When I speak do I sound like decay?
I spit the shredded,
The crushed,
The drenched and tattered
Pieces of high-cost academic language,
The old fashioned phrases with which I
Dressed my words in dignity,
The symbols of all that I attained before I stagnated and regressed...
Did I pluck truffles from the mountainside?
Did I shovel them in me,
Greedy like a coal furnace,
Only to heave them up later as wretched slime?
Now, for the stench, no one can understand me,
No one can even try

A human being is a mouse-cage
Walls of the nest lined and fluffed
with candy and scraps
The whole of what a child would think of
Ice cream for dinner and
Staying up late
all compressed into one cotton-ball for sleeping on
The spirit inside racing on the wheel of the brain
climbing the rope-ladder veins and viscera
Up and down
Until one day it escapes
A thousand wings
A million eyes
A blinding light like a dentist’s
Eagle talons and lion claws
Freefall
Metamorphosis beyond the frail imaginings
of little girls and boys
And you wanted this, didn’t you?
You asked for it, so here,
Limitlessness beyond comprehension is yours

I believe in the power of light to work evil.
Its presence shining on atrocities
Renders them all the more horrid.
And the way it brings heat,
Strips flesh, bleaches bone…
Light is a great and terrible Thing;
Power is power; a push or a pull.
Kinetic energy brushes your fingers through your child’s hair and
Rips bullets through soldiers’ chests.
So I believe in the power of light to work evil,
Just as I believe in the power of dark to hide it.
And I keep my lamps low,
And my hands behind my back.

I know you always saw yourself a knight
But I did not realize for a long time
That I was a page.
You were my sparring partner
Who taught me to come at the world
Gun drawn
So no one could out-shoot me.
You told me,
And I know,
That Justice wears a blindfold because
She slashes her sword indiscriminately,
And looks at that scale
Never.

You always saw yourself a lawman
I always saw you as a fool.
I never realized I learned law
At your feet.
Fallacies and ways of
Drawing out argument and diatribe,
Loopholes of morality through which
We spin.
You taught me to be technically correct,
The best kind of correct,
Always exploiting but
Always within my jurisdiction.
I only know now I was a deputy
To a sheriff of ridiculous stature.

You taught me THE ART OF WAR.
It was engraved in stone for me
Like an all-caps Roman monument.
THE ART OF WAR
Is sprawled across a stone archway in my mind
Where you came, and you saw.
It marks your conquest.

You made it my way of loving,
Of relating to the world and the people around me.
You made me a martyr and mercenary,
Standing atop a hill in golden armor,
Sunlight behind me and wind in my hair,
An avatar of Durga,
A disciple of Joan of Arc,
A four-year-old poses in chainmail
You wrought for her.
Illusions of grandeur such as your own
Come with this territory.

You taught me
As your mother and father
And grandparents
Taught you,
THE ART OF WAR-
That love is just begrudging words of sweetness
Issued only after ruins lay all around
And both parties are sufficiently vulnerable,
Their bricks having been pried away with crowbars.
Love is only an apology given to mollify
The wounds you have already wrought.
The only privilege loved-ones are afforded,
Is the bandage that covers up the customary
Destruction
That is your normal face.

You and I only ever knew love as
You clipping my wings
And I breaking free to spray
The shrapnel of those chains
Into your face.
We added to each others' pile of scars.
It was so rare for us to run into battle together,
On the same side,
Voices as one in a battlecry.
I don't even know how long it's been since
Us soldiers-for-hire got hired
By the same team at once.

You cast me out of steel
Like a sword.
And now I am the legendary blade
Destined to clash against you for all eternity.
We will only ever know ceasefires
Of a day in length.
We will run through the flame,
And we will practice the art
You taught me.

My father cooked.
My father cooked like cavemen cooked, fire and stone,
Like men in the wild making cacciatore,
Soldiers in a trench chucking a can into the fire,
A party in winter furs eating kidneys raw,
Carved from the back of a beast.

