Joanna Oz

Joanna Oz Jun 2015

here

bone chews flesh,
crunching on raw edges,
rough and repetitious.
incessantly running over scars,
making sure of their existence, continuing to reopen
wounds made eternal by habitual compulsion.
oral fixation
gnawing on words chained in a churning stomach
bile sloshing up at the roof of a throat
left rug burned
from pleading with a preoccupied lover.
jaw locked on malicious intent,
reckless and rampant with silenced regret.
feeding a delirious desire
with insidious acts
sworn not to commit nor dissent.
lost,
spinning on the same man in a different mask
lost,
swimming in regurgitated phantoms
lost,
sick and solemn on the edge of a moonrise
peering into the belly of a beast that resurrects each morning
brandishing a new name,
and an old sword
forged from karmic residue and ancient power
wielding shadows over the watch tower
smothering sparks leaping from fire
spelling minds to forget their mistakes and souls to retrace
disaster.

i have been here before.
i have been here before,
i have danced to this tune in this dress,
i have held your face in this light,
i have seen the sun rise from this bed,
i have watched you slither from my side i know what comes next i've been here before.

i have been here before
i have etched this pattern into these palms,
i have chosen this chaos from this cup,
i have mistaken your touch for love,
i have backspun into a woven embrace i know what comes next i've been here before.

i have been here before
i have yet to rip up maps to the temple,
i have yet to cleave the imprint from my mind,
i have yet to drown the longing in my chest,
i have yet,
to muzzle the insidious glimmer of hope that this -
this time will be different.

i have been here before.
i have wanted those who dream of others.
i have sacrificed my blood to a dead god.
i have laid my innards in blinding spotlight i have worn pathetic eyes into bleary nights i have stood in the lightning hellbent i have sent love letters to a nonexistent address i have sung for the mute and deaf i have given myself to those barren of intent i know what comes next,
i've been here before.

i still hold ten thousand colors of feeling
and i still wave my flag half-mast.
i still look into the distance when i hear footsteps creaking
and i still wish they were yours coming to find mine,
i still convince myself of fantastical lies.

i have been here before.
i am no tourist.
i am no native.
i am a woman with no face
and no name
who hides in the crest of the shore
waiting for the tide to sweep her away.
i am a moth trying to touch the moon set ablaze by candlelight
spill my ashes over your bed,
and lay with me
here,
one last time tonight.

Joanna Oz Jun 2015

fingers

sticky grasping fingers
unsatisfied with holding lovers at arms length,
greedy to encompass
the entirety of another's being
face-to-face.

crawling up your heart's rickety fire escape,
they toss pebbles at the window
and pray
for a sleepy conscious to emerge.

daydreaming of caressing skin
bare to the blazing sun and gentle wind,
they practice tracing figure-eights
longing to skate
from collar to hipbone
drawing invisible treasure maps
and collecting jewels from creases of elbows.

twitching with anticipation,
swelling with life,
full veins racing to congregate at the tips that would
make contact with the your planetary surface.
they orbit spinning as a moon,
reflecting glow after midnight
and pulling in tides to kiss the rugged shore.

longing to memorize the rise and fall of supple valleys,
they would search like a blind man
fervently running over porous exterior.

hungry with curious wonder,
they purposefully linger centimeters from your edges
begging to be met by your fingers
reaching back to form connection.

Joanna Oz Jun 2015

the loudest silence

haggard hare hopping haphazardly through the haze high off hypocrisy and hilarity - hunched hyena cackling to hit the heights of his hands
miss mary mac mac mac, all dressed in black liquid lining the white of glistening eyes that encircle pooling pupils pointed with poisonous precision at their pulsing partner.
pass me your excuses,
I've grown starving hungry and stark-raving mad.
pin the knife on my back and call me lover, you liar,
I'll lean into your dagger and sing back with laughter.
misdirected malicious intent positioned on the bull's eye of your chest,
sink another three arrows into the target and dance round the corpse in victory with shaky knees,
sprinkling suspicion onto sapling trees stunting growth in both directions,
suspended air in leaves swings over my early grave graven with images of Indra.
stave off sympathy with a tall glass of cyanide,
sinister smirk slinks onto your face through the fissure cracked at the cornered sides of the mouth.
leisurely lies are boiling over the brim spilling tar onto the floor,
curdling to mold
decompose the muffled mystery
muttered by dubbed-over lips -
can you decode the silent spaces to glimpse
the ugly truth?

