An off-white pew smudged
by fingerprints of all mourners
who come through
dirt poor people pushed
into this narrow hallway
wreathed with dusty fake lilies - Meant to
Honor the dead.
Two names written in the book
But the other lines are empty
as the gap between Front Row Blue-Haired Lady,
whose name I know,
and the Back-Row Tattoo/Piercing Crowd that is
15 rows deep and
15 rows weep
because my cousin is gone-
and the address printed on the memorial is wrong.

I think I would like to be out of my mind,
maybe with you, for a while.
So we started a practice of trading our cells
for the rapture of each other's arms.
No algorithms here, just alchemy and wine,
(This is all that we both can take)
No more of this, "Love? Are you my love?"
simply,
"I love how you taste."

It just so happens
That I have done everything.
EVERYTHING, you know.
In public, no less.
Well
As public as an elevator can get.
They were all fantastic. I have a sixth
Sense about them, you see
I separate the great ones from
The unbeddable, insecurable, unreliable
and then
We leave.
“We should do this again.”
And sometimes we would. But
Sometimes

I wish I had been
One of Those Girls
Raised in the church
White dress Easter
White as lambs
Donttouchboys
Donttouchdirt
God is your husband
The Earth is circled
by the Sun

You think it would be nice,
First kiss to ever come
On a day filled with White
And to know that your To Be
Has never been Anywhere
with Anyone
Like
Me.

My voice grows thin and wan
like flower buds surviving,
pale green, too pale to stay.
When will the sound beat upwards to the sun?
Not speaking/ merely words -
singing with the tulips,
Humming like the bees in spring,
Capella, Forte, I want to sound like the roses
who belt and  weave the most robust of songs.

When will I **** out this disastrous black thumb choking out my arias
every last one.

The world shows you bouquets while law screams of consequence
So loud that you begin to wonder
At the random order of floral arrangements -
Red masked hyacinths
Fox-gloved armaments
Honeybee sentinels guarding the last living queen
Who will she be
Are hornets defter than bees at murdering interlopers -
The last of these I've seen
Tiptoe at the grave of endangered species.

hell intersects at carondelet and bourbon sweatsheened street speakers lambast lucifers gates where grimy undercover angels lean to sleep and slumberpray the word of god sweeps through the concrete beat only humidity speaks while the spirit sings praise praise praise

When the end came they burned my home, my family, my life
But they left me my poems

And what my father said
With a smile which broke his face open wide

I thought I glimpsed a scholar or a prophet sitting there inside his wrinkles of skin like so many pale finale curtains falling

"Sometimes we search for our potential in the ruins

But what we need is to build it

All over again.

And though history will reveal us tearing it down,
Over and over,
So many times that you begin to wonder Why they built it in the first place,
Our supreme purpose is to build it again.
The reason for its birth no longer matters
Because the bridge breaches the abyss
And we cross it together.
There is, at least, power in that."

These are the words of my father.

What can the rich know of hunger
Or the starved stark raving mad life
Pursued by those they call fortuneless -
Those who carry with them every penny of affection, rolling each coin along naked fingers, eyeing the emblem of trust engraved, the stubborn profile revealing merely one side of the man - will this one be kind to the touch
And once spent go farther than commercial advertisements could ever know, will the time spent be earned back by a truthsome look given freely and the admittance of wishing for more time with the other, more than the span of an hour within a night but wishing for a thousand nights further, mornings, afternoons, and twilights in between - serving only to waken and from the coins face glean that an hour has passed and while passing the mirror has changed its occupant: the trees outside have all turned green.

Nola I came crawling
fingernails scratching at your broken concrete
blast-ridden ears numb to
Music at your center -
Now I lay myself down in your canals
Along your muddy parks
naked; indiscreet
I swirl in trumpet music
Eddy down echo streets
With funeral processions -
celebrations of Lives worth living
Again and again.
I would fold myself neatly
In lines like paper airplanes
to cut through your wet air
like a deft tongue parting lips
gasp and gasp again,
I want to deep dive in cerulean.

She moves with grace
grace moves with her
if she'd dance
sing
would it be her you'd hear
She's hiding something
green
old
crumpled
in her hand
trembling
rage inside
Don't fix
what is not broken,
or in your words,
"God has spoken."