He cooked like people dive into ill-fated romances,
No looks backward and all caution to the wind,
No time even to throw a pinch of salt over one's left shoulder.
Heart broken and fingers burned,
You would learn to love again,
And you would complete the recipe next time,
And it would someday be true love, amazing,
A bite that could sustain long after it was consumed.

My father taught me how to cook.
He taught me by taunting me when I picked too dull a knife,
Without ever showing me how to tell a sharp one.
By screaming at me in impatience when we were a second from crisis,
Without having the foresight to speak softly before danger was nigh.
He taught me the grandeur of making something delicious,
Without extolling the virtue of making it cleanly and safely.
He taught me recklessness,
To risk everything for just one iota of glory,
To act out of insecurity and even suicidality.

"My mother doesn't cook,"
I bragged as a girl.
"You will not find her barefoot and pregnant in a kitchen,
A dangerous place full of sharp knives and hot fires and screaming men;
My father protects her from all that."

But my mother does cook.
It is easy, and quiet,
And so it is difficult to notice,
But it happens.

She taught me to make spinach pies,
And when the frozen mixture itched my hands,
She took the filling from me and did it herself.

Meat, as wrested from nature by brave huntsmen,
Is tough and stringy and crusted with cartilage,
And when I clean it thoroughly,
I am doing as my mother taught me.

Decorated cakes are soft and fine and, yes, unnecessary!
But people eat with their eyes,
And balance the bitterness of life with all things sweet,
So I am doing as my mother taught me.

Setting a kitchen to rights may be as dreary
As removing the dead from the battlefield
After the spoils are won,
But both prevent rot and disease.
We do it for others as much as for ourselves.

That is what my mother taught me:
To act like someone else cares about me,
And to show I care in return.

I do not know how to reconcile love with experience.
The people of the past buried their children
Wearing wreaths of ceramic flowers,
Armored greenery stiff enough to last whatever journey
Lay ahead of the child’s thin bones,
And every petal must have been shaped with love and only love!
For what else could convince an aging back
And aching spindle-fingers
Into laboring over finery like that?
This is one of those things that makes young women want to die.
Awake, alive, poisoned with the lust of others’ eyes,
We stare at the coins resting on the tongues of mummy women:
Just enough to pull a little something from the gumball machine.
Our fingers twitch,
And we want it.
We can only want it.

Something pretty about me falls away in winter,
When I lose my leaves and flowers like a sharp black tree.
Spring, summer, and fall, strange men pursue me,
Tap me on the shoulder, and tear at my clothes!
But as the sun sets earlier, my shoulders square and my eyes steel.
The soft things in me harden;
Butter frozen in the dish, that tears through whatever you spread it on.

A witch lives in a house where butter is never soft;
Where milk goes off too soon and animals never approach;
Where men awaken in the morning to a mouthful of pins and needles,
Lips sewn shut,
Pick-up lines stillborn on the tongue.

Other people are getting love letters
Through my mailbox,
But I'm writing in cursive on ruled notebook paper
In a language of one.
Can this week's new health crisis
Please identify yourself?
Will you frame everything in illness
Until your life is only messy buns,
Cardigans, slippers, and frozen pizzas?
Where are my shoes and earrings,
My mauve lipstick, and milk complexion?
Where is the baby powder I used to use
To reduce the chafing of my thighs?
People in hell want ice water and
I think I get it, *******.

Let us see a slasher
I’ll show you one I like:
A girl who faced some biomedical horror
Some Thing From Another World
That lived in her and ate her alive
Made her need showers every other day
And hairspray and soap and razors from the drugstore
There was hair on her legs and teeth in her mouth and feelings in her dreams and
Oh, she was so very upset
She cut it out
Cut it out
Cut it out out out
Whatever it was that made her stink
That stuck the flesh to her bones
And made her feel happy and sad
She slashed and burned and became
Less, or more, than human
A toothy facade on long hollow stilt legs
Never smelled of anything at all and
Never slept no more, much less
Dreamed dreams
I’m so happy for her, I
Wanna be just like her, she’s
The Girl That Makes It to the End

Someday when you want to find me
Look for someone whose patron is inborn adversity.
I will be Angkor Wat whose foundation rots,
And the temple still stands.
Look in the oasis for an arrogant rider,
Whose horse strives to throw her off at every turn,
Yet she is still clinging on,
And thinks herself a rider of Dragons and scaly lizards.
In the reflections on the surface of her eyes,
I will be there right now,
And she will be a different human,
The kind of icon I always thought I would become.
Look for the specter of madness and fatigue,
There you will find my fully-fledged self.
When we look at babies
And tell them they will grow into beautiful young women
We don't even know what we're saying.