Joanna Oz Jun 2015

I periodically break.

sometimes, there is so much boiling over in my chest
that I must stare at the moon and pour out my excess
into her generous craters,
filling in jagged sidewalk cracks with apologetic cement.
sometimes, my heart is a jackhammer and I crush my bones to dust under the pounding weight of the love I carry for you,
I am a beggar who continually
accumulates debt to throw roses at your feet and watches silently
as you don't miss a beat walking on them to longingly greet
the shadow of another's ghost.
sometimes, I catch a whiff of your lips in my morning tea and a moan slips into my cup splashing burning liquid onto raw skin
pulsing ****** regret and chagrin.
sometimes, I wish we had never met,
and sometimes I wish we had been the first sight in each other's newborn eyes.
sometimes, I reach for you at night in my empty bed
and roll off past the missing guardrail your body used to create,
stuttering and floundering on the icy floor sometimes I pray for Lucifer
to burn your fingerprints from my skin -
the blistering sores would hurt less than this.

Joanna Oz Jun 2015

fantasmacide.

i want to collect all the loose pebbles kicked out from the cracked sidewalk corners of this reckless town and hold them in my silky nightgown,
dreaming of little moments forgotten and pushed aside by thematic fantasmacide.
i want to bathe them in the river and let them cleanse me,
soaking in hiccuped breaths and slow motion blinks,
just a second more of peace-ridden darkness before the clamoring jamboree - streets spilling over with hilarity, drunks dancing wild, children searching for love in tops of trees.
i want to caress every weary brick-face
with the souls of my feet,
conscious of all those to walk before and following - so many lives with unique spiraling fantasies
woven into birch leaves.
i want to press them all between ancient book pages as they fall,
let potion brew amongst severed pieces of processed bark and dying leaf,
rejoined and relearning each other's mutated intricacies.
i want to drink the honey dripping
from the eyes of roof-top lovelies, clasp their hands and spin in revelry.
i want to memorize the hue the moon casts over this town,
the way she lays me spell-bound into dewy grass,
the way the wind laughs,
the way your eyes split my heart in half - nostalgic for what has yet to leave me,
romantic sadness holds hands with mystery.

Joanna Oz May 2015

scorpion.

projection of disemboweled guts oozing blood
dripping entrails onto starched white linens
hung in pristine precision, poisoned into submission
my demonic parole officer has come out to play
from the dungeon of hell's seventh circle
i swallowed a hive of maggots with my lunch today
forked serpent tongue slurping slime and slugs
unholy satisfaction from magicking fantasy into
ghoulish, gory realities and ******* tears from deserted lungs
the lion's dinner watches his stomach being eaten
dull but forceful rock formations cracking and crunching
disembodied hallucinations, presupposing predilection
i am the grim reaper's prom date, predisposition
gussied up in cobweb tulle and glittering larvae
with a chloroform corsage, what generous perfume
the skeletal dance floor creaks under my spinning,
groaning of lives sped through on tranquilizers
dancing a tango with Death, i smirk in dizzy abandon
the band is beating their bones to chalky pulp
music made from desperate self-destruction
projectile ***** onto my pedestaled ideas
chunks of last week's insights stink the room
the bile which processed them to rejection
is sticking dripping off the untethered chandelier
i watch them both fall towards me
first, in slow-motion glimmering
and then,
all at once,
i am below them
and we are below the skeleton floor
in the cellar of the scorpion's dungeon
that i escaped from this eery morn

Joanna Oz May 2015

...

your silence is deafening, darling.
pour me another cup of misunderstanding
and i'll chug it down to ease
the choking passage of razors through my throat,
the singe of blood soaked vocal chords.
the emptiness of your bones
has propelled me to project ancient tomes
to consume hollowness, to color in absence.
i have cued all the thunderstorm songs
and i'm humming along in watery refrain
sluggishly off beat and out of key
to keep the fog from suffocating me.
there was a roaring fire
that's been smothered
by the vacuuming of oxygen.
void swallows void,
fantasy births ghoulish reality.
the moon stands half mast tonight,
stars falling as tears into the sea,
flooding tidal waves rolling over, over
churning lost hands up to hold a choppy surface.
forsake all promises
but cherish me, still.
love takes her last steps off a jagged cliff
and into an etherial hell.