A tantalized spirit
Delves into my spine
It dictates my breathing,
It quickens my saunter
I see filth in my mind,
In my decaying lungs,
On the palms of my hands
Muck where virtue once resided
Virtue untainted by original sin
“O’ God free me”
No reply
The spirit seizes each prayer
If the spirit within should perish
Or plague babes hereafter
It is negligible
For every breast carries putrid milk
Every infant grows
And matures into a gruesome sight
Every wave peaks
And culminates
Every day passes
Every harmonious sound shall cease

He was last spotted
With his gnarled hands
making love to his pockets
maybe bearing a child
half palm
half cotton

Every so often
he’d flail the lint
from his fingernails
serrated from his spleen,
knot them up
into steely ***** of yarn
and batter the window
of his sister’s room

His knuckles may have suffered
some trauma
but it’s likely now
they speak in scars
with windbag bones
that don’t shut up


He isn’t a looker
His nose is large
and barbed
like wire
with currents
that breathe in pollen
he’s allergic to

He got inked last March
on his eighteenth
shrouding his flaxen leg hairs
in ****** red roses,
a wide mouthed skull
with an inverted cross
bludgeoning its left temple,
and the words
“Here’s to your destiny”
in all caps

He has a mop
of tow colored hair
and narrow eyes
either a robin’s egg
or air force blue
that I once piloted

He’s a well padded
five feet and nine inches
But I picture him
far rounder

You’ll never see him
well kempt
he smells of minced cattle
and marijuana


He could dissolve you
into laughter
even on unlit nights
when the moon
goes to the cleaners
and the stars
swish around
in the Laundromat
with your knickers

His grin was cloying
like syrup
until his teeth stuck together
in a wonted pout

Don’t keep your eyes peeled

You won’t find his face
on a milk carton

This boy isn’t really missing

He’s out there somewhere
studying chemistry
or law

But he isn’t here
to give me hell
anymore

So I picture his calf,
his immutable tattoo
whispering
“Here’s to your destiny”

and hope I still have one

There was a Mortician I used to know
With a chin of whiskers and sallow teeth
He didn’t comb his graying tresses
“Moonlight commence your drip” muttered he
But his hair grew stringier and his ligature looser
A man ever dingy with mourning

Shrouded with death was his visage
A man of fifty, shriveled like a rose
If you spend lifetimes watching milk curdle
And leaves stiffen
Traces of mortality will wrinkle you the same

Acrid appealed to the Undertaker’s senses
Drank black coffee to match his hue
Used to cloud lucid skies, he’d wipe out the blue

None spoke to him but the drawing room mirror
Listen he didn’t to its clamor of tongues  
For a reflection’s to blame for receding flesh

Thirty years conducting funerals
Built a morose man
Quietly he wept
Though a furrowed rose cannot
Thus his quietus was born

Clocks rupture
Their willowy hands thaw
Groping for each solemn hour
Stillness encapsulates
Seconds wither
Time is a stagnant corpse
Lying composedly
Amid a necropolis of lives he’s taken
Guilt sinks its teeth in like wet cement
Time once whispered his tears
Through a colorless chime
None heard
None cared
None mourned
All just watched
Watched with cavernous fright
As time clung to their shadows
Scribbling death upon their veins
And staining their youth with fear
“What a harrowing purpose I serve”
Time croaked
And with quivering lips
Time slipped away
Tick
Tic
Ti
T
_

Blood brews

Whiskey thrashes rugged orifices

His garbled speech is stifled

By my crimson skin

An ivory doused from his liquid voice

Slash

He’s caressed with daggers

“Self indulgent *****.”

Gall severs in my throat

My iris droops to my waist

Slash

I’m fastened to the ground

The sun renders me frigid with its every ray

His wounds protrude to my chest

Slash

Ethereal whispers in his ears

Darken his soul with a hex

I see a smirk

He leans in  

I weave my head backwards

His arid lips don’t invite me

Not when I long to **** his wretched venom

Slash

I hide

I hear him in drips of the faucet

His whimper

The guttural sound he screams

I even hear the blades pressed to his wrist

Slash

Tears brim my smoldering eyes

I’ve been stitched by needles

I’m a defect

How can I be his pulse?

Do not spoon feed me,

with your fleshy hand


Love has no palate

He's pompous and bland



My belly is tumid

your cream is too thick



You blaze with the fire

our flame has no wick



You burn me to ash

say, "I don't feel a thing"



Light a few matches

your heart doesn't sting



Smoke like a chimney

see if I care



Go on, get wasted

you've minutes to spare



Why not let liquor,

dictate your life?



She's done it before

she'll make a good wife



She won't let you drive

she won't let you speak



She sounds like most women

what more do you seek?



Your blunt and your flask,

they make a good pair



The flask omits me

the blunt omits air



I often bite

I'm like the wind



'Forgive me father?

I have sinned'



Of the seven deadly,

is pride the worst?



Shall I speak with God

or Satan first?



If I ask for God,

I find a queue



If I ask for Satan,

I find you



Is God the devil

when he's drunk?



Has he fits of rage?

Has his liver shrunk?