I have taken alcestis’ place many times
Sighed for her and said I’ll go instead
Moved heaven and earth
Torn death screaming from its place
So others might walk once more in the sun
And so I might what?
Ah, so I might.
It would be good to stop living and dying for someone else
To quell this rhythm
“Do it for them, do it for them,”
That makes such an irregular heartbeat
Too strange to straighten a body
And would they understand what I had done for them before?
Ah, so they might.

1.
He said
You’re so thematically inconsistent
What are you? A ghost? A vampire?
I said I am a more old fashioned thing
Before monsters had to be **** and well contained for the screen
A specter- solid when it wants to be
And blurry when it does not
Think of me as the mistreated children
And the wreckage in your wake
Think of me, and my hands will grow substantial around your neck.

2.
I don’t self-diagnose.
Don’t trust myself to know myself,
I take personality quizzes with
A moderated panel of objective observers.
What mythological creature am I?
“A fairy.
Step light, speak quiet, hard to get in touch with.
If you weren’t right in front of me
I might think you weren’t real.”
A fairy.
A sweet thought, pleasing to the ego.
Who doesn’t want the graceful bearing?
The mischievous face peeking out from holly bushes?
Who wouldn’t want to feel ladylike and airy?
I don’t self-diagnose.
If I did, I’d never end up with something so pretty.
A ghost, I would say.
Long-dead and fading every second.
My tangled hair and pale face,
My cold bare feet padding silently over the hardwood floor,
My too-big clothes swaying in some invisible wind.
Step light, speak quiet, hard to get in touch with.
Better organize a seance before the veil draws closed.

Some People have never experienced true Relief.
Pain does not just stop, it leaves Pleasure
To settle like rainwater in its dent on the couch cushions.
Some People never Rise because they never Sank
One can writhe contentedly in Nothingness,
One can *** when a Headache lifts its pall.
To Some People, it is good to sing
Of "freedom," of "love," of "pain."
Some People have always Walked Without Chains,
Some People have never been Hated,
Some People have never experienced true Relief.

sugar, sugar
crunching subjugated under these bootheels
the Diamond Dust on whom I Cut my Teeth
sugar, sugar
sand between the raw fingertips
i am a ***** now
salt swatched on the flesh
that tenderizes the meat
that dissolves the snail-heart
the dull slug-eyes
Pink Salt
Pink Sands
sugar, sugar
Oh you said it would be sweet, but son,
It was rough
Rough
Rough

Sweet things, Soft things:
Fingers brushing clean counters.
A skirt spread neatly over a lap.
People dreaming together, in a morninglit room where a fan blows,
And riffles papers.
Closed eyes.
Cats' paws.
Quiet steps mindful of a sleeping house.
None are important,
They are hardly original.
But often I close my eyes,
Let soft light filter through the capillaries,
And dwell on them so that I may
Escape that which is bitter,
That which is hard.

You don’t know what to say.
She carried your body across three states,
Held you in the air and fed you your last meal,
And you don’t know what to say.
Because she carried you, bore you to soft ground
And cypress trees,
But threw away the flowers for your funeral.
Your Dowry Hope Chest lies open,
Alms for the poor,
In some nameless little town along the way.
Is it “Thank you?” Is that what you want to say?
Were you disregarded? She carried you…
She shrouded you and broke ground,
However rough her hands were,
However quickly she moved! Even still…
And you are thankful to lie in this good dirt,
You want to be thankful for it here.
So you try not to think of it,
How there was a hole to fill and a rotting corpse to bury,
How you were one more thing that could fall into place:
Flowers to the field,
Linens to the needy,
Corpses to the ground
Where they belong.
And what should you say?
You are dead and gone, settled at last;
She does not expect you to say anything.
And so it does not matter if
You don’t know what to say.