I am a seashell
draining on the shore
emptied out by you,  
the wave receding sandy floor
-another opened door, now closing just in time-
back to the breakers,
pulled out to sea,
back to the cormorants,
farther still from me.

A room is just a room
a box is just a box
eight by ten nothing-
but Confinement for Life is what they meant
by the bars.
The box is a room is a tent where I pretend screeching in the night is just animals at play,
and beyond my thin flap door is the wilderness in all its glorious green array.

In Morris the goats next door are braying
Hello! Hello!
As I ****** through the underbrush, legs tangled among weeds, hearing
Intonations of the beast, perhaps just a sound but it seemed to me to be:
Goodnight! Goodnight!
Said the goats blight
I see you! I hear you!
Come away from the night.

Boots belts button lapels
Satin slips on too cleanly
Is it 32 or size medium
Inches verses miles to go
in someone elses shoes.

The ghost
Empty girl
A spectator of greater events ( our narrator. Protagonist)

What it is to die inside but to keep breathing. It's like watching life but only catching the  end of all things; the greatest romances but with every suitor you become so aware of the approaching end. You watch for it, bite your nails over it, rip your cuticles to shred the golden air you breathed only days ago, filling it with noxious silence and this oppressive somnalence;
And hell
to return to You, the real you, feels like clawing your way out of a well
You can't recognize your hands
These pinched phalanges are cracked with age lines but you are so **** young

Your hands are the hands of another.

How long is history made
20,000 years or three hundred?
The dedham cracked, releasing as it calved the chip on its shoulder
A glacial erratic
A plutonic catastrophe
Or a geologic pilgrim
Which we call Plymouth Rock.
When we landed on the chip,
It broke once, twice, and its demolition continues as tourists whittle down the stone to its smallest of meanings
A sedimentary token of mistaken intention.
I wonder how long we shall be here.
I think the truth is found in the dwindling stone.

"Only in border towns do people know the price of peace."

Because the border fences move overnight, barbed wire stockades grow legs and strut backwards under the moon. In the sun, entire houses have been devoured by Russia.
A woman, in Georgia, milks her cow, who is in Russia.
A man awakens in the morning, only to find the road to his fathers grave has been swallowed wholly.
That was six years ago and he still cries about it.
But he does not cry over the houses, the farm land, the livestock. He says, "We are not afraid. We sleep peace fully, knowing the difference between wood and flesh, a threat and a promise."

The sun does not touch me, neither does the green,
The wind turns the heat but grazes not for me.
The dogs ride the lanes, lapping smiles outside squares
Of windowpanes which tow them from over here to there;
I wish to be a dog, for dogs know not of rage or kiln,
Who bay the moon yet see the dark and shoo the lonesome kin.
The night drags on and in between the hours slow then grow,
In Interstices, sore tendons pop, the cells have shrunk too small.
Now lichens; blue, green, yellow, red still grow despite the hand
That peels them back from rocks and limbs; a forest drowned in sand,
Keening high, keening low, it sings the only song it knows: no, no,
I cannot die, I cannot go, I grow to fill the empty chambers,
neglected for too long.
I hate the night and day and more, I hate the rising hope
Which feeds this restless hour but gives not light nor scope.

Good morning
Good afternoon
Goodnight, my dearest one
I first saw you standing in the halo
Of all things bright and beautiful.
I found the truth of your enduring
Courage to be resilience
And your flaws merely wrinkles in the pages of the best story ever told.

Letters that will never be sent crowd the inbox - white envelopes, red or black the same, message trains going nowhere except the flame - intricacies of anger - the minute delicacies of disdain flooded ink overrunning mountainous epitaphs because it is impolite to question the absent reader but euphoric to ignite the writer with all the tragedies descending from the top of the page concerning
Dear Darling,
Best wishes
Sincerely,
Yours.

I am Mira
my changing brightness
lasted for months as my
beginning pulses
lengthen and widen
bursts of energy
never stay
always hiding
binary stars too close
colliding
My brightness
Mira
lasted for centuries.

The Mole girls survived underground for seven years in the keep of Reverend Winslow

He braided their hair into weaving chains and permitted them to sing only after evening prayer

Outside, he said, the sun has been stolen by a ravenous monster, swallowed whole like an orange down the snake throat

At supper, the Mole girls chew their peanut butter, swallowing past hard inquiries like, "Where is my daughter?" knowing to ask is the same as
"Where is God?"

