Little girl, stop shaking
Your wounds are not the kind that will heal in time
You have predator in your blood
And abuser in your skin
Your antibodies cannot save you
When your body wages war against itself
The ****, it will not clot the way it is supposed to
As you grow older, the features come in
Your eyes look more and more
Like your Pop Pop's
Your face looks more and more
Like your father's
Your mouth tastes more and more
Like your older cousin's
After all, you would know
What his skin tastes like
You try to scrub it off
Causing the wound to reopen
Scrape the scab away
But you, beautiful girl
You are not your bloodline, your birthright
You are not destined to be angry and cold
Your sentence is not the dungeon
Is not death
Intelligent woman
You will hold in your hand the power of ten thousand men
You will wear the teeth from your ******* relative
Like pearls around your neck
You will paint your nails with the blood of your toxic family
Your past will not mute your scream
Your childhood will not filter your radiance
You, warrior, will rise up to be queen.

I just sang a song
because of you. I cringed
a little,
cradled a broken part of me
in these arms where love
used to be nested.
I shed a tear
for you. I mend a little heartache.

The process of creation
Instant in a flash of light through the spoken Word
Or fertilized in the womb
Or sprouting underground
Maybe born of the heavens long ago
Before earth and sun
Born of the stars, exploding into the universe
Or within the volcano
Deep inside the earths core
Born of the waters, the streams and waterfalls
The rich colors of the untouched forest
Initiated in the sounds of night, birdcalls and the occasional howl in moonlight
Sons and daughters of thousand year old oak trees, acorns falling, scattering
Conceived in the deepest and darkest oceans, unaware and uncaring about the mythical surface world
Carried upon by the wind accross the world, currents and pathways charted by the birds and the monarchs
Dandelion child

A man once told me
He felt as if he had created me
From scratch, a muse
Conceived by invention,
Rather than the precision of my blood
or the tiny cosmos within my marrow;
He was mine,
But did not belong to me

The path of sirendom
Is paved with gilded lilies,
Soft flesh, and quiet angles
If you let them,
You can drift on through
Your feet hovering three inches above the soil
Saturated ripe with fertility,
Easier than breathing

But there will always be
At least nine of you
In every patch of every field
Preserved in light
The quicksand of reason, immortalized
Delicate whispers convince you
What a lovely work of artistry
An inspiration, the birth of genius
But you are only the vessel
Left empty

But I have never
Belonged to anyone,
No square of grass
Lush enough to rest my head
on a practiced lap
I was not an island to discover;
Sprung from beneath the Mariana,
I was built from the deep place
No pedestal to extend
The unhinge of my reaching arms

I took the long way up
Scratching through earth, long dead
No fruit, carefully arranged
No marble, heavily lidded
The flowers collapsed,
Like your idea of Woman,
To linseed stain
A smashed sunrise
It wasn’t god, but myself
That I met on the other side

life is a straight line, they say
no bouncing springs of chaos
and impossible conversations
which tear the mass of intermingled blue stitches
apart

no destination
a train with tracks straight through
the barren emptiness of
Antartica
not the hum of your insides
that
what’s that word again
soul

nor the pure anticipation
the twisted gut
of never quite knowing
it is not the fear of reaching
and extending
and finding
nothing

life is a dash
between symbols
it is an inch
representing all of you
which makes
you,
You

strangers will observe
casually
they will never envision your
silhouette against the glare of a Sunday
sun
your breath, coffee-ripe
or the morning news sitting at her
empty space
at the kitchen table

maybe,
if you're lucky
you'll get a brief pause,
a second of consideration,
two-and-a-half-centimeters worth,
before they move on

my childhood was removed from me
inside of a blue mustang
and what remained after that
I tried to barter off the highest bidder
but I grew,
not up,
but forward
further away
slowly releasing
hands of defiance
fists chock full of hopeless words
like anger, the flavor that aches the bone,
the cold kind,
more barren than the green of Christmas lights
glimmering off the icy veneer of a white picket fence
overeager, in the apathy of theatrics,
to strip off the remainder
because the empty feeling that followed
might one day
make a decent poem

windmills grind
a breeze into a wisp
as wrung dust, floats
in dust moats of cumulus rust
like the  fatigue of a sixth sense
in a world of five comas
and a hunch.

a world of long shadows
with a brief harrumph
of brass

from a blood-yellow sun
and a bruised
lamp.

the catheter of a ******
and a pearl's
edge.

apple on my head
arrow in my mouth...

and a goose egg.

this dawn has no sun... it has an eye.
it is nothing but dreams and a risen Christ.
the long beyond behind me, is the avalanche... the tremors
in a golden misery. a blunder on glass stilts.
this dawn has to step outside -
to have a mirror. it has to bake the clay
that made a man.... into
an iron wisp.

it has to occur to God
to have your entropy be a deep kiss.
to obliterate the schedule of planned events
and substitute the void for the real fear.
is has to occur to Us
to have no reality other than this.
to celebrate the anvil of cartoon antics
and most refuse the void
with the mind clear.

' bout a train don't come.... been always here....
sinking into the ravines of your cabbages
and sulking in the mulch
of some soiling ambrosia.
a cure for Krackens  in your refractory-
stammering the diphthong  
of an adjacent
howl.

but not quite an amethyst
at rush hour  

but a diamond in
the hush.

a black diamond
within us.