Mary Mary
quite contrary
Once the girl that never cried
You were Mary Beaton
And pretty Mary Seaton
And simple Mary Hamilton they all saw die.

Mary Mary
so you cry
To see the flames take breast and thigh
But heart takes hold for a thousand souls
Who hear their blasphemy no more.

Mary Mary
take his hands
And put them on your swollen waist
Make him love you
Make him touch you
Feel the phantom babe within.

Mary Mary
haunted face
The chapel so bereft of grace
curse Our Lady for her place
as she quickens see the kick
and your barren womb below.

Mary Mary
echoes call
the ghost of hopes that haunt the hall
Your darkened chamber lonely cast
reluctant lord to break the fast
two bodies strangers
one unchaste.

Mary Mary
sickened lie
the blood between your legs belies
the death that grows within your womb
around you languished hopes are strewn.

Mary Mary
So you die
with painful breath and blinded eye
The ****** takes your place at hand
with fecund fertile ******* she stands
to suckle the nation you could not nurse
for surely, you bore your mother's curse.

From so far away
the fairground music fades
the carney's call echoes.
Were you sure you wanted to pay those pennies
for that stick of horehound candy?
String a song of sixpences together
And **** at them until they turn your mouth blood red
To hide your broken lips.

In the double wide that gapes into the evening
With its yawning broken windows.
The dingy feeling in your eyes
Refuses to fade with the dust
And the touch of sticky plastic stars on your bedroom ceiling
Keeps you company
In the bitter watches of the night

Jesus and John watch your father from the living room wall,
As the last flickers of a camel’s Pentecost flame
Are extinguished on your arm.  
Branded, you lie stained in sin
Your child eyes asking St. Peter
Why the gate is shut.
He breaks bread across the table
With your bones crushed to a fine flour,
Mixed with wine.
This is my body.
This is my blood.

Your broad forehead glistening--
kissed with salt from the sweat
of the sea you've never seen.
The clay is still under your nails
from molding the beaker beside you.
Meadowsweet on your lips
you lay down to die
with the softness illness brings.
Tonderghie copper hair
falls over your knees,
body curled as a new babe's.
Carry with you our songs to the afterlife
from this cold forest
to clearest skies.

The scrape of thought--
like the scrape of skin
on the bare threads of a sheetless mattress.
Limbs, like the first lines of a journal,
******, new,
waiting for the scars and the stories that follow
as bodies move together,
so slowly as to atrophy.
Memories echo in the silence
light careening through the window,
and words we can't remember teasing our tongues.
I could have asked you so much, and so little.
These are the stories we tell our inner selves,
the half-truths we justify
and the lies we ignore.
The moments we relive until they are frayed
beyond memory,
beyond repair,
the quiet brush of hands
over a tattered blanket.

Come away O human child
to the waters and the wild
with a faerie hand in hand
for the world's more full of weeping
than you can understand.

Bridget,
Your pretty face,
was all they found in the peat
with the hoarfrost over your mouth
and your burnt skin curled in ribbons.
This, and your black stockings
he couldn't bear to remove.

Bridget,
Did you see the wildness in his eyes
that night he brought the priest
for last rites?
Did his hands shake
as he mixed the herbs with *****
and threw them in your face,
telling you to come home?

Bridget,
was he jealous of the sixpence in your apron pocket
the pieces of you he could never own
and the independent streak
that ran through your sensuous hair.
The hot iron at your throat
the only jewel he cared to hold there,
the slow smoke rising like a chain
'round your neck.

Bridget,
did you stare at the frightening faerie child,
his changeling wings beating above you
as he called you by his own name.
Did you scold him in the name of his aos si mother
to watch his strange eyes flare
as you choked on the dry bread
he'd jammed down your throat.
You were never his Bridget
you were your own.

Bridget,
You were never the last witch.
We are still hunted
across deserts and into alleys
acid and fists destroy the magic
of our bewitching eyes.
Angry, they reach for the pieces of us they can never own
and burn our hearts on hearths
across continents.
The smoke rising from so many fires,
unnoticed.

I feel so lost without you,
my north star,
my comfort at the end of days.
There may as well be light years between us
and that destroys me.

You're golden in the light of grief
romanticized, I know,
but right now,
don't care.

I botched my reconstruction.
The arches of my cathedrals lie unfinished, burned bone.
You can see strait through my ribs into the living room-- one breast gone.
War is never civil
and its aftermath, never logical.
Reluctant combat of minds and hearts,
my body aches for you,
my conquered heart
reaching blindly for your familiar arms,
to find nothing but air.

The house, when empty,
feels like a moseleum.
Everything is dark.
It is strange, how literally I can feel the heart tear.
Pericardium and myocardium,
ripping with the slow, tough **** of time and waiting,
atrium and ventricle split.
Far away my brain turns in on itself
as I stare at the candy on the road,
left from a Christmas parade,
Defined by the things its left behind,
though they lie unwanted.