Notes passed in class
notes scribbled in ink
Notes to remind
notes to forget
yesterday's to do is tomorrow's regret

Tell me they will remember me
Tell me the song they play at my Ending will be cool and not that one by Norah Jones.
Play my ashes Hey Jude, or,  I Get By With a Little Help-
from my friends,
Who will know when I am gone?
I got the invite in a song at a wedding in Mobile bay,
Maybe CCR or the Fleetfoxes gave it away:
the hints in these notes passed in class,
notes passed  on from the verse
notes to remember, letters to address,
yesterday's to do is tomorrow's forget.
And all I can say in my defense
(of this regret) is that I wanted
One song more, the one that wouldn't end.

“Have you heard the bells yet?” He asked, languid, dispassionate.
“Not yet,” I replied.
“You’ll hear them at night and you will rise as if to answer but there is no call, the bells are in your head. Strange isn’t it? How this place follows you around like a lonely ghost haunting the only house on the block.”
“People aren’t houses,” I said.
“Aren’t they home to something?”

Wearing a gown that wouldn't cover my ***
And socks like starfish feet
I peered across the dim gloom of my
Robot bed to the nurse board, which read, Treatment Plan: To be Determined.
And in my post-pancreatic anesthetic glaze I thought it was a note meant for me.
Too true.

Please
Please, I don't want to be a poet
Not one of those dripping wash-cloths of a writer
Who tires the eyes with words like
Evermore
or
Asunder
Not a poet
Who          thinks
Ridiculous spacing
Like this is cool

God
Can’t I be something respectable

lawyer
astronomer
doctor
proctologist!

I’d rather mine real ******* than those attached to aesthetes.

What was it like for Hilda,
first spread wide beneath Mr. Pound,
pounding pounding pounding
to white lights and champagne sensations
then perched at her type writer
as he broke into her thoughts, ripped away black lettering
still wet upon the page, proclaiming "Poetry! Poetry, my dear!"

I wonder, did she object more to 'poetry'
or 'my dear'?

We’ve spent months and weeks and nights perfecting the curvature of my body molding against yours
as my fingers slip in among strands
and my knees bend just a little
to make sure my chest is resting
beside your center of operations
My head nods forward and then dips back
my lips have come to expect the
next sensation of exhalation
meeting here
meeting fear
Because now there is no practice
for our congregation of cells
no preparation for parting your lips
or my thighs
We are rehearsing in our minds
how to make thought pictures die
until practice with a stranger starts again.

Someone, please tell me why I set ships to sail
Why I build them intent to fail
I fret and follow them from the shore
Eyes ******* up distinction to see,
Sure that maybe one among them all
At least one will come return to me.

Sing

I plead with you not to speak except to break the air and sing
Bring forth the heart that is listening
Dutiful to your passion, fulfilled, holding aloft that which can never be still;
The jagged heartbreak, the quavering schill calling plaintively, "Are you coming for me?"
...
"Are you coming back for me?"

And you reject the old bylines, criticisms, cataclysms of popular opinion
Noise buzzing within you turns to vibration
And you know
I have always been here

X
X
X
X
X

Grasp that which they say cannot be held
And continue as if no one is watching

When I was smooth polished stone
When I was unbreakable, indefatigable
I wasted the wealth of my youth

Spilling gold coins from my open purse into the street, stashing emerald bills in gutter cracks and the window sills of strangers, enemies, and friends

I never saved a dime

And it is time which has grown a face, laughing in fine lines traced by tragedies, one two three
In coffee black mornings and the long stretch between when the air is thick with hands grasping at the next order, the next order, the next order...

What am I to do with my empty hands
They say the devils work is idle.

Where once we had school
-a tall building, the gathering of books, thoughts-
Now a hollowing out. The stale wind blows through barbed
wire, remnants of horror, intended to remain
To remember
This hollowed out place
A school becomes a building
A building becomes chambers
Chambers become cells -
all paths lead to the Hill of Poisonous Trees,
where many red rings hang; symbols to replace horror
with Remembrance.
A school becomes a building
A memory becomes a memorial;
But the trees grow despite the poisoned hills.
One day I hope they outgrow this place;
and yet I want Strychnine Hill to stay -
If it is the only way to remember,
To memorialize the school that was raized.

