015 at 11:43 PM UTC
I heard un-hallow crickets
play mandolin in
small city grass strips
far from rubber-asphalt
grips of cars passing
in distance.
Their moon-muscle
remembered
to move silence
somewhere else,
alone and terrifying,
twisting itself
in burning sun towers or
...something like that.
Screaming, scraping
wings of little
creakers; are they
also scared?
Does he beat his wings ******
until the stringy veins
of his back snap
and ******* under
the weight of Sun Towers?
Would blades of grass ******
his open wound, reduced to
whispering
woes into his wake
about his wonder?
My solitude requires nightlights
and their temporal choir.
Nov 6, 2015
Nov 6, 2015 at 12:35 AM UTC
I was going South, walking on beige lake-wall
immensely focused on each pattern and grain
of every single rock at Belmont harbor. My body
wanted to scream out of it's skin how deeply
I fell in love with their lives, endlessly content
with being beaten by Lake Michigan. I counted
each wave, each blow as they slammed against
the boulders screaming Remember Me! before
returning back into themselves.
I was walking North. On the white smooth gravel
heading home. I had a moment in my own head
about how crazy it might seem to Strangers
if I told them the rocks had introduced themselves
to me and given me their names. A man walked
his bike on those same rocks, an affair I didn't mind.
"I was just seeing if I had the courage
to ride my bike up here" he said to me. He must've
seen me smile, and with that thought, I bloomed;
"Oh please do." How silly we both were
to feel ashamed of our love for boulders.
Oct 20, 2015
Oct 20, 2015 at 11:26 PM UTC
into the elbows
of bamboo shoots,
slithering up them. I reach
fourteen purple spotted, green orchids
-- one reached her pink purse to me
and kissed me. I peeled at her specs
like gumdrops on my tongue and tasted
like laughing amythesyst. Laughing like toddlers
do. "And how do toddlers laugh?"
like they know they are dying.
"I didn't know rocks could laugh,"
she said. *Well they do. And praise them.
They are dying longer than us.*
The orchid gasped, her golden tongue,
pink tipped dipped into the slippery mud
below us: loose cement. She buried her tongue
and dropped, from her nest, two pearl seeds
embedded into the soil imprinted with my feet --
*are my feet ***** "I think I might die too."
What a shame -- She outstretched her petals
they dried, brown, odorless, deceased
whispering this and sweet nothings to me.
She cradled and cuddled me
to her dust. What a shame
she only thought
and never knew.
Oct 20, 2015
Oct 20, 2015 at 11:12 PM UTC
People are no longer like swatted fruit flies
begging for apple seeds, and remind me
more of leaves riddling the lake
casting shadows on fish faces.
“You are too young to be afraid of death”
but I have already felt the wrinkle.
I never felt wrong but maybe
I had stepped in-between
the crossfire of oil and water
like daytime moon
who always shows
her face too soon.
Don’t let them keep my clothes.
Oct 18, 2015
Oct 18, 2015 at 6:52 PM UTC