The wise woman bends a broken knee
Her ewer goes deep into the clear river
A shiver
From the cold fingertips to the snow of her hair
All tangled with voices and
  swallowed bits of oceans and
   muffled out cracks and
    internal bruising and
     the light that they give off
      the dreadlocks she will never part with.

She approaches the crowd that watches
Someone bathe in the cold waters.
She fills which cups are still upright
Nods at a ‘thank you’ or two
And wipes a tired eye
  as she fills her own with wine.
   Water’s to drink
     And youth is to behold.

A group burial ground
Is much like *******:
A pile of bodies stripped of dignity
But not being in a state to care.

There’s the angel nodding at me
Just as I was thinking about independence
Or commitment?
Well aren’t they the same thing, anyway.
The typewriter unnumbs my brain
Makes it lose its soft malleability
That Ancient Greeks so despise to this day.
I can be good in that frozen brain
But I can’t be well. She looks
At me and smiles like a cat
And I get scared of the feathers of her words.
The sand the figurine
The cancer
All a grainy, grinding noise in my hand
She sees through me
And I am left with no one I can hide from
To ease my separation anxiety.

The keep where I keep my own mind’s words
Is looking at me, rejected.
That is because the angel’s words I need so much, that whe-
-n they finally arrive I’ve got to grab them before they get the chance to pull and drag me.

Drag me. Type type type. And then you wonder why I started getting migraines.Thirty soon and every decade it gets deeper. The disturbance. The divergence. The ******* through the elements of the dullest childhood in the whole **** world.

The end of some kind of sense.

Waiting
-I seem to be doing lots of that-
I’d swear there’s smoke trapped under my lungs
My gut’s caught on fire
Consumes me
Red hot coal,
Two bags of air ousted
By toxic smoke building up,
Fragrant like tobacco
Wild like wood.
I often dream about
Driving a knife into my stomach
Just a pop and an excess of smoke
filling the room
No blood at all.
I’ll open the windows
Turn off the fire alarm.
I’ll leave the wound open.
A gaping, smoking wound is more dignified
Than screaming in the flames.

Poetry, as I perceive it,
And no offence, alright;
Is not this:
Writing as I would speak to someone
Only stacking the lines one on top of the other
Instead of next to it, in a paragraph.
If I were to put my strophes in a straight line, and end up with a Facebook status,
No matter how great,
This is not my poetry.

What poetry is
The lick of moonlight that betrays the mouse’s tail
The crickets over the careful cat’s march
And a microscopic last breath between a crush of the fangs.

The panicked heart
Is pushing the shoulder,
  pushing the elbow,
     pushing that hinged down wrist,

In hopes that one swift motion
Will untangle the word ribbon
In neat short lines on yellowed paper

Those wings that scratch and claw inside the little cage
Bleeding the walls
Will break free to fly and feed.

But Monday mornings I take great care
The wrist is nailed tightly on the cross
All the pistons are jammed in just the right way
Come Friday night the ribbon won’t untangle
And the bird will give up, sometime.

I was her tiny little lover
And she wouldn't let anyone else come close

Not that you were ever tempted

Now I'm happy
You're there, just around the corner
And I've got my lovers
And that's the second best thing.