I'm a little, little teapot, full of secrets.
I'm a girl, all wet eyed and this morning's
careful ministrations are now my
vengeful war paint - dark eyes
like I haven't slept in days.

Slept till noon in a blue T shirt - it's
so much harder to wake up to an empty bed
even with all my sheets exactly where they belong
Me-*******-ticulous, perfect, all mine, stellar.

I'm a normal girl, a girl, a girl,
a twenty-something brunette who
just doesn't know how to turn off
her ****-off attitude. I'm all flesh
and bone and I just spent 30 minutes
ODing on my own adrenaline,
martyring myself secretly like some
glorified, glamourous ******
trying to stick it to the world that
hasn't done me any favors!
But I don't really believe that.

These days I'm dancing like I fight:
all tight fists and closed, wet eyes.
I'm rage and *** and I'm ****** as ****
and you don't know anything about me.

I'm a girl, a ****** *****, a
twenty-something brunette with
no excuses. I'm sad and I'm angry
and I'm so sick of having absolutely
no reasons why.

I lay my head
Down.
I lay my head on mountains of thought and unwoven material.
It weaves itself together and apart in my dreams.
In knots.

I lay my head on uneven, fragile branches and my ankles hang across into the air.

I lay my head down on rough, open water
And icy memories lap at my closed eyelids and frost over my sight.

I lay my head across your wrists and I try to memorize your pulse and the hum of your life
Because it sounds so different from mine.
I lay my head down on the sound of bumble bees and honey.
I can the smell the sunburn and it echoes on the shell of my ear.
I can hear the ocean.

I lay my head down on railroad tracks and my thoughts go loud and flat.
They stretch themselves out into silk.
They loop and strand themselves together and now I think a spiderweb.
I am very glad that I am not afraid of spiders.

I lay my head
Down.
I lay my head across the wings of a bird.
We move the sky and the world falls over itself beneath us
Again and Again.

I am wearing spider silk and birch bark.
There is ice in my thoughts
Even though they are not frozen.
For the first time I can hear honey and bumble bees in my blood
And as I hold my wrists to my ears I can’t help but thinking.

I lay my head down on the Idea of Creation.
Down
And I rest.

Birds in cages are immortalized in poetry,
in wordy melancholy and round top cages beside
windows tauntingly open to the mountains, the
earthy smell of wheat and the breezy ocean air.
Hundreds of perturbed human eyes press close against brass,
mooning with open mouths and dry lips
cooing baby-talk bird-calls in hope of a
crying return, like a blessing,
or a soft forgiveness.

Outside,
Lovebirds are doves and songbirds.
They commune with owls and storks
and perch on branches, all the better to coo
and cry to the loving, glowing moon.

Anger, jealousy, and fright are all stones. They are heavy
and they have no place in the bellies of skybirds.
Caged birds have jealousy and clipped wings,
brass bars bent into tiny atmospheres, but canaries
carry bile in their beaks, beady black eyes watching
changing seasons with singing spite.

I am and have always been a swallow,
all creamy white belly and a thousand
creeping kinds of brown.
I wish to stay up, up for a thousand hours
in the realm of thought. In your thoughts,
I wish to be the voice whispering stories to you
from inside your precious head, curved
lovingly above me like an unending sky.
I am wings and feathers and I am full of things
that I desire much much more than air.

It smells like rain, and the stink of it
sticks to our faces and our clothes. We shed
our shoes and soon our clothes and soon
our voices are abandoned amid the rows of slumbering
apple blossoms.

Some haven’t seen it yet – Children are asleep, and
they cannot feel the earth as it trembles, or hear their parents
as they whisper at their open window.

The earth has grown hungry, and angry,
and the earth has eaten the moon. The soil yawns
in contended fullness, and the world trembles.

Hours ago, we began to fret about the ocean. We
began to fear our own earth, and to speculate in whispers
which legend it would attempt to gobble up next. Whispers,
like keepers of secrets from a god gravity won’t let you escape.

Now we’re bare and secrets tumble from lips
like baby birds from trees, hundreds of heathens flashing their hips
in the darkness that would have been a full moon. We’re all waiting
for rushing water, naked. Soon, I won’t have secrets to keep at all.

You pace a room full of forgotten thoughts
And find yourself hanging
Down
From the peeling wallpaper
It is yellowed and crisp
In your hands

A tangled man
Made of Spiderwebs
Asks you why.
“why,” he asks. “Do you always fall parallel to the earth
But perpendicular to everyone else?”
You toss him away on a puff of breath.
You tell him you like falling, thank you very much,
And fall out of a shattered window
And you are reabsorbed into the nighttime.

The purpose of poetry may be to create from immaterial
   To deceive
   To be unbearably honest and
             undeniably cruel
   To know
   To understand
   To attempt understanding and
             maybe even empathy.

The purpose of poetry may be the art itself of
             harnessing energy and chaotic self influemce.

The purpose of poetry may be to externalize insanity
             or find/create the soul.

The purpose of poetry may be to realize the power
             of our own subconscious
   To find the potential energy in our words and use it
             kinetically across our tongues.

The purpose of poetry may be to find god and to finally
             find out what this was all about in the first place.

I am in a dream full of romance.

A Young war hero arrives home with
A broken spine and he says
He wants me
And a broken house
With a crooked chimney
And a red door.

I warn him, quietly.
I tell him that my door is green
And that when I open it
The wind will always blow it shut again.

He hands me a can of paint
And he kisses me on my lips.

I live in a broken house
With walls full of bones
behind a red rusted door.
I do not use my door.
Only thieves use red doors
And I use the skylight
Sometimes,
                                                                ­                                                                 ­                                                                 ­                                    I wish I were still too stubborn to be lonely.

A man knocks on my rusty red door
And I yell at him through a broken window.
He has a boat,
And this sea captain takes me on his ship
Under heavy woven sails.
He names me first mate
But keeps me in the kitchen
Until we start taking on water
And I push him off the stern
And sink the boat myself.