mud at a wall
and then ignore it
balance a leaf on water
watch it grow ****

take a dump called a stick on a stick
that's my poem to the LA sewer system
noone can see it

Cars collide and I wake up,
Dressed in someone else’s skin,
I don’t know which way I was going,
I couldn’t tell you where I’d been.

We talked that night in broken pieces,
Or was it all inside my head?
You asked me if I was sorry,
And I asked if I was dead.

I walked along the empty hallways,
Lost in poison, fog and mist,
Desperate to find some meaning,
In memories that don’t exist.

You said I’d been trying so hard lately,
But sometimes this is how things go,
My mom told me to keep my guard up,
My dad called to say he told me so.

Now all alone in some apartment,
And still surrounded all the same,
Trying to find my sense of balance,
Or lose everything that I became.

She walks by wearing blue stockings in the rainy afternoon
Her youth is like a tender dream
She wears a pair of adolescent stars from her ears
All her boyfriends, when they speak, sound like cool rivers
In the sky-blue of the day
She smiles
The way lilac bushes crush petals into joy

Now three o’clock in the precious afternoon of torn cotton strands
School lets out a riot of sapphire glitter
Some girl stripes her vanilla ice cream cone with azure breathing
On seeing this she faints like a toss of sprinkles

She’s woken by blue candy kisses
Like a cluster of stars falling
From a boy
Upon her face
The constellation of a crush

As she gets up
A thousand blue ponies slide from her rain-water hair
Before disappearing in the distance
Young children mount them tackling flowers

She kisses him
And lets slide the sky-blue of the day from her lips
His arms fall like water around her body
As she turns, racing to make friends with
The twinkling blue of a butterfly’s eye

To ignore the desert winds,
the beckoning of glittering gourges
and dreams of melting rocks
turning to storms of steam.

The doctor worries for me,
my lungs are filled with sand castles

This is
the last 3 a.m
of 2015*

2014 - 3 a.m
laying in bed
next to a man
who claimed to love me
and lied.

2013 - 3 a.m
laying my head
on the cold tombstone
of the man
who was supposed to be there
all my life.

2010 - 3 a.m
laying my mom's head
onto the pillow
because she was too drunk
to do it herself
and daddy didn't come home.

2009 - 3 a.m
finding a bullet
full of lead
and wondering if that
was the reason
the yelling had stopped
in my parent's bedroom.

2007 - 3 a.m
sleeping well fed
in a warm and comfy bed
as my parents kissed in the living room
and they were happy
and so was I.

2015 - 3 a.m
downing the meds
the doctor prescribed
to numb away the pain
- but, surprise
it didn't succeed
cause just as well
I can't stand to breathe.

*This is
the last
3 a.m

What haunts the hollow     hallway of dark hours
fails again. A friend,     not fear, grips me.

my lungs,
infatuated by the smell of smoke,
all I know,
is my walls,
are going up in flames.


c.f.

Other times I kiss the northern winds, let them dance with my curls while caressing my curves. Drifting me away, a feather in a gentle tornado towards vague, dreamlike, foreign lands.  

& in other occasions I belong wholeheartedly to the moon. She's my favorite intimate lover, the most passionate of all. Her dark mysteries keep me addicted to the light she steals from the sun.

Then when the sun takes me, lights me up, burns me, sweet sweet fire, as he embraces me. A Phoenix coming back to him over & over. Naked scars & whispers of warm love, poems that tell me he shines for me, keeps the soil under my feet warm for me, tells me he lives for me.

All the while the ocean waits patiently for me to yet again submerge myself in the chaos of its storms. Maybe all the salt water in the oceans are just tears that've been shed waiting for lovers to embrace its madness. Oceans long for fearless lovers, lovers that fear not the wrath of its solitude and forbidden passion.

& once in a blue moon I sit in silence & succumb to the unknown. Most of the time words fail me and I can't describe the way I unwrap myself in the darkness. Dark matter, the ether, my intangible lovers living in the same place. There's an art to losing yourself in places like these.

Sometimes I belong to you, but for the most part, I belong to myself.

Startled by the crack they launch,
spread wings and soar
through rising summer breeze

Perfect black symmetry
wingtip to wingtip
recalling the first flight of courtship
seven years before

Circle the ripening corn
living the wind
feeling the sky
tilt, turn, circle again

Black eyes cast below
they see a figure,
watching, waiting
rifle lowered, patient

And she begins to falter
to mistrust the surging sky
her element, suddenly unmastered

He is oblivious, effortless.
Spiralling, alighting,
he turns his curious gaze
to seek his mate

And finds only empty blue
where she should be.