I slept with her, my rapacious pen, took me in quiet vengeance in
full on conjugation

raken and taken, me,
her overlording me now, her authorship, so long held
in my maledom abeyance,
a kept imprisonment, unleashing at last, a tongue lashing~leashing,
de-spite my un-desirous craven lying supplications,
excuses of innocence and accident, coincidence and conflation,
ashes, ashes, denials incinerated, all fall down

she wrote/stabbed upon my heartless chest,
in the cheap crudités colors of a prisoner’s inking,
“user of words mine, all mine”

gathered up my innards of loose words,
speculative notes & titles yet to be,
born and kept hid in password protected silent back labor files,
now hers, leaving me sputtering, unable to create,
a homeless mute citizen, possession-less,
helplessly hoping her hovering harlequin might relent,
without any shelter, even a glimmering, a single aleph or bet

she celebratory cackled and clawed,
professed her reclamation ownership of all my poems predecessors,
zola j’accusing that I, ripped from her forcibly,
with no granted permission, her womanly touché of my scribing,
warning of no more global warming for my unprivileged hands,
daren’t try for pretenses of stolen legal guardianship,
warning of a new, forced caining inscription,
a tattooing of  “thief” upon my 5 knuckled right ******,
“plagiarist” boldly inked in back & blue upon my left palm

I, predator,
she, victim,
of my now self-professed, admitted confess,
she, my single victim,
of a decade long serializing criminal coverup

her parting poem a threatening,
herein issued in this very verse,
damning all who would falsely credit themselves,
to suffer shame and an unimaginable curse,
this, the newborn eleventh of ten commandments

parting, she kissing my lips, even my emptied apertures,
with warning bitings,
she knew all my
my numerous noms de guerre,
no dead scrolls caves to hid in, and to be discovered some future day,
and if ever marked as copyrighted,
’twas no tunneling escape,
the exposed truth to be over-stamped
upon all, upon each, in every language,

”copied right from the tongue of a woman!”


and she would be wright...

A clear trail left in trance is how I shall form words,
Elegantly, majestically casting them onto a blank paper, focused on creating poetry, a time recording friend has gone missing,
Now the lonely sound of my scratching against the thin paper, lead by transience of its decay is the only sound we can hear.
What once was a world to create fantasy has drowned, black as ink into the darkness of a never ending tale, time and time again,
As if to hold on to embers, scared to lose all light when the last one goes out, for a cold, uninspired, spiriling dark of ones mind,
With the mission to accompany her throughout each and every writing as it unfurls, comes to life and simply blossoms in pride,
As I see a smile cast on her face, the determination to keep going alightens a flame, but unceartenty overcomes my weakened body,
When the trace of my mark begins to fade, I wonder how long it will be, until there is nothing more to say, do or think about,
Even if this dreamlike tale of endless, ongoing poetry were never to end or falter, never to be distorted nor interrupted;
Even if you don't have to die in a dream,
one is bound to wake up sooner or later,
As a tired hand carelessly, roughly, lays me down,
I wonder how many poems one can write,
Before running out of the ink of the mind.

~ Umi

What if the people in this room were the pages upon which we wrote: documented with our travels, or inscribed with our beliefs. Our stories, once secrets, become legible. We carry them in heart to heart conversations both trivial and deep. We brainstorm, helping each other write the missing parts and next chapters with our actions as much as our words. We read those around us in the quiet company of our thoughts- our dreams- sometimes loosing ourselves in the blank spaces left by those we once loved. We look up briefly from our reading with renewed perspectives, and we move. Our hands both reach for the same pen at once to rewrite the narrative, passing late-night notes to each other if only to keep ourselves woke. We don’t name what we’ve written, but we sign our names at the bottom and call it ours for the time being. We are impermanent. Still, we leave our marks like fingerprints on the pages of each other -  happy thoughts and revision comments color coded in the margins- our own jam session hidden between the lines we stay writing with no idea or expectation of how it will sound in the end. We utter mysteries and we’re misunderstood, simplifying our confusion into basic metaphors or parables, so that those who pick up where we leave off can understand them, or find some common ground; some shared chapter. We borrow pens and finish each others’ sentences as we collapse on the same endings. Our dialogue subsides into unspoken movement: into silent eyes reading. We are campfire surrounded by the stories we stay telling — that without, we'd be left to scratch the indiscernible signs of love on cave walls for only the darkness to forget.