Stuck,
I mold to the first touched
Hold to the surface much
like octopi twirling along
the ocean floor
Sticky,
pry candied fingers
from your sleeve
those residual molecules
of me, steadfast
to the point of discomfort.

She was a diver
Because
As her toes left the board
Pointing
The curve of her back
Bending
She would begin to fall
Free – form
Freed from
Her promise to keep her feet
On the ground
Because on that day she
Was a diver
And it was her joy to fall.

Today from the atrium the oleanders crept.
It has been coming, I have foreseen it
in the dark where soil is kept,
in spider cracking windows
and the pale greenery's lost steps.
though I had once thought the escape
to be inept.

I used to worry their fragile buds, when
seeking freedom from prism light,
would not survive the harsh transition
would not survive the come-on night.
Now I see the morning to come
after the midnight run would be
the first light born, negative the shield,
through which the oleanders used
to see:
the dawn,

the triumph,

oh the sight,
The harmony of the dew
with daylight's furious might
and the sun breaking the way - it makes
the gloom so bright

while I, in my room with my pill candy and my
sheets: the white is just too white and the
walls are Mary clean.
I watch them from my window and I hunger at the sight.
I envy them their beauty, their strength,
and their flight.

Understand,
if you are to try
at times, Blue-Blacks pervade my canvases,
Blushing Pinks and Blood Red
retreat from stapled corners in waste-not, want not Oh my God, I want that
One in the olive recliner there,
staring bold as Brass in
Brass-colored hair,
Blood red is back
She left Blushing Pink way behind when she went
Streaking with perfect line and form, challenging with truth or dare while coloring a sailors red sky morn, to warn to warn to warn
The Blue-Blacks are coming
The Blue-Blacks are here
The Blue-Blacks are running
the game from in here.

The garden is dark tonight while you have left my side. I am a stolen rib; the fruit upon the vine called to me

so sweetly.

But don't go into the dark and the deep, remember what you said to me, that we are these hollow children, we don't deserve to pay

these curses.

But the Earth sighs, "Oh, Adam."

Ankles bobbed. Cannibal Dan executed female (gorgeous). Hartford Inquirer:  
“Justice killing? Love? Money?”
“ No.”
“Oh?”
“People question rationale. Society thinks, ‘Undeserving Victims!’
Well, 'xcept you, Zackary.”

Consider the ants of the field.

Do they wander from the highest
The gatherer hills from which they've grown
Were they born free or enslaved
Did they arrive red soldiers,
Becoming merely many
Knowingly unknown
Carving a labrinyth
Erupting out of a disrupted cone
Do they feel the death of one in many
Do they feel the crush of carelessness
Do they rush out from the labyrinth into the unknown Fighting for revenge
Is this the nurture of mother nature

She does not know to suffer death as Kin do.
No slings nor arrows, nor sting
Could force her to uphold it
Shiningly, in the manner that one cradles
Home.

A hand is all we see
reaching from the door
he’s pulling her to him
but the moment is much more
than just him holding her
because the algorithms are wrong –
it’s the math that she can’t do,
that ****** her all along
There is no tall-dark-handsome
who will fix the broken things
but a voice that sometimes whispers,
*You are not broken. Sing.

No laughs and no apologies
The door was left ajar
“You may assist yourself at the mezzanine.”
girls cascade as men pose
strategically
in shark skin suits
like swimming tessellations
corners fit against corners
bait fish schools
Moving in murmurations
No one ever looks up
at the ocean top glass ceiling
Their eyes are aimed downwards
waiting to see a massive shadow rising up
from the sea floor
No one knows what goes on down there
down where the sand is so cold,
where the flesh of the bait fish drift and
the ***** pick at remnants on whale bones.

As tears break through lines in your face
as your hands open limply
palms beseeching stars
Sister,
I don’t know the lyrics of your sorrow
but I have run to catch up with you
so that I can join our cold hands
and grasp the sun between our palms
so we can run together.
Sister,
you run ahead and see the end of the line
(please share it with me)
in broken sobs
you beg me not to look
where true darkness is kept
like secrets from the young,
and yet, you turn your face
back to the sun
Sister.