in times past
there was a rifle called mine
and daddy, always boasting-
she’s deadly with that 22
she’s deadly

i was deadly

four feet tall
i swung it out in front of me
cane of a blind man
as wild and changeable
as the spinning needle in my compass
watch where you point that thing
take care

take care

and all i said for want of wit
to memory now i can’t recall
only empty chairs, like gapped teeth
mark the occasions of parting glasses broken

pots boiled
whistling in dry pain on the red hot stove
destroyed objects, leaped before looking
and an empty oven on 400 for two days
she’s deadly
she’s deadly
take care

Take my hair down from its braids
Take the jewelry from around my neck
Take these bracelets like golden shackles
And take me back to my mother’s house

Take me back to my mother’s house
Where I was happy as a girl
Lay him in the ground facing to the sunset
And I’ll rip my hair the whole way to her door

Break my china, throw my dowry in the river
Rip the curtains from the windows
Strip the floor on which I made my marriage bed
And take me back to my mother’s house

I am an animal, not a girl
With sharp teeth and a spine
I am not fit to eat the scraps of men
I am not fit to be a wife

I have been touched by death
He has run his cold fingers through my hair
He has claimed me as his prize
And he wants to wed me at my mother’s house

We build the bony cage for all our lives,
The twig-by-twig of robin’s nest in ribs.
The one that I have at the base of my spine,
bird-fragile, nestles in the bowl of my hips.

Here no reverie, no peaceful inclination,
No dignified ascetic’s mindful rest.
Just rattling these bars in self-castigation
Of the prison-home I’ve set within my breast.

And in the dark around me, I hear gnawing:
The ugly wail of metal chains on teeth,
The beastly sound of walled-up creatures clawing
For heat-stroke freedom wavering out of reach.

Come dance with me awhile inside this prison,
And beat your feet down on the bony floor!
Come let them know what strength has now arisen,
And don’t do your jailer’s work for him no more!

If you learn the building blocks of womanhood
You will never be the same again
This gender self-destructs when gazed upon for too long
And The *** Therapists and Makeup Artists
The Midwives and Matchmakers
Have all been un-ladied by their knowledge of lady-ness
Here’s to the fat mask-wearer at the Sephora makeup counter
Who will never get a beau and did all the faces at her sister’s wedding
Here’s to legions of ruined teenagers
Riding on the *****-seats of motorcycles
Because once you’ve gazed on the truth of femininity
The others can smell it on you
Like mother birds rejecting a chick
And all of us Nuns and Ateliers
We’ve only got each other looking out for us now

I used to stand, a little girl,
In the face of the mighty River,
And try my luck against the current,
Till my thin frame would shiver.
The River was a muscled god
Of milky Grecian marble,
Who'd swallow up the flotsam,
While the safer songbirds warbled.
My mother told me "stay away,
The River, he is hungry,
He'll twist you round and break your bones
And take your sweet self from me."
And, from then on, I'd heed her word,
And steer clear of the River,
Or throw in sticks to harm it,
Vainly, watch them be devoured.
And sometimes, when the rain came down
For long days at a time,
The River would rise from his bed,
To drown all that was mine.
So he got many over on me,
And I, nothing on him.
The River was so sly, you see,
The Devil, just too slim.
And then I grew up proud
And beautiful, and moved away,
To a moneyed place in the northern states,
Where the River stayed away.
But I met a man just like that Body
Rolling, roiling, wild,
That took and drowned all I did have
And left me with a child.
And my mother took me in again,
And told me just the same,
To shun the River, guard myself,
A man's worse than his name.
I took to daring, once again,
That arctic current down,
I'd dip my toes in evening time,
And smooth my forehead's frown.
I'd talk to him, my belly swole,
Confide in the River wild,
I prayed to God in the water's hearing,
That I did not need the child.
The River told me he would help,
That I could use his ways,
For he wanted only sacrifice,
And I wanted not the blame.
So I waded in, the hands of water
Cupped beneath my thighs,
And the River's water turned blood red,
And my eyes rolled to the sky.
Now I live alone again.
Playing mother was not my lot.
The River took my baby in,
Because my arms could not.