I love God

you are him, my fiend



Though you've never been handsome

Though you've never been kind



I bleed darkness

down a rusty drain



God, you are my darkness

God, you are my pain

My blood is not red anymore
It is not even rufous
It is achromatic
I’ve seen it go to a watery grave
with moonshine

It drowned
for a foolish fluid  
one so dimwitted
it forgot the word “No”
could be spoken
to bring their negligent ears
into *******

(And not me)

My blood rushed out
In it’s gloom
I wanted to emulate it
and exit my body
just as they entered

What a theft
What a “five-finger discount”
Literally

It was a perfect portrait
A gun kissing the crown of my head
and my indifference
towards the money in the cash register
that I called my soul-case
If I’d even had any left

My lips moldered shut
They don’t like parting anymore
Two buds charred sorely
as a pen
that speaks only in black ink


I searched every crevice of that washroom
for a noose
I found my reflection
and thought that close enough

So there I hovered
hung up on my mirror image
suspended by two claws
honed with dejection

My eyes slammed taut  
My pulse ******* bones in my face
and gnawing itself
with prowling fluorescents

I grazed the scuffs on my thighs
I hadn’t put there
for once

Then I remembered the nausea  
snarled up in their cheeks
Their words like spiders
I don’t know where they’ve gone
and I don’t want to

“Is it that time of the month?’
said the shorter, more truculent boy
and he sniggered

I stood submerged
in hard edged a laugh
that liked to wrench my ears
and make rounds
on nights hot and heavy
with languor

and perhaps,
had I not been so small
or weak of muscle
had I worn a different dress
or forgotten to coat my lashes
had I sipped on tea
instead of *****
I could’ve flagrantly pushed them away
Darted not with my eyes,
but my legs
I could’ve screamed “Get off me you scumbags!”
until my throat shriveled up
into a dried cranberry

But I didn’t

Instead I’m screaming
on a piece of paper

Because the worst that happens here
is a paper cut.

When first we met, the winds were brisk
almost bone chilling
The harsh breeze cut loose the leaves
from boughs with one foot in the grave

You weren’t one for first impressions.
You were brash
You nipped my hands
and mocked my trembling
like a parrot

I hated your foliage
It was colored in drab hues
browns, reds, oranges and pale yellows
and I was painted with that same brush
I could have blended in
with my sallow skin
and flimsy flesh

I tried to pretend you didn’t exist
I didn’t wear a cotton scarf
I didn’t wear wooly boots
I didn’t wear a button-up-coat
and I paid no heed to the missing sun

I let your cold arms coil around me
like the serpent you were
and I sunk my teeth into forbidden fruit

I tasted the acrid nectar
and I waited
for it to poison my thoughts
but it didn’t

And soon I heard the ringing of your leaves
I scuffled at first
then swayed in time to your bells
humming their diaphanous chime
and I hung bells from my neck
so you could sway to mine

I saw everything rupturing with its last beauty
and then I knew why they called you “Fall”
Because while everything was falling,
I had fallen
for you

No matter what I say
or do

There is a wholesome glow
in his eyes,  
though they are starved
from vaulted schemes

and there’s a dimple
on the side of his mouth
caving in
like a wooly bruin

There is a dire red
in his hair
he thinks a plunder to the gold

and the ground shivers madly
when he walks  
or speaks
or sings

His scent lingers
relentlessly
feasting off
my etiolated heart
until its ridges
die between his teeth
and I look unhinged
inhaling his knitted garments
like limpid air

I love him
no matter what I say
or do
and I’m afraid
because for the first time
the fire stokes itself at night

My mother never talked about her mother
because she passed on when I was five
and that’s when I learned,
that people do not live forever

I was not permanent
I was not an indelible mark  
I was merely grazing the earth
making small smuts in the soil
and moseying over leaves
as we yellowed
together

I dumped my dolls into a dark bin
and hid them away
because none of them blinked
none of them changed
none of them died
and I could not relate
to stagnant bits of plastic
anymore

My mother never talked about her mother’s hands
but I remembered them
Her palms had more ridges than mine
They were always cold
glacial troughs
telling stories
like maps of the past

I remember her incurable malady
like an empty cart trundling down
a pitted road
towards a parched body of water
that my mother later swamped
with creeks from her eyes

I’d spend sleepless nights
cradling warm bodies
I knew one day
would not cradle me back


I knew one day I’d be impregnated with wrinkles
and peppered with ill-favored liver spots
but this did not scare me
like it should have

It only scared me that
my mother never talked about her mother
because after she’d gone
she hadn’t much to say
about a part of her
that would always be missing

It was you
you who burbled my thoughts
Who coruscated my facets
Who severed my gears
Who took my milk for gall

You who left me
digging caverns below my arms
as they proved to
hold no one

So useless, I became their hangman
hoisting them up
to the sky,  
dangling them down
to the ground
They swung lifelessly,
as a nocuous pendulum,
condemned by all
for their open tears  

It was you who couldn’t bear my weight
no matter how light it got
or how strong you grew

You who lugged my baggage on your back
and threw it off your shoulders
when you found it a foolish load

You who poured cream in my coffee
with your sweet laughter

Who gave my stomach butterflies
ridden with insomnia

It was you
who left me
lovesick and languid
biting back malaise
with an ailing tongue

Now I house snoring
butterflies with broken wings
and my coffee is black
and bitter
like me


One day,
I’ll wake up
with grooves marrying my skin
encroaching
like waves on a bay front
with gunmetal hair
sweeping
like a broom over dross
with dust nodding off
on my knees

I’ll gulp down bygone speech
putting droughts in my throat
from all the pride I swallowed
then, with a bone-dry mouth, I’ll speak again -
as winter must melt into spring -  
and I won’t say “It was you”

I’ll say
“It was me.”