Mother dearest, please stop crying.
Your eyes are red and waterlogged
like a heart in a jar
of seawater. Those clumsy eyes
dropped their intentions again,
dropped their bombs without thinking
about the impending nuclear winter.
The say grave flowers are watered
by tears, by grief and love (and good
fertilizer). Considering your shit-filled
flash of teeth, you should know.
Your heart is a graveyard, flowering
with thorny roses and black
berries, locust trees and crab apples.
If you shook any harder, you
would jostle yourself apart. Rusted
bolts twist free of their joints
rolled too tight. When you collapse,
you'll say it's my fault again. But,
how can I shatter your bones when
you never let me stand for myself?
Jul 9, 2021
Jul 9, 2021 at 9:54 AM UTC
This howling monster will eat
me alive; that is no question.
My bones will grind between
its teeth, white powder in a void
black maw. I can feel its breath
on my neck, wet and hungry
like a teenage boy in the dark.
This howling monster will not be
satisfied with surrender; only sunder
will fill its canyon belly. It can
rest no moment until it is fed.
Those eyes are too full of souls.
This howling, monster will cannot go
quietly,
growling I EXIST
until its throat burns.
Feb 12, 2019
Feb 12, 2019 at 6:45 PM UTC
The milk man died last week. I didn't
know him well, just enough to know his favorite
chew and how much he hated Fritos.
I knew his lover and her worn-out
windbreaker, her frizzled hair as gold
as her Marlboros. I sold her a pack of silvers
once and she nearly snapped my neck.
They take (took?) their tobacco dead
seriously. She hasn't come back
to work yet, though her five allotted
days of grief are over. The empty
milk crates just aren't empty anymore.
May 31, 2016
May 31, 2016 at 9:44 PM UTC
I am two:thirty heat lightning.
Inconquerable flashes of my elemental fury
leap from grumbling cloud to dewy earth,
dancing naked under a smoky moon. I am a burning
offering to the sodium lamp sentinels looming golden
over black tar; there is tobacco sown
into my every pore. I am the underestimated
weight of fog rolling off the meadow's swollen calf
river, the heavy lowing of labor pains, the thick
croak of the year's last bullfrog. I am the first
crunch of dying light, the gray tinge of wood smoke
on chlorophyll burned red. The sting of my icy breath
creeps into sleeping eyelids, through every crack
in waterlogged armor. My frosty four o'clock
is no place for strangers. The frozen silence
does not know my strength. I will bend the world
with feet of glass. In time, the weight will break
my own limbs, expose their green, soft meat.
I am the green shoots of daffodils sharp,
triumphantly cleaving the rested dirt. There is yellow
warpaint across my forehead, a crown of blistering elegance
glazed by wings of stubborn three:thirty ice. I am resilient
and eternal—perennial—blooming to a cold, white moon.
May 12, 2016
May 12, 2016 at 12:13 PM UTC
I never liked beets; too soft, too red
too round, too bulbous,
too much like a bloodmoon.
I cannot live in these shaman
sleeves. They're heavy as rocks beneath
the waves, soaked to the bone
by a salty, sunless sea. Too much
blue is bleeding into billowing wool, red as beet.
There's never an anglerfish
when you need a light, no beetbulb of flame
for that last rush of smoke before the black
undercurrent squeezes the air too thin.
May 5, 2016
May 5, 2016 at 4:37 AM UTC
My hair smells like you--
Old Spice and popcorn smudged
lips. Hold the butter.
I want grease dripping
from your palms, a salt
sea of foamy yellow. We
reject kernels bob along
unpopped, burnt, steamed to bursting
refused the right to blossom.
The neighbors have a noisy truck
spitting exhaust onto my rear
window. Gray. Hazy. Ugly
as the reason you're covered
in glitter. You taste like gin
and ginger, orange tea and cold
chai latte, notebook paper
in a dark coffeehouse.
The elves are holding hands
but your hand is on my *** and
this movie's boring--wood
pannelling in a split-level apartment
above your father's bathtub.
Your mother wouldn't like me.
She's a ***** anyway. You tell me
she can't cook because she can't
subtract. But you're no good
at math either, lovely boy. Double
your handprints on my ***
Curl your toes to the three-four swirl of my hips.
Dec 17, 2014
Dec 17, 2014 at 4:53 PM UTC
I am exhausted
with the weight of my
bones, with the weight
of your bones
in my arms.
You fell to your knees
in the dust of the road,
gathered dirt in tiny whirlwinds
around you and begged
to know why your robes were filthy.
The brightest streaks you had left
were where our tears dripped
into the handsewn folds.
You cried for your blindness,
I cried for your tears.
We sobbed to the moon—
to Diana, Elatha—
the only gods we atheists could stand;
their crescents smiled on us.
You covered your head while I
danced in the tear-stained
dirt, sandals tickling the edge
of the high road, sending
little rocks over and down
onto the sandy heads of camels
below. I laughed while
you wailed and when I knelt
to pull your hands into mine
you shrank
into your whirlwinds of mud,
crying, “Wicked!”,
hissing, “Harlot!”
Sep 16, 2014
Sep 16, 2014 at 11:40 PM UTC
You are hollow and sharp--
not exactly hollow, but full of holes
where your guts should be.
You are rust and cruelty,
all ancient bloodstains and missing
hunks of steel.
You are afraid of your angles
the wicked serrations of your tongue.
You lick your own wounds
to taste blood wondering if
it really tastes like you at all
or more like the leftover bits of flesh
still stuck between your crooked teeth.
But you don't frighten me, Bonesaw;
your razor blade arms are nothing but home.
Sep 4, 2014
Sep 4, 2014 at 12:01 AM UTC
Photograph by Michael J. Sullivan, 2010
Listen up, you little ***** and let me
teach you a thing or two. See this skull here,
poised and serene? How do you know it’s poised?
It’s dead, for Christ’s sake! The only thing it’s
poised on in the edge of this stump—“ye olde
dead tree” holding “ye old dead head.” He had
a name, you know—Yorick—I didn’t make
that up. I knew him; good friend of my mum’s.
This sword here could have been what ran him through,
you know. Coulda got him straight through the gut,
and you’re all sittin’ here admiring its
craftwork. It’s the fancy hilt, isn’t it,
the bright metal chasing its own tail in
golden loops. Warm yellow over cold steel,
that’s what you people like—spectacle, shine—
not dust and history, like Yorick over here.
You don’t mind if I smoke, do you? Only
thing these candles are good for, really. They’re
tallow—stinking, smoky fat made by Jen
on her weekends off. She doesn’t know much
about candles, but her Wench’s Special
Draft is the best mead made for this dung heap.
Anyway, I gotta piss. Leave Yorick
with your tips, and remember: what glitters
here isn’t gold, just paint over old age.
Jun 10, 2014
Jun 10, 2014 at 7:29 PM UTC
I have never needed you
more than right now, in this very
moment, covered in blood and ticks
and grass. You must hear me thumping,
beating my need on dead stumps that smell
of your **** and gunpowder.
I need you. I have always needed you.
Your teeth slit my fur and I need you
still. Your mouth is my everything,
the warm safe of heat dragged straight
from your lungs with a rattling wheeze.
May 8, 2014
May 8, 2014 at 11:47 PM UTC