Every time I speak, I hold a crystal lens in my mouth
And the light of who I am and what I say refracts through it
Blasts my innards onto the walls as sure as I’d been shot
Point blank range, and every drop of blood a slide in a projector
It’s an unbearable burden, and it’s the curse of hindsight
To know who you are to others only after the splash of rainbow light
Only after you’ve burned some Rorschach on their retinas
I’m so ******* upset all the time about it, it’s pathetic,
But I would hold your face in my hands nose to nose
As if I were about to kiss you roughly,
And I would open my eyes their widest and shine into you
Pure white floodlight high beams of absolute truth about who I am
Only the trouble is, really, even I don’t know.

Some people say it is the easiest thing in the world
The first thing that spills from a baby’s eyes:
Not tears, but love, easy love like cheese oozing out of a sandwich!
I like that, I want that;
That ease of use, reaching behind me to pluck love
Out of my toolbox without even turning to look!
There it is, at hand, at hand, fistfuls of it like plenty, like bounty!
But other people say the other thing,
That feels so true because it hurts,
Because hurt is what we’re used to when truth comes into it.
They say it’s hard work every day, that it’s conscious;
It’s the tension in your muscles when you do a new dance step,
And the only ease you ever find is the autopilot, the muscle memory.
Years down the line after hard, hard work you just might feel it,
The way a gymnast’s old breaks thrum in reminder.
“Remember how it used to be so hard,”
“How it hurt you and you had to work to become this,”
That inner contradiction to her graceful posture when she lands.
I think I want it easy,
But I don’t really know how I want it.
When you’ve never had it at all, how can you
Pick and choose the way you finally get it?
I think about women in pastel dresses brushing lint off their husbands’ clothes,
And I think about how blood rises to a cheek when it’s been slapped,
And I think what if I was never meant to have it at all.
Maybe I can’t even do it the hard way, can’t fake it till I make it
‘Cause I’ll never make it anyway.
The easy way or the hard way,
The easy way or the hard.
We never talk about option number 3,
When someone looks up at you, eyebrow slightly raised,
And says with a quiet finality,
“No.”

The freak of nature tossed her hair in the sunlight
And bent her neck at an impossible angle,
Tilting her already-crooked face in happiness.

"How can you be happy?" They said.
"Do you consider yourself whole?"
Implying "We don't."

She smiled
In her wide, glass eyes,
Like the eyes of ancient dinosaurs,
Like a throwback to the time of giant insects.

"I am more than whole" said the Lizard-Queen.

"Nature makes her mutations
In hopes of a good one, that will stick.
This is how we came to walk on our two legs.
We began to talk.
We gained the ability to love each other."

"Am I good or bad?" She asked.
Some shouted good, and raised their hands to her.
Others murmured bad, and stared at the ground,
For the ground, unlike her eyes, did not meet them
With such eerie consciousness.

"I'll tell you," said she,
"It matters not to me.
If I am good, then I am evolved.
If I am bad,
If these bones of mine have an unfortunate propensity to break,
If these eyes of mine grow weary and blind in old age,
Then I will be more than good or bad.
I will be a part of the experiment
And the process.
I am honored that Nature chose me to be
Her Freak."

The old broken sack
Rocked in a chair.
Deep within the wrinkles of her face,
Past the fractures in her arms,
And in the bottoms of her blind black orbs,
She smiled at the children clustered round her deathbed.

"Do you remember," she said,
"The story which once I told your parents?"

"Yes." said the many children.
They were children of all sparkling colors,
Of all different faces,
And the Lizard Matriarch noted this.

"I was wrong," said she,
"Partly wrong.
I am no different from any of you."
And they gasped in astonishment,
And looked at each other's faces for any sign of her.

"Each of us is strange,
Each of us has a structural idiosyncrasy
And a basic different core.
It is not I alone who is evolved,
Nor I alone who is a step in the experiment,
But it is every baby born.
There is no normal."

