his eyes were singing ghostly blues
blue weather clung tight to the sky that day
his hair was light, just barely blonde
how lucky you are, i told him
how lucky you are
i am so young but i know
how lucky you are

don’t talk to me like that, he said
but he held my hand
the ******* sewn to his left arm
harmless men can be forced
to bring harm to others
at the drop of a dictator’s hand

i had barely ever seen snow fall and he said
he’d never seen snow quite like this
red stuck gummed to the crystals
and the stove pipe chimneys choked out
skin charred like burnt paper
so white
they had died in the dark

i’m sorry, he said
how old are you, he said
five years old, i said
he shook his head
and led me towards the doors
of buchenwald

“It was so quiet, one of the killers would later say, you could almost hear the sound of ice rattling in cocktail shakers in the homes way down the canyon.”

William Garretson was the gardener of 10050 Cielo Drive, in Los Angeles, a summer house rented by Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. He lived in the guest house on the property. On August 9th, 1969, members of the Manson family visited the residence and brutally murdered all the inhabitants, as well as Garretson’s friend Steve Parent. Garretson claims he had no knowledge of the murders that night. He is the only survivor of the Tate Murders.

your screams sounded
like fiberglass breaking
an almost impossible noise
like a hemorrhage at midnight
i was walking through the garden
and i swear
i heard the neat click
when he severed the phone line
if only i had known

i have thought up one hundred scenarios
in which i saved your life
but there is only one
when i don't
and every night i try to justify this reality
because i could have sworn
the sound of their boots
on the steel fence
was the telephone
ringing

when they saw the headlights
swerve over the lawn
steve was as good as dead
shattered like a lightbulb
under pressure
four shots pressed into his forehead
a candid bullet kissed him faceless
his absence was
a tell tale piquancy of slaughter
i lay in bed that night
and turned my face to the wall
when i heard the screams

tell me i reek coward
say the raw red skin of my knuckles
shaved away from the foundation of my raised veins
as i sat through another police interrogation
are nothing compared to the red poppy
that blossomed in the center of his chest
call me callous
but i will never forgive myself
for trimming the flowers
that sat innocent on the coffee table
in the middle of a mass grave
all i can say is
i was just the gardener

i found her
blooming on the living room floor
the baby cut
weeping from her umbilical cord
still attached to mother and father
by a rope traveling from neck to neck
thorny slices of fetal skin
peppering the carpet
blood sprays still wet
were soaking into the wooden door
sadism comes in many
limp limbed contortions
but only one color
and i saw *HIS smile
carved in the cavity
of her stomach
i swear to god
i wish i could say
i didn't see it coming

i found the severed tendons
of his fingers
suspended in the eerie light
of the swimming pool
pruned like overripe plums
the remnants of his face
scattered across the driveway
like taraxacum seeds
their bodies all
hanging like wilted stems
broken xylems hinged to sepals
by threads of sap
running down uprooted ligaments
there is not enough therapy in this world
to cure the silence in the garden
upon the aftermath of execution

the shapes of murders' footprints
left raised beds in my shoulder blades
manure smeared ***** across my lips
every flower i have ever planted since
has languished in the smell of your corpses
melded into the callouses
of my finger tips
i am just the gardener
and i am all broken anthers
petals shriveled, toxic
call me a survivor
but there is blood inside my filaments

the minute the man walked onto the train
with his forty in a paper bag
i noticed the
salty
sickening
smell of
trash. he’s got a petty criminal’s
sneaker drag,
he had that looking for trouble
vision lag,
and he looked me straight in the eye
so call me trouble but the body language
of that
kind of guy
makes my throat a foreign land spit travels through
in tentative swallows,
the aura of quiet anger
around that
kind of guy
makes for a swollen tongue
that’s rough as a desert is dