dead what's it ?
inside the clasped lid
of never to part darkness
inching each breath
presses
pressing
with each breath
towards that titanic chasm

(into which leaps
every humdrum
scintillating eruption
of drab being)

I cannot imagine
anything more absurd than
perhaps ******* or sitting
outside on the pale veranda
of a minute café
tucked into the
silent crease of
a dying city


the light stroking
carelessly the **** soil
boils
with extremely sleepy
afternoon
every where–

and occasionally
a child
can be heard
murdering silence
with its long shriek
of rapid youth–

i wonder and play.
my hands neatly in the comely foil.
i bend and kern
each brilliantly lashed
marvel of coalesced laughter–

a tiny poem is sitting
slant wise their
across thighs
with deliberate health
of constant ***–

there is a mountain hurled
studiously *****
aggressively swept
by moonshadow
and nightdust:          (amongst the reeds

                                     a tired frog

                                      is lilting


across the ether
its ancient song           ) I wonder,


can you hear it to
ever think
upon the frail note
of its enormous throat
that to live is to die
constantly as–


a truck turns south
into the friscalating
dusklight its shadow
is minute;

and how can it
the insane probability
that we naked forevers
might suddenly be
in each distilled
anthem of terrible life,
the brute
the heap
of chaff
off from the stock
reaped by unthinkable hands

(but i think and i wonder
and my hands play amongst the
cool beds of immortal rivers
endless coils of blinding self

"We'll start with choking and work our way up to slapping."

We are critical.

We find flaws in
everything we see
because nobody
wants to write
about perfection,
even though sometimes
we wish we could just stay
staring into that
unblemished surface.

2. We are never satisfied.

We live our lives upon
mountains of
scrunched up
bits of refill and
ideas we gave up
trying to
express.

3. We never forget.

We write words about
eye contact made
three months ago
that we replay over
and over in our minds
even though it
stopped
being relevant.

4. We are fickle.**

Our emotions flash
from one
to the other
like strobe lighting that
disorientates us
until we feel as if
the world
will never be still.

5. We are exposed.

We don't know how
to keep our feelings
to ourselves so
we'll write them
down for
you to find
'accidentally'.

6. We are vulnerable.

We wear our
hearts on our sleeves
and won't lift a
muscle to fight back
if somebody tries
to break it
because we thrive
from the pain.

7. We will never stop.

We will never stop
feeling and
we will never stop
hurting,
we will never stop
breaking and
bleeding and
loving
even though the cycle
is endless
and we know what's
coming next.


We are addicted
to agony,
but we agonise
for the art.

1.

dear feminism,
do i think of women
when i write to you?

why do i personify?

angry at an unjust world,
angry at injustice in ourselves,
have i been taught to fear you?
ignore inequity of fears?

or hide  
in the shadows of your salty curves
speaking soft with sycophantic tilt?

was this what mother meant,
portending talk of therapy
two decades in advance?

a bouy on three waves,
i crash against protuberances too:
limp didactics on avoidance for the victims,
waking in continuums of shrugging crime.

sameness differs in utopias --
every latent gut avers the right to spill.
despite the lissome quell forgetfulness contains,
my proper sphere will leave me
deafened in a wrack-dry
tidal echo--
'Fairness' stains clear beauty dark
as my imagined egos drown at last
from down our oceanic well of shame.

sacrifices fade,
i cannot write...
i write, and fail,
defined by sediment cliche,
reading women authors out of obligation ..odd desire,
and so in dim medieval-fashion
miss
the trail of monoliths erected
for a craven ease

2.

dear civil rights,
why were you taught
through prisms of boredom?
my voiceless reading left you to your rage,
while i communed with glossy nature,
private leaves.

how dare i clap your back
"congratulations"
at your tidy givens  granted
scars were open past my seeing,
and bleed still

while right here, empathy dies, now

dreams are bombed,
grafted to infected faculties
to wallow tended in a garden of injustice
erudite and dead,
i **** a bit i tell myself then stuff my face with food,
cover breath with smoke
and sleep in sour ignorance
no courage left to care.
blind grins bouquet the status quo
of rotted stems, discarded roots

i bury you with homeland fear
the killing silence filled with just intentions
for tomorrow

3.

dear feminism,
you speak for me, too--
my genderless ear attunes

cathartic sweep of ills
scaled beyond your other selves,
sexing into common chosen songs

no fearful tremble
at a mainstream backdrop reprimand--
to be a good gender,
--this gender not that gender--
gestate bigotry of symbol wombs,
cut ripe to cater to unquestioned whim;
no violent selfhood requisitioning
to closet inner innocence in pain

contractions shock in further waves
i midwife simple hope i hope
true fairness you have nursed in seeing death


4.

dear punk **** feminism,
marginal i ask as i perform
unstructured sutras on my heart
exemplar of a meta-freedom
burning in the core of threaded ages strung--
how then life without your voice,
vast silence unobserved,
the hidden anti-*** persisting
in our gender-theory--theorizing sterile norms--
sweet pulsing concupiscence
in our every waking breath
a pollinating zephyr tease toward
celebrating every feotal bathtub bliss --
unbridled ideologies unleashed
unmade into opining din

5.

dear temperance,
i vote you cherished
whirlwind
singing endless through the ageist ridicule
apparent failure in the civil warrior's eye
dogma blinks
denial of the rights you suffered for
but underneath compassion all along
i rally in your family's younger gaze
staring down,
questioning the steady rhythm of a whiskied fist

6.

dear feminism,
have i been taught to celebrate you?
have i been taught to fear for you?
have i been taught to treat you as a woman?
why do i personify you?
like some Sophia cybered up atop the forums of our age

blind and failing
i would be dust as well
like any rightful fading into dust
be swept along with all coercive screenings,
fear-born silences
immune to reason and the reasons of the heart--
rather than to live forgetting
letting go the questions giving rise to equals in a discourse
revising what it means to ask the meaning of


#
dear feminism,

when you are gone..
i for one will sing you
hope

to protest bigotry
a raging tranquil step
of care-filled voicing

dare an upward sloping arc
a dream becoming shared
to overcome
attain
inspired by once unfamiliar names

i will still be here,
the angry feminist
burning in my flagging underwear

brightest outrage at injustice
your deeper loves, fairness
selfhood honored
as if written in the stars
or ancient shorelines
-- you will not be gone

if you're've been the aching

the

occasionally slender

drawl mouth

of

p
e
r
h
a
p
s                                                             :


've you become
my hands
beneath
the
ta
b
l
e                                                             in


a tired
cafe´









                                                                                                                                (t
                                                                                                                             uck
                                                                                                                          ed in
                                                                                                                      to the s
                                                                                                                                 e
                                                                                                                                a,




                 "sunlighttreesyourhandsandgodbetweenitallyourhips"


                                                                .

the house next door makes me
sad.
both man and wife rise early and
go to work.
they arrive home in early evening.
they have a young boy and a girl.
by 9 p.m. all the lights in the house
are out.
the next morning both man and
wife rise early again and go to
work.
they return in early evening.
By 9 p.m. all the lights are
out.

the house next door makes me
sad.
the people are nice people, I
like them.

but I feel them drowning.
and I can't save them.

they are surviving.
they are not
homeless.

but the price is
terrible.

sometimes during the day
I will look at the house
and the house will look at
me
and the house will
weep, yes, it does, I
feel it.