She cried strange tears from her wrecked eyes.

"Nature has chosen all of us
To be her Freaks."

Under a low-hanging branch of magnolia,
a foolish young person lay breathing his last.
He bled out his guts to the soft-stirring air,
Soothed as white petals, like ghosts, flitted past.
A foolish young person believed those around him,
A foolish young person left Mother at home.
While many would say that she tearfully warned him,
She was one among many who told him to go.
She told him of bravery, bloodline, nobility,
And of destitution, tables yet to turn.
Under the branch that snows down white magnolia,
He bleeds out remembering others’ words.

Under a spice-scented branch of magnolia,
He thinks of the will of a God he knows not.
God would not wish for the sins he’s committed;
This murderer is not on his way to meet God.
He thinks himself hero, and calls himself savior,
Conservator of all that his short life has known.
To keep others underfoot, deprived, and in chains,
He gives up his body, his blood, and his bone.

Under a low-hanging branch of magnolia,
His heartbeat an abacus, he tallies up deeds.
He fought not for money, he fought not for "rights,"
That reasoning is long since lost to the weeds.
He fought not for love of the branch of magnolia;
He fought not for dignity, the saving of face.
He fought for one thing, and one ugly thing only:
A life lived as if of superior race.
One could say he did not know his own motivation,
Because he so fervently deluded himself,
And many, thereafter, denied it as well,
Till they worshipped the rag that led him to death.

No one is ever going to know you.
You will die with your soul achingly untouched,
And you will not be special for it.
Every day, we come in and out of the world together:
Doctors cradle babies out of the birth canal,
Hand them to their mothers, wet from excision.
Grandchildren hold the hands of dementia patients
As they lay in their beds flickering like candles.
Yes, these are good things. Yes, they are done together.
Yes, still, we are all alone.
You don’t really need to be accompanied,
You don’t need pure wordless understanding,
Your soulmate never did and never will exist.
It is ok.
You will not be special for it.

I went out looking for flowers for you
When even the daffodils hadn't yet peeked out.
I imagined myself finding three white flowers,
Pale maidens, quiet and starchy and stiff.
I imagined them singing you to sleep,
And it kept me warm while I looked.
I found none on the cold brown forest floor,
Covered in moldy ice and
Leaves transformed into ugly panes of glass.

The trees' branches were so thin,
Just curled and knotted black rope
Against a clean sky, white as a hospital sheet.
The boughs tangled up in bows,
And I wished that I could take them
And gather them in a vase for you, like flowers.
Like any picture written in branches,
If I shifted slightly,
They tangled at different points,
And I could never have gathered those new pictures.
Not in a million years...

Everything around me was the blank white of things asleep,
All bones and marble and the cotton at the top of a pill bottle.
I stood in that white so long my face felt red.
I went inside.
It felt wrong to abandon my quest,
But I knew it was thankless, fruitless,
Stupid to look for flowers in winter.
I knew, too, it could do you no good,
Whether you had flowers or not.

How like you it was that you should go
When the flowers did
And leave me with nothing
To offer.

When the natural color of your lips
Makes Pantone’s list
And suddenly for the first time in years
the **** lipsticks in the drugstore reflect back at you
A bouquet of roses which compliment your hair and eyes
Suddenly, when you never wore pink before
Now you revel in it

If your skin bubbles up in pimples
Your fingers float up of their own accord
Dancing with the shared delusion of
A clean excision
Yes, it works this way:
Remove the thing of evil that has poisoned the water
Pluck it neatly from the tree and watch the flowers bloom

The face answers your fingerprints in a drop of blood:
No, it does not work this way
Your skin, your life, is not a lever
No two-step process,
No fulcrum to remove and leave behind a simple rod, inert
Not even a Rube-Goldberg machine
To be followed back end over end
The handkerchief chain from the clown’s shirt cuff
spirals out impossibly with no simple beginning

Welts on your face in dappled shades
Pantone’s colors of the year
You cover these over with foundation that
does not quite match
This portion of blood you seal away
And that portion you smear on your lips
Loving as much of yourself as it is possible
To buy in a tube

Beneath the Earth, bequeathed to mud,
The soft pink worm there nobly stood,
And in the muck ahead did gnaw
A path with well-accustomed jaw.
Thus having made himself a place,
He felt the light shine on his face.
For though every worm's stone blind,
He has the sharpest animal mind.
It's what mankind will never know;
It's what the worm will never show;
It's how the meanest thing that lived
Received God's kindest natural gift.
For man will never understand
the lowly worms on which he stands.
Each thing that you have never noticed
Holds in itself some higher office.