My soul has fled to the wilderness
birth pangs of grief beginning,
prepared to deliver a stillborn heart,
As another star falls out of my sky.

It will go dark, I know.
One by one fall, without wishes to bring them back.
I stare at my sister's golden hair
and dread the day when she will be the one lying white,
bloodless
in a hospital bed.
Oh my mother, Oh my father,
are you to fall away, too?

Light. I scream, I need light.
But I will not throw bits of glass at the sky
to pretend I have re-lit the stars.

I have dreamed of you. Branch like arms, solid sapling strength
as you arrange words perfectly on a page. I have so long been frightened of shattering the silence. Silence and I, we are old friends, can it do without me? Dare I bruise it? As the proverb says, are my words beautiful enough to make snowflake-shards when it breaks?
     Words, what are words? I can write them quietly-- silently, here they hold no decibled danger-- shout them, sing them, whisper-- silently.
     I thought my mouth an ugly thing. Sister jealous of quiet depth, woman of few words, tired of the vomited syllables that pour from others, tongues flapping. Do words live or die when spoken? I could not add a note to the melee, my head swims as it is. Voices, so many voices, inside, around, abreast, beside. I cannot help but listen. I listened so long to their siren's songs I forgot how to speak. I have mastered the silent tongue. Fluent in touch, in sigh, in glance, shift, breath. Incompetent translator, I have forgotten the mother tongue, red lips standing locked and lifeless. Does something misfire in my mind, rusty rifle whose trigger cannot be pulled but on dry days? Thoughts have scattered like leaves under my feet. I am bland, I am blank, blanched, useless, dumb.
     Speak, you say. I want to speak. I will sing, I will shout, scream, anything for you. Listen to how much you mean to me. But not just for you. For me. For the heart of hearts that cannot reach the page, the tone even the most emotive of words cannot capture. Yet fear has bound the mouth of my heart shut. So afraid of causing harm. So afraid of pain. Is the fear of suffering really worse than the suffering itself? I am frightened of the first un-eloquent strokes of the tongue.I do not want to blather, chatter, stutter on about pettiness.  I do not want my head to speak when my heart cannot. Tell me, dear heart, tell me, tired heart. Tell me we will learn to speak again.

Night flowers bloomed
in moments to rare for words.
It is morning,
and they have still not folded upon themselves
but turn to face the day
unfurling more beautifully
than before.

It is night. We are sitting on the steps among fallen leaves, looking out into an eerily empty scene. Pale blue light shines on the weathered concrete where a single white car is parked in a forgotten spot. It's strange without people, the bustle, constant hum of voices, engines, the occasional horn.
     It feels more alive to me now. The place in and of itself alive-- as it would have been if man had never existed. If our existence had been lost somewhere up among the few stars that now dare to shine through. Those few (happy few?) who dare to look upon the tragic, transient, mortal beauty of men.
     The familiar symphony of night sounds can be heard in the little line of trees before us. The wind is plucking leaves from branches. They fall brown and lifeless at our feet. I wonder if trees miss their leaves, or if, perhaps, they have accepted the perpetual cycle of loss and renewal mankind has yet to make peace with.  Each year shorter than the last, each day longer than the first. I have always loved the melancholy of autumn, its bittersweet solitude, the leaves as quiet reminders of  mortality-- tiny deaths to foreshadow our own. No, I do not wish for death. I have, but not tonight. Tonight the air is soft and cool, and the air and sky are clear. I am finding peace in the mundane chaos.
     He is next to me, thinking. Solemn, with a tinge of sadness, but for what I'm never sure. He laments the loss of our child-like wonder, and I question if it can be regained. I would like to think so. I think somewhere, inside all of us, our childish hearts remain, molten core of memory, identity, the first, the fairest of us. Who we were before the world beat it out of us.
He has a soft, deep, murmur of a voice. A tiny gap between his two front teeth I notice when he laughs. A lovely laugh that shakes through his willowy, wiry frame. His eyes are kind and thoughtful, yet serious. When he looks at me, it feels as though he is trying to stare right through, and I turn away. For all my wanting to be known, perhaps I am not ready--yet. But parts of my spirit which have long lain dormant are surfacing again, coming towards the light. Timid, they step out, unsure of where they are, what the footing is here. But so far, solid.

