Purple
The sunlight pierces.
In the corner of my eye
is a shape.

Memory
River of my remembering.
The fishes who eat themselves,
are slaves to the current.

chains between my ankles
jangle louder
as I inch towards the comfort
of a familiar tree

Under its shade,
where I buried Yesterday
along with the sins and joys of youth,
Moss has spread

What a day!
Cats and dogs at a gray soggy play!
And I,
wet like a rat in a bucket emptied spray,
afloat in some other soggy boggy day
when love sloshed in a dismal pool of gray,
floundering in a fiendish feline fray,
stuck and struck in her seismic, sonic sway…

Oh, that catty countenance with fanged sustenance,
turbid turbulence and lurid malevolence,
that midnight ambulance in horrid remembrance!

Hunting stare hunched in her browbeating brow.
Puny purring powwow met with caterwaul and yawl.
Sweet savannah meow gone in  hellish growl.

Alarming anger on an angular arch.
Claws bared in a mad menacing march.
Crisscrossed with a seeping scratch and such!

What a row!
Rage, a full bent feline bow,
ready to lash a claw; or ready just to throw
fire flicking arrows through two slits narrow,
hissing, spitting, screeching and scratching
over my poetry popping pillow!

           Ripping, rooting, pawing and clawing
           my chuffy, puffy, poofy and goofy
           poetry popping pillow!

Insults stood on end at verbal animosity.
No reciprocity to my purring grandiosity.
No curiosity to quell her feral ferocity.

Such feline a fever...
I’m aligned to see cats never.

My cattish brunette, now a silhouette,
bitter a vignette from seismic a duet,
smoldering a briquette on blank a palette.

She can not understand
how much a heart can desire
something it never had.
Those little hands and little toes
soft coos and a tiny, button-nose.
Wrapped in white, an angel sleeping,
peaceful and drowsy,
with all the angels waiting.
With hands that don't know how to stay
and cries are all to communicate,
a darling angel grows and cleaves,
relying on one for all she needs.
And wherever in Heaven she may be,
your lonely mother waits for thee.

Is this what writers do?
Conjure the worst then set you there, contorting
to listen for the beauty that sings in suffering?
Your boiling body fights, trembling
and next to you in darkness, brooding
I see the struggling and the worst
and imagine  your beauty

as a memory that enters a room
full of mourners-
sunlit breeze captured
in billowing fabric
which turning and holding
there for a moment
lets you go
as the tears and the chatter
go on

Jan 2021

They came to me in
a febrile dream.
Whispered screams and
malformed limbs.
They wanted to drag
me to the hell they
came from, but I fought,
and got well.

when I tell my mom I feel sick
the first thing she does
is kiss my forehead to see if I have a fever
and
I just feel like
there's a metaphor there somewhere

Further than ever
A promise to break
A river lit silver
A heart left to ache
To sink or to swim
To run or to stay
I’ll sleep through November
Awake me in May