Oh little pair of legs splayed out from beneath the house
I could pick up your sad white bones and hug them as they flopped
Brokenly
In my embrace like a wooden puppet

I know you would turn around and bite me
“But I helped you” the Anasazi warrior protested
“Ah, yes, but it is my nature” replied the snake
And I would die at peace with that knowledge
And forgive you over and over

What will I become in some time
Beyond your little pair of legs under the house
your little hand in the attic holding a powdered donut
The rope that dangles over the washed-out creek

Poor little broken snake that bites me
Poor little ghost that possessed my old porcelain doll
You ain't vicious in any way that don't come natural
You know the terror I became mourning those legs
You know who left your sticky little hands behind in the attic
You're a child forever and you know very well that
It's a warrior that the snake bites

Some things must be allowed to die.
Like pruned branches and withered annuals,
You can’t sustain all of it, nor should you…
So say goodbye to some parts of yourself,
Wrap them up like baby teeth in an old handkerchief,
Fertilize the yard with them,
Watch them decompose and brew beer with them,
But you can’t keep them around.
They’re dead, they’re dying, no matter what,
And holding on can never change that!
Let them hang around too long and one day,
You’ll reach for it,
Some lost piece of yourself,
And only close your hand around soft putrefaction.

You get hoarse and forget how to speak now
lightning struck your throat and left a cold opal there
all milk white and cornflower blue
riot fire noise trapped in a chunk of ice
the veins of it scraping the throat raw
and reaching down to fossilize the heart
the whole of the innards becoming included in the matrix
until it is all stone
until it is calcified chunks connected like a maze
waiting for some craftsman to pour resin over it
make a conversation piece, a coffee table
But you?
You will never speak again.

Worry is a talisman
That I touch and count
Like a rosary
Every bead is every thing
That ever might go wrong
And every touch wards it off
Worry uses up my hands in
Counting beads like an abacus
So swift is the movement of my fingers
That they are a blur
So involved is the action that I am
Paralyzed to do anything else but worry
It is common that we are told
Not to fear making mistakes
That each mistake advances experience
And confidence
And brings us further from worry
But having made the dreadful mistake
Whose birth I counted over and over
Whose bead I held in my hands
Sweating
And seeing what it held for me
I want you to know that the things you worry about
Are as bad as they promise to be
And as much as worry is paralyzing
So is every thing you are trying to ward off

Of course I’m selfish
What else would I be
Kneeling on bones and shielding them
With my body
With bared teeth
Well where else would I be
Does anybody not build this sort of monument
I want to know whose fridge isn’t covered
With crayoned blueprints
And then I want it to be me
Who told me to think this stuff
And when did I start listening
When did I stop fighting the hands
Pulling at my shoulders and waist
And turn inward instead
But also
Where the **** else would I be

I am like all other fools;
Nothing broke my heart.
My spine of brittle woven sticks
Cracked under nothing.
My lungs gave out under
Years of whistling
"Shu-Shu, Xu-Xu,
Xu-ni-de."
They had breathed in too many daydreams
And real air calcified them with the shock
Of finding it all had been delusion.

A life of smiling at babies and dogs and buttercups
Left me unprepared for their destruction
And my own ruin.
It was my own fault that I was abandoned
In the face of a tsunami of stormclouds
Barreling out of the Western sky:
The last sigh of a sun that goes there
Each day
To die.

