Death lies at a bottomless cliff
Gorging the valley till the earth splits
And marrow spills through black haze chatter
Between bones of ancestral desires

His voice came through to me one night
A wisp that seeped past glass and flesh
To trickle deprecation
And lay my fitful mind to rest

"All you are, all you to blame
No innocence
You gorge yourself to death

All you are, all you to blame
No innocence
Where men exist"

You shouldn't kiss guardrails
Because they have chapped lips
And the jagged edges
Will slice your tongue
Whenever you touch them

You shouldn't kiss guardrails
Because metal on metal
Isn't a forgiving sound
But you already know that
From when you had your first kiss
And you were each wearing braces

You shouldn't kiss telephone poles
Because they are sensitive
And will bite your lip with an electric current
But not in the way that you were hoping

And rear view mirrors aren't for decoration
But you never bothered to look at them
When you were desperately switching lanes
And speedometers aren't for your entertainment
But you always enjoyed watching the needle fluctuate
As though your life depended on it
(It did)

And the high beams of oncoming cars
Aren't Christmas lights in restaurant windows
And crashing through the windshields
Won't bring you any closer
To the apple pie the bakery down the street made
That always reminded you of home

And even though you no longer recognize
The town you grew up in
Or the boy you fell in love with
You shouldn't kiss guardrails
Because they might kiss you back
But not in the way that you were hoping.

Your head on my chest:
thumping hare and cerebral mess,
the electricity and disconnects
drove my rhythms out of breath.
I didn't know that this was you:
a tantalizing wit in lieu
of the neurological faculty to
feel my chest pounding for you.
You are a palpable glitch,
with a brute heart and incisive wit:
my form deflated under it,
I gasp, writhe, and then submit.
My eager sentiment waits for the sound
of your breath catching then and now
and I think that you'll come around
when you grasp at me and moan aloud.
But you are steadily in place,
I, silly hare running a race, breathless face
your backward truth, the callous fate,
the need you can't reciprocate.

Smoke, it is all smoke
in the throat of eternity. . . .
For centuries, the air was full of witches
Whistling up chimneys
on their spiky brooms
cackling or singing more sweetly than Circe,
as they flew over rooftops
blessing & cursing their
kind.

We banished & burned them
making them smoke in the throat of god;
we declared ourselves
"enlightened."
"The dark age of horrors is past,"
said my mother to me in 1952,
seven years after our people went up in smoke,
leaving a few teeth, a pile of bones.

The smoke curls and beckons.
It is blue & lavender
& green as the undersea world.
It will take us, too.

O let us not go sheepishly
clinging to our nakedness.
But let us go like witches ****** heavenward
by the Goddess' powerful breath
& whistling, whistling, whistling
on our beautiful brooms.