stayed with a woman
and her sister
for a few weeks
up by the chesapeake
on a little river
with a dock
that audienced
the most beautiful
sunsets
a man could witness
she was a good woman
widowed
quick to think of others
before herself
never got drunk before noon
worked hard and long
for the money she earned
and I appreciated her
and her hospitality

her sister
smoked ****
and drank expensive wine
on that dock
during the earliest hours
of the day
looking upwards
all the way till that
beautiful sunset
I would join her
while her sister was hard
at work

I appreciated my woman
for her work habit
for the *** and the
hospitality she gave so
willingly and passionately
however I also appreciated
her sister
in many of the same ways
which is why I was asked
loudly and violently to
cut my visit short
after only two
quick weeks

I still miss
those sunsets

Her eyes are the stained glass broken from confession.
Her withered hair buried beneath dirt gravel.
Her forbidden mind fosters slobs of crazy.
Her mind is a battlefield of Trojan takeover.
Her bare feet remember sacred ground of tainted memories.
Her ears embrace the screech of still weather.
Her grapefruit mouth juiced with venom is tasteless.
her sharp egg shelled fingertips woven from braids of straw.
Her body is the Earthquake ruptured by the vibrations of collision.
Her thoughts trespass gated abandonment
Her firework pen exploding with gunpowder secrets.
Her gunpowder secrets deterring the sanity.
Her cracked lips cobweb from silenced words.
Her puppet stringed smile puts on a show to the audienced world.
Her soul has been toyed with by the cynical Fates.
Her echo without direction is a heartbroken drum line.
Her armor has been dowsed with sharp, penetrating words.
Her skin has painted stories interior to her porcelain frame.
Her soulless story can be dry swallowed by rocks.
Her tears bleed of whispered screams.

(Jenny's Granny's house. Ayr.)

Where seasonal root veg soup
Warmly journeyed our throats
Granny Jean, skin translucent as glass,
Sheer, showing tendril veins beneath
Crinkled cliff-edge lips at Jenny's budding womanhood
She knew hers lay as barren
As insignificant as the pale Mojave borderlands.

Brazen-cheeked dolls and pastel bears
Audienced my transition from slip to sundress
Back in the lucid haze of the pensioner's kitchen
Where dust particles hived like antique film grain
Sat Jenny; painted lips like crisp apple skin
Freckled cheeks hollowing atop
Her milkshake's flimsy plastic straw

Raspy, bubbly ***** filled
The kitchen; appliances groped
By the pious smite of the sun
The kind of light they say never to walk towards
Then, a weathered cough and the stiff moan of a rocking chair
Just to jest fate
Was none of our business yet; I was taken by the hand

We pass many exhibits
On the austere lilac fridge:
"Mr. & Mrs Richard D. Barclay, wed on 11th of Oct 1961"
And crayoned from her own hand, aged 10; "Me and Granny B"
A waxy glyph on lemon sugar-paper not always in memoriam
But among the moth-wing wallpaper lilies
For now

Dust dunes like mattress ghosts
Collect in mushroom clouds above Jenny's sudden weight
While I feed myself to the mirror
My frock, flesh, hair all seep
Into the totalitarian whiteness of our room
And I am happy if this is my course through life
I know I'm no one

I try on, as I shake goodbye,
Jean's hands; fire-crafted leather baseball gloves
They do not fit just yet but
When my hands no longer sheen in the virtuous sun
When I feel citrus hand soap grate into each wrinkled chasm
I promise you, gran, I will remember
Even the Mojave desert will see rainfall.

It was immaterial who had fired the first proverbial shot in the great Schenectady logomachy.
What was immediately clear, however, after the proverbial dust had proverbially settled
was that the battle had left no survivors.

Proverbially.

And what had begun as a simple ballot measure to rebrand the municipal mascot
had ended in the annihilation of every intellect in Schenectady County.
And much of the East, West, and No Coast regions of the United States.

The grass roots campaign to replace the Schenectady Patriot with the Schenectady Concientious Objector
(a figure no less devoted to country, but more "free thinking," its proponents would argue)
had gathered unexpected steam when introduced to the public at large
in a tweet by the nation's commander in chief.

The inevitable result being a relentless and fast paced evolution of the story
by all-day-all-night-all-the-time news producers.
All using the same words with different tone and inflection.
And the relitigation of every detail
by 37% of American households.  
Including 6% that didn't actually give a ****, but enjoyed participating.

So what had been good natured
and modestly ambitioned
civic badinage
progressed through all the stages of twenty-first century newspeak
familiar to the politically observant of the time.
With any nuanced or genuine debate
relegated to micro-audienced podcasts
and IRC channels scattered about the internet.

And when the measure passed.
As part of a pendulum swing greater than itself.
The victors
taken by surprise
and frayed at all edges
by the death threats and vitriol visited upon them in the preceding weeks
felt sure
that everything would be better off simply left alone.
While their detractors
apoplectic
foretold the end of civilization.
And prepared accordingly.

I remember the first time
My heart felt
Sick.
Sick for someone else.
Her face has faded from my
Memory
But not the feeling of my chest
Hollowing
For the first time.

Every pulse spent with her
Was like that of a fist
Hitting the head of a drum from
The inside.

Or like sinking.

A soft, crumbling
Concave.
Like fleeting footprints in
The sand of a bad
Dream.

I suppose it was pity, mostly.
Slumped with the stature of a
Vulture.
All crooked and
Insecure.
Of course my adolescence couldn't
Identify
With the terminology
Of such a foreign
Energy.

She wasn't alarming.

There was a subtleness to her.
She was like creeping
Quicksand.
Only,
I didn't know I was being drawn in
Further
Until the air became
Thick
To breath.

She wasn't evil.

There was a
Timidity
To her.
She radiated
Stagnancy.
Something I had never
Audienced before.

She was like the only
House
One finds at the
End
Of a road long
Forgotten
By civilization and
Laughter.
Broken and splintered from the Weight
Of buried burdens and
Contraventions
Of the white picket fenced
American
Dream.

She was like the figure one
Reluctantly
Forms in the
Dark
And her
Silence
Was the comforting thought that
Nothing
Is ever really there.

I know it's because of that
Forced
Reassurance
That she oozed the
Disregarded
Desperation
Of an
Unsolved
******.
The one tossed in a
Box and thrown on a shelf.

Overlooked.

To think of it
Now
I can't help but wonder if

The others saw her too.