Dandy

Dandy Dec 2013

I’ve filled all of the balloons
with cigarette smoke instead of helium,
just like you asked,
and when the children come crawling,
peeling themselves from pavement,
we’ll take needle-points to latex
reshape their tracheas into factories
Soon our home will brim with smoke rings,
I'll place a finger to them
only to ruin the perfection produced by small lips

Thumbs are to erasers as tears are to pencils
I swear to you I try to keep within the stencil
but saltwater weeping, shallow breath, and tobacco smoke
don’t seem to stay within the lines as well as I’d hoped
If I had another way I’d draw terrible pictures,
stick them to the fridge and insist “mom, take it with ya”

I’ve been ripping out dictionary pages and
nailing them to various foreheads,
yowling, “we need knowledge, we need verbal expression!”
Though, I don’t believe I’ve made much progression
because a woman turned to me today with a
business suit on her back and a chewed up heart at her feet
She fastened a note to the top of her skull that read:
“ignorance is bliss” then she waited for a car to bind her to the street

DDD *(3/14/2013)

Dandy Dec 2013

A Castle Built From the Corpses of Kingdoms' Past

A hand around a cold, dead, arm
waning fragile and thin
Impressions of fingers on flesh,
twisted, crooked, bent
Across railroad tracks this sack is
dragged, heaved, yanked-

Like saddlebags;
you walk with dead bodies attached to your hips
You still have yet to question this
I wonder though, if you did,
would you see how much dead is attached to me?

Everyone has a Past
and like Death, it asks to stay
Asks you to hold it's hand along the way
To help it across mountain peaks and swamp trenches
This thing, it even asks to sit with you on park benches
There are a thousand empty wooden pews, but still,
you let it sit, and this,
this is where it will not quit

-Yanking still, across garbage piles and sidewalk cracks,
it even begins to ride piggyback
Again, you don't question
What do you see?
Nothing, darkness, it's numbed you,
blinded you physically
It builds it's palace atop your spine,
and evermore straddles between lines of harm and lie
Breathing in pure battle cry

DDD
*(11/26/2013)

Inspired by the song "Dead Body Moving" by The Devil Makes Three.
Written in Atlanta, Georgia.

Dandy Dec 2013

Ten

10
Out of your bones shall grow a humble garden
Glistening in that delicate pale light that bleeds past the night
Forever to greet the morning

DDD
*(3/20/2013)

Dandy Nov 2013

Do Not Bloom In Basements

Infantile, juvenile, call it what you will
For now I shall believe that my life's been one big spill
and for notches in Your belt, or notches on Your bedpost
I ran along the snowy banks vying for lost hope
My bare feet turned to ice blocks and for me that's my burden
I did it only to inform the other birds that You'll lure in
To forewarn them of the gentle hands that mend broken wings
because in the beginning all is heard while angels sing
and maybe by the end I’ll harbor brand new feathers
but the fingerprints upon them are now far too much to weather
Sat atop an emerald pedestal in a cage spun of gold
A window has become all that's left of old
So fair warning to all whose veins are weak:
don't give away your hopes to just anyone that will let you speak
For what it's worth my wing does seem improved
Although the brokenness was my only form of proof

DDD
*(3/14/2013)

Dandy Nov 2013

This File Cannot Be Deleted Because It Is In Use

You uploaded your data directly under my skin 
Crossed my wires, stored your files 
Maybe I did that, I don’t remember; I was too drunk  
off of the whiskey-sweat that beads up on your flesh 

Tongue acidic and raw
Throat burning 
Bile in my stomach churning 
just like the taste of your name

 and the last two times I’ve placed your hand ‘round my neck
 I clasped my fingers ‘round the neck of a bottle 
Downed it, drowned in it
 Trying to delete your files
 I thought I had heaved them up later that night
 when I laid my head down upon the trash bin
 to admire my spewed and skewed works of art,
 but the next morning I found you,
still in my bottle of a heart

DDD
*(7/8/2013)

Dandy Nov 2013

Forest Fires Veiled in Flesh

He drenched himself in Ronsonol
lighter fluid, the irrepressible sting of it
stained my nasal glands
Flick, flick, flick---it started with the
puddle that filled the spaces beside
his body and it all happened so
rapidly; by the time I could smell the
pungent odor of his sneakers melting, his
jean-covered kneecaps were already ablaze
Something in his body turned the flames
blue-and-so licking him like an ocean's
stay in Hell had leaked through a crack in the pavement

Skin boiled now, blood and epidermis colliding
morphing into globules-bursting and bubbling volcanic masses-God, it's all
so much more horrific than those gore movies I used to
swear I understood -- the face of a male whom I had just seen
now blending into blacks, blues, oranges, and gooey-oozing blobs of tarred scarlet
Blackened muscle slobbering from bone, loose orange furls of hair that existed
mere minutes before were turned into particles of matter sparking
from the gluttonous fire devouring the whole of a human

I wondered what his last thoughts were, I wondered if the inferno
tickled his brain bits as it prowled about the vessel,
I wondered if the flame latched sizzling silk fingers around his
soul -and the colors such an act would produce-

If one is consumed
by all his hate
does it burn up the soul, too?

DDD
*(2/26/2013)

Dandy Nov 2013

*****

I call you an *****;

An ***** player,
Player of hearts and eyes alike
Your fingers pressed to the porcelain
as if the weather depends on
whether or not the pipes pipe up
as if a heart does not beat without
your hands repairing the metal indents

An ***** donor,
Donor of drunken livers and stomachs full of barbed wire fencing
Your lips pointed upward once awakened from dissection
as if you could lacerate a human being from the inside
and go on being
as if keeping them in liquor-filled mason jars
will cradle their fear

An ***** system,
Without a skeleton or bandaids to piece yourself together
You bleed out and ignite a single flame
as if you could burn a house down
with all your leaving
as if you could survive a life spineless
not living but breathing

DDD
*(11/10/2013)