i do as a ritual
or sometimes
have lost a wedding ring
intended for Blanca
but
yo soy
enchanter

1
2
3
4
5
6

each is part of a knucklebone
a divination of entrails
and all games
eternally
are fated to decide
nothing

Miss Maiden,
might I compare you
to that of the guillotine?

Your swooping grace
like the edge of a
shining
silvery blade
that curves and cuts
across the sky
so seductively
slitting the throat
of the horizon

From the threshold of dreams
to bring a new day
Where we feed our blood
back into the monotonous machine
then drop to our knees
and pray for divine intervention

My femme fatale,
Could you take me out of this?
to break cycle
before you wax away

You know you were always
my favorite deity,

Artemis, Artemis
You’re the art I miss
from a life unfulfilled
From the music

The untold story
agonizing inside
writhing for a release

So I’m drawing you down
to this plane
to hunt me as a willing sacrifice.

Won’t you drop from the sky
and come blow my mind?

Just leave my head in the basket.

Bright child of the Tarot, a new age awaits you –

but not through the mazes you’re wandering in.

Your gypsy desire and clairvoyant excursions

are setting your beautiful brain all a-spin.

The dog at the precipice barks out a warning:

the FOOL, the MAGICIAN and PRIESTESS are wrong

Pay no heed to their signs and the omens around you –

let faith be your shield when the DEVIL seems strong.

JUSTICE, as blind as the HERMIT is *****,

has seen that our TOWER is stricken and doomed.

The SUN, MOON and STARS in their orbits bear witness

as LOVERS  in ******* to DEATH are consumed…

Egypt can’t help you – the CHARIOT‘s  stalled

While the TEMPERANCE angel was mixing the drinks.

The EMPRESS (a tedious feminist) preaches

an upside down future, the HANGED MAN thinks…

Though the WHEEL almost crushes you turning this way

And the staff of correction has battered you hard

I am sure you will make it, if only you pray

to the sovereign elector who holds every card

for a ray of redemption to light up your way.

Let the major arcana now bow and acknowledge

as  JUDGMENT is sounded and shatters the sky

that righteous and just is the blessed Redeemer

who loves every lunatic card-addled dreamer

like you and like me. Therefore hear as I cry

that the WORLD in its fulness can’t harbor His love –

nor the heavens within nor without nor above…

May the HIEROPHANT‘s dynasty wither away

and the EMPEROR‘s  scepter be broken to shards

as the breath of God’s Spirit comes into our world

to reveal the true STRENGTH of your house made of cards.

There’s a crystal ball that sits on my dresser
that I never fully learned how to use.  There’s
a pack of Tarot cards that reside beneath my
pillow that I use to play solitaire with.  I
have never known what it means to
“Be like Jesus.”

I find the numbers
              13        and        18
to be rather unlucky, which is probably why
I branded one onto me externally and the
other internally.  I wonder if my grandmother
now knows the secrets of the world, if my
battle-eyed grandfather knows the
key to redemption.  I wonder if
my sister ever learned how to control
the talking skulls in her closet.

I wonder what my Pastor would say about
my fear of Purgatory.

Three days
three weeks
three years
five years later and I am still waiting for
                                                                ­              Absolution.

I’ve been thinking about hands
a lot lately and how fingerprints are like
permanent, foreshadowing tree rings
etched onto our beings; I wonder if
the number of rings on my palms have any
correlation to the number of years I’ll live or
the number of years he’ll live or the number of
years that she lived. I’ve been thinking a lot about
        life lines        and        heart lines
and if there is any stock to be found in palmistry;
I wonder how my fate line got to be
so muddled with my luck line.  

I see my life the way a clairvoyant would:
in cut-up and choppy strips of film—
I should have seen the omens,
I should have read the smoke signals,
I should have recognized the cards.

Act One began on a waning crescent moon
and continued until its gluttonous belly
had swollen with light; I thought to
myself that craniums made of gallium
often melt the quickest, that blood filled
with plutonium often flows the slowest.  I would
have given my body up to the pathologist free of charge,
would have let him dig his hands into my entrails for
some sort of divination, some sort of revelation—
I was never told to beware the Ides of June
nor the Kalends of November.

Act Two began with the birth of Jack Frost
and has been continuing without intermission for
the past four celestial cycles; I thought to
myself that heart valves made of sodium polyacrylate
often love the most, that sinkholes disguised as
fingertips often feel the deepest.  He whispered
in my ear cliched words about not believing in
God, but how I made him feel blessed, and in
that moment I knew he was the oneiromantic being
that had been shadowing my dreams since 1996—
I guess you could say that, sometimes,
I believe in love.

There is an art to fortune-telling
there is an art to hands
there is an art to bones
there is an art to dreams, and over the years,
I have found them coinciding more often
than not.  In my sleep, in notebooks, in
irises, in mirrors, in poetry, in small little sighs.
I do not know if I believe in fate or destiny, in
God, in auras, or in the Blood Moon Prophecy,
but I do know that I believe in you.  I find myself writing
sappy verses and smelling your shirts and I do
not know if it is because I miss you or if it is because
I’m bored or if they’ve somehow
                       mergedintothesamething.  

I’ve been wondering a lot lately about
where you show up on my hands; about where
he showed up and where she showed up.  I want
to know which lines bisect and which lines fall
short; I want to know if the resemblance between
        mother        and         daughter
continues into that of my palm lines.  I want to know
if my life line matches hers and if my heart line
is even worth giving away—

find me in your crystal ball, make me
your sacrificed animal, look for my body
in the stars, and we will know that
        it was all made to be.