His eye is on the sparrow. I watch them too; from my porch I can see the golden feathers lit by sunrise rays. I counted myself among them, it seemed much simpler that way. Didn't intend to build a nest there, to stay, but the days grow short and my safe harbor is miles and miles away. My mother asked me not to cut my hair, her golden headed daughter; is pride wrapped up in locks? I will lose it all anyway, every yellow strand. Maybe the sparrows will come to use it, weaving homes, their own safe harbors. There is good in that at least - I wondered a long while if it was possible - but I like to think it's true. His eye is on the sparrow
I watch them too.

while residing in my body
I feel a poisonous need to
not be here
peel back my skin
like onion layers
white stink petals
falling to the hardwood floor
before the full length mirror
A skinny girl itching
inside a fat woman suit

The reason for lockdown is muddy
Bricks stacked in a hole make a room
Of sorts
The roof is the sky in blue 8bit
Infinity framed to taunt a finite life;
Two lives -
A heartbeat and a tree
He cannot imagine the view from above
With his neck craned angular all day
The only way out is up

He gives his water to the tree
Leaves only drops for his prickly tongue
And when it rains he blesses the imprismed sky and drinks his fill

Green flag leaves unfurl
Climbing to search the sun
But he is brown as the muddy floor
Which cracks as the sun rises up with
Midday
Mayday, he says, remembering the boat in the Aegian - the radio spitting static
Maydaymaydaymayday

Surrounded by black water
The desert stretches on
Each wave a fist descending
Always a feast of inpotables.

Progress of the tree is measured in squints, patting the trunk, whispering lines of poetry - whole passages forgotten

How will I escape this labyrinth of suffering
Kiss the bark with prayers.

Isolation breeds desperate dreams
Teeth knocking around his head, falling to the floor
He buries them in the roots
Have one piece more
Grow tall, let me climb
The wind answers his words in the leaves
Yesssss yessssss

In Carson you took my hand as we crossed the whitecapped river - cold water cramping toes, we minced our way along algaed rocks like cats tiptoeing on ice
But in Tillamook we hunted Dungeoness crab and I roared for you
Did you hear?
We were hunting our kin - and I wondered if this could be sacrilege to the Cancers, perhaps not
But I heard the quiet "Thankyou," given to each one as you lowered them into the ***, the reverence in your voice soothed me like the pounding of the Pacific arm along that beach - my own golden shore -
I thought I had lost it you see -
Hidden in the dunes we consumed the flesh of the ***** and sat down to watch the sun melt into the blue
I wanted to say thank you too
But the words escaped me like your bandanna flying out from the truck
Like those ***** in the bay below who felt us tugging at the lines and crawled out of the ascending baskets, escaping death from our mouths
I like to think that we are them as well
Because we both run from comfortable prisons, the pillow that cradles the head but entraps the heart.

The sky over Canal
Cuts my eyes: a blue blade
(Larger than I've yet seen)
Hanging over my head like
The sword of Damocles.
Tooth and nail - cuticles
Like my mothers' fingers shred
Another signal confirming
Now is the time to grab the blade
To fight.

My days are spent among
Triggers and Fragments
Mirror shards glued to a wooden frame
with a faux metal placard  proclaiming Faith!
You must have it.

My nights are strewn confetti and black lace pinafores
shoved into the crack at the door
but the party is still bumping, a broken record singing
Have yourself... Have yourself...
A merry little Christmas.

My mornings are shattered by the call to begin again
again again again
Scratch the frost from the windshield, turn the key, close the door,
That same song is playing- this time on the radio-
Left turn signal blinking like Triggers and Fragments,
Have yourself
A merry little
Christmas
now.

I traded the wide open ceiling of the night sky and spring mornings,
the ever stretching further carpet of emerald goodness,
and floral scented air
for a four walled room,
with a nine foot ceiling,
and fifteen feet,
from here
to there.
No matter how long I walk around the box I am always
led back to the shuttered window by the bed.
The carpet is brown and the ceiling is white
but sometimes at night I can hear the crickets chirping
from a long displaced forest, from somewhere far away.
The music isn't always hampered by midnight sound pollution.
But the ceiling is forever lost
No more milky-way swirling in the deep, deep black
or the azure throw with diamonds spread across it's
threads and the blessed falling objects that I could reach up
and grasp with my tiny-child hands.
Though I can taste the water, the mercury  still offends
Stop thinking of the places that cannot be returned
and this quiet destruction,
For which I make no amends.