I am driving home under the melancholy grey sky that reminds you of the empty spaces in your chest. Sickly yellow street lamps are coming on, one by one, highlighting the potholes and cracks in the road. I can't help but picture what it might have looked like in the 60's. The still all American heartland town, when the rusted buildings were new and shining, when the once grand houses had fresh paint, well manicured yards, un-littered by fake deer and old tires. I remember old news papers from estate sale boxes, pictures of women in smart dresses with cinched waists, sitting prettily in the society section. They are probably dead now. Buried in the cemetery on a hill that overlooks the city, and down onto the tiny matchbox houses now boarded up or falling into disrepair. Still yet it seems maybe it was never new. There was always the dust, the smudge, the ghostly fog on old mirrors. I wonder how it will continue, or if it will at all, perpetually rise and fall, as all things do, or simply fall, the lifeblood of youth trickling out and down the freeway, or soaking into the already saturated ground.
     Hopeless seems so dark a word, but the truth was never pretty, was it? Perhaps, here, is the hardness of truth, in its grit, its blood. The pebbles that stick in your palms and skinned knees. They once said the depressed were the most realistic of us all, that it was the perpetual state of the human mind-- everyone else in optimistic denial. I was inclined to believe them. Our rose colored glasses taint the world cotton-candy pink while E-flat minor and discorded harmonies echo somewhere in the mountains, longing, hard, sad.
     What haunts you? I want to ask the old rail road tracks. Who died here? I say to the gaping cinder block house. Do you remember what laughter sounds like? I know you remember the bark of dogs, the screech of tires, gunshots or fireworks, who can tell. Dust the memories off the way we dusted sawdust and insulation from the boxes in the hoarder's attic-- find them suspended just the way you left them, open the room-- unchanged since the children left. The toys lie on the floor where they fell from small hands. The safest memories are the ones unremembered. The more they are recalled the more corrupted they become till we are painting our own picture all over again, and we are Van Gogh on a rainy night. Is that what happened? You remembered them all too often. You stared at the sun till you were blind and wondered why you could not see the stars. Yes, that must be it. You clutched those slips of laughter so greedily-- recalled them again and again until they faded, till now you hear nothing but the wind, and cough nothing but ashes.

Sometimes I apologize
to silence
for the wrong
notes

Something broke inside me.
glow-stick soul
snapped
one too many times.
There is nothing here
but broken glass
the darkness remains
undefined
un-defied.

I hold nothing against you.
These spines are in my chest
clutched like a sacred heart grenade
with fingers too close to let the blood through.
Driven in desperation
cyclone of nonsense and the neurotic
marred by nothing and marred by all
and the red dash trenches
with no man's land slowly decreasing
but too many futile-over -the-tops
for far away victory.
Fruitless as the wavering charge
one step forward
two hundred back
Stalingrad psychosis.
Shell-shock guilt and the stark reality
of one's own mind and the prisons it builds.
Peace is a forgotten word
not even whispered in dreams.
Freedom drowned in the mud.

Leaving me is how you stayed
tragedy and memory work the same
they spin the lead back into gold
your lips they were my alchemist's stone

But you're still standing in my head
more perfect than the day you left
I blurred the scars and darker days
it all looks perfect from far away

Chorus: I fell in love with a memory
With something that you'll never be
It's funny what the mind can make
and leaving me has made you stay.

All is fair in love and war
Though time is still their only cure
Forgotten tales of a thousand lives
All men live and all men die

You left your heart and ghost behind
and your words burn in my mind
you're probably gone a world away
but leaving me is how you stayed.

Chorus: I fell in love with a memory
With something that you'll never be
It's funny what the mind can make
and leaving me has made you stay.

I want a lover like the evening sun
half shadow half light
wanderer of dappled paths between leaves,
sojourner seeking the reflection
of life in darkened eyes.
He will taste like Pheobus
bright, amber honey tongued,
the golden glow spilling into the deep corners
light has yet to reach within me.
But his arms will fold like Erebus,
the comforting dark
of purple shadows behind lids falling for sleep
the peaceful night, quiet, cloaked
in the solemn strength of dying stars
and the last whisper of northern lights.
Remind me what it is to know
the depth of dark
without leaving the warmth of light.

Adulthood is falsehood.
I remember at the darkest,
hearing a voice other than my mother's,
mantra repeated for knife-depraving comfort,
keeping nails away from face.
I thought it should be the voice
of the woman who held me against her breast
who bore me through blood and near-death.
The voice seemed more woman than my mother.
The deep, solid, earthy voice of iron eyes and earthen hands
rough tenderness of nature,
the comfort of Eve
made woman, never born child.
But I suppose she understood better than we
innocence lost.

My mother has the fragility of spun sugar,
But steel bent will--
I realize there is still the scared child
buried in her heart
and I see the same reflection of me in the mirror.
Buck-toothed, grass haired, round faced, and wide eyed.
I wonder if I will ever feel fully woman.
Or if we're all just scared children.
Powerful and powerless
as the girl building sandcastles
holding dominion
till the tides of time bear them away.

I dreamed I dug a bullet
out of my own thigh.
I asked if I might bleed to death
and they said no
as long as I packed it with happy thoughts
and my mind went blank.
There was no pain, no cringing release,
grim rush to blank reality,
these legs are used to feeling.
I pressed a ***** palm to the ragged edges.
I feel better.