Bury me under the chokecherry tree
Then they won't forget how and who I was
When life is done retching and spitting me out
Plant me with the kindred roots like a little cyanide seed
A hard and bitter pill in the wet black maw of the earth
Remind the little children
Of the red ridged fingertips that pressed my taut skin
They gauged that I was valuable and ripe
And bruised me

little animal walking in the dark
chased by the heartbeat, heartbeat,
the hammer that says
die alone in the dark
the downswing of it cruel on the skull
of the suffering little animal
in its misery in the road
You still take an analgesic
and feel nothing
a cure is a poison is a cure is a poison
you’re grateful to the berry
that killed you
and scared of the river water
that brought you back
scared of the stutter of that
heartbeat, heartbeat
the ache in the chest
the shortness of breath
the voice saying that was enough to die
now pay enough to live
heart-throat animal stumbling on a dark road
it can pay you as well as a rock can fly

What ergot prophecies existed in the past
of the coming of dead black suns and starless nights?
Some love affair with tragedy, ten millennia long,
that resulted in us all writing
"kindness and love and rest and holidays" in red ink.
I am tired of saving grains of rice for the world to come,
but the bandages my grandmothers wore around their arms
keep me from putting the *** on to boil.
I have dreams about the future, and only believe the nightmares,
And so I suppose that nothing changed after all.

Philosophy stretches back into pre-literate mist
You can watch it do this when you close your eyes and you are not yet asleep
This is just a ladder of time, a helix of faulty ancient dichotomies
G to C
Touch the step called “light and dark” and watch it resolve into weary gray
A to T
Touch this fragile rung, “man and woman,” and watch it crumble into dust
Nothing there for you to stand on, child, so don’t worry about it
Make a new ladder, a new rung, and **** them all
The grasping hands of the wordless past, the gibbering tongues
The blank faces that barely knew what living even meant
You know what it means.
Now do it.

The body’s unrelenting in its pain
Because God said it has to be this way
Light will shine and it will be this way
Some pain is unrelenting and must chase
Chase round a sleepless room from lay to lay
Light shines and you will know the chase of pain
You wake with it upon each newborn day
From couch to dining chair to bed you chase
And unrelenting it must be this way
Your spine all like a matchstick in its splay
A burnt out head and brittle down the length
Light color bone and splintered down the length
How can this driftwood bear the weight of pain
It has to. It just has to be that way.

Washing berries for a pie that I cook for someone else,
If they were for me alone I’d eat them straight and raw from the carton,
And if pesticides killed me, then I suppose I was a pest.
That’s no revelation;
I’ve tasted it on the skins of countless gala apples.
And what about other poisons, laced into blackberries and broccoli?
I can’t count them or know their names but I can hope
That one day they’ll gurgle in my gut like
The last note of a song,
And that’ll be the last I hear of it.

I never wanted this body
That rebels against me
It's too big
Too heavy
Hard to carry around

I never wanted to have to eat
To have to void
To have to cure sicknesses
To have to accept pain in my joints

I never wanted to know youth
Only to grow old
And I don't want to know
What's going to happen next
If I already feel old

I would be willing to skip to
Death
And commandeer the wispy vessel
Of a ghost

I would not even miss sleep

Strong dose, that girl
Taken on a spoon and you'll fall
Writhing to be the first to apologize at her skirts
Confessing sins known and unknown
Screaming them half-mad in the night
As the sweat drenches your sheets

Did the spoon clear those sins from your lungs
Did she build them up there
Brick by brick in the bronchi

You dream of her standing impassive
In the midst of the bacchanal
Object to be worshipped
Effigy to be burned
Single sane survivor in the whirlwind of tarantism
She engineers such hurricanes

Hair shines down from the cloud-pale face
Solid bars of sunlight through a hole in the sky
The palpable yellow beams of God's arms
As her fingers pluck the wind to send it roiling

White women's eyes flash in
Trickle-down smiles,
Outlined in nacre and kohl.
The fact that she turns forty once every year
Is not why she never grows old.
They won't die, they won't die!
By the skin of my thighs,
A new crop pops up every year!
With an antebellum name
And a draped-in-lace frame,
They grow up with poison in their ears.
Where am I going and where have I been,
And where do I find myself now,
But that same debutantes' court of white sin,
Wiping white tears from my brow?