Steal all your gold
Back from those who do not know how to treasure it
Take it from their careless hands
Hold it gently as you coax it back into yourself
Tell them 'this is not how to handle a heart'
Because it was, a heart
That you put into their tender care
See how bruised it is now, how aching?
Do not learn from this the act of anger though
Do not now hoard your gold, dragoness
You can be fierce and gentle at the same time
Give your jewels to those who you adore
And if they break them, bury them, treat with roughness that which you gifted
Then rear your head back, firechild
The sun is inside you, and she says sometimes it is okay
To raise a little hell

How do I take the tar
Clogging my body
Thread it through my veins
Into my waiting palms
Where I can shape it
Disperse it,
Press an inky handprint to paper
And have it create something
And not destroy
It is always the way of the ink
To mark, blemish, to claim
A spot of the world for itself
And here I am, succumbed
Full of a seeping dark that,
Here, when the ink
Is fed by the grinning night
I am nothing but the mark
The blemish
The stain
And still I press myself to the world
Handprints that grasp for a way out
And create nothing
Nothing of any worth, at least

I find my soul in the dip of his lips
That perfect Cupid’s bow
How it seems to cup my very dreams
I know that my heart sits
In the curl of his smile, a secret thing
Held between us, one grin to another
And still the way he holds my lungs
Under his tongue, rolls them in his mouth
Controls every shudder of my chest
I am transcended when I look at him
Two eyes of spring forest that take me
Boundless into whispering sleep
When the light is absorbed into his skin
And they change from willow to ocean
In a blink we travel miles, and I follow
Eager, with my hands reaching for him
To entwine in the curls of his hair
I am always aching to pull him closer
He is the sun blowing kisses at my moon
And I, with all the brightness he gives me
Will sit peaceful in his orbit
Home, at last

I am a clock that clears its throat and repeats itself
Always stuck on the same sentence
Never able to contribute more to a conversation than a dull click
Over and over, setting teeth to grinding.
I am the clenched fist, too,
All the bones and muscles smiling at each other
Curling up against their lovers
And holding anger inside of them
Like a tongue between teeth
A chime caught midway
I am the midnight hour that echoes inside of itself
The way the impact of fist against mouth
Echoes through eternity
On the hour
Every hour
Repeated
A metronome of rage

concept: it is 7:10 in the morning, my room is bathed in gold from the sun’s slow ascension. It is a beautiful life

When Adam ***** Eve
And calls out Lilith’s name
the slinking Power inside her
Opens one sleepy eye
And uncurls two glistening fangs
Eve wraps her fingers around Adam’s given rib
Hands ****** and covered in blood
Eve plunges bone into sacred heart
Hears him gasp from gospel mouth
Mutters her name like prayer,
Like truth
Winds herself around him in python embrace
Swallows the blessed body whole
And becomes the Garden he dies in

God looks away

I have been a dream
I have been a tempest
And a flood
And a raging fire
I have been the creeping dark
The terrible sun
I have been the ghost that knocks my plants over
I have been the spilled soil, too
The branch that taps against my window
I have been a car crash
And a mirror
And a stunted cry in the night
I have been a brilliant sunrise
A bloated ocean
The ghost of my father
I have been the cracked rib of my mother
The snakes’ yawning mouth
Eve herself
I have been a leaking tap
A righteous man
A little sin
The blade and the wound
I have been the wolf and the howl
A bulbous moon
I have been a dream.