Take this violent heart of mine.
Someone pulled the pin with a kiss
spit shrapnel and blood,
cut your lips without meaning to.
Cough enough smoke, and your eyes water
phosphorus breath.
Born under the rising of a red sun.
Blood spilled this night and every night
between sheets of rain and steel
cold, heavy, stark as my eyes in the morning
when waking to the sirens.
Foxhole of fear and foot-shooter,
What am I good for?
Men may cry peace, peace,
but there is no peace.
Not in this violent heart.

Looking for lost lover's names
in a sea of make-believe.
Name, what is in a name?
Roses and ******* smell the same
no matter what you call them.
Meaning, memory, response,
or the lack thereof.
I was always one to hope
for things already gone.

There is something divine, of light through clouds,
in that cantabile,
the plaintive, golden chords, minor falls,
radiating from the deepest recess of the soul
a tugging lilt of melody.
To think these might be the lowest harmonies of heaven
the simplest of notes in Gabriel's voice
the sweetest, must be so,
It is a wonder
the heart does not break with beauty.

The red scarf looks best on me.
It's the first time I've gone somewhere alone
here, in months.
It's growing bitterly cold,
I understand why the wind
might hate the human race,
having blown us about for the past million odd years
and finding that we rarely end up in the right direction.
He tugs at my hair, and the clouds
as I troop down the sidewalk,
the cat who walked by herself
I think.
Something like an independent streak
that rarely rears its head.
Might as well make the most of it
while I have the courage.

Sing in the greyness, the darkness.
Twine it round your fingers
round the staff lines
you carved into your legs.
Black white and red
what have we anymore?
Dame Misfortune Madam
of whorish time,
who waits for no man.
Which came first?
See who lit the cigarette last,
see, he puts his trousers on
one at a time.
Eternity in a nutshell,
the universe in an eggshell,
and we brewed beer in them
to get rid of the changeling thoughts,
though mother heated the shovel
iron hot, it glowed
black white and red.
Flicker, dance-- does it live?
Do we live?
Even when we can see the end?
Blindfolded fortune, justice,
says no,
twisting ribbons round her fingers
black, white and red.

Her smile stands like a porcelain lock,
lips closed like the red doors
to the Forbidden city.
Those blood-washed memories
will never dry in closed rooms.
Rust grows under her fingernails
smelling of iron and salt,
destroying the magic.
Her mixed drinks, peroxide and pain killers,
sleeping pills
stand on the nightstand,
after her one night stands,
leave the door standing open.
The cat knocked the glass over,
stained the carpet.
She locks the door again,
blotting the stain with her hair,
she chokes on the dust.
Swallows down the myrrh
to make her breath sweet,
wash the blood from her teeth.
The plastic wrap party dress
clings to the bruises,
and she paints it black with old mascara stains
and phone bills,
taping the pieces of herself together
with promises of old lovers.
The door opens
The lips lock,
porcelain smile.

I dreamed he kissed me.
a breath of a kiss,
whispered, that
Vanished into sleep,
up the stairs
and into the attic with the ghosts
I kick at
while they wring their hands.
Mother's voice, another's voice
in memory, or in thought, dream.
Startled, started,
and then gone,
the wisp of a kiss
still on my lips.

Water bearer*
It is always borne.
Never passing under the bridge
where it's supposed to be.
Streams burst from under the tongue
and sponge pores.
Drowning inside,
under memories weight.

Reckless sleep
a car accident dream.
I see red, no, blue?
Someone is panicking outside
the imagined steel.
Big, gentle, I don't know him.
I am calm-- too calm.
They can't get the door open.

I learned to find beauty in everything, even the sorrow— a curse?
It is the deadly beauty of darkness
before the lion closes his mouth
round your head,
and the vast blues of water
as you drown.
Romantic? Never.
Real? Always.
The truth was beautiful
and it hurt.

Loneliness is a taste of death
Here I am, dying,
without arms to expire in.
The house is silent, as I drift to sleep,
not eternally,
yet.

I supposed I loved him
Because he could tell me I was beautiful
without ever opening his mouth.

Something is drilling between my ribs.
Freedom swings to guilt.
*justify, justify, justify

Love me, he said.
She tried
And failed

I'm sorry
I did not let go
gracefully.

The poetry is coming back.
I can feel it.
Maybe because home is so close,
and the bitter-sweet taste of leaving
is closing in.
Home? Which is home?
Some wandering blood in says wherever my head rests,
clinging to the heart-strings
I've tied round the trees here,
Or the ones I left unraveled
far away.

Your truth is sweet.
Mine is sharp.
I cut away at you, without meaning to,
my hands are scissors,
yours are feathers.
Icarus, do not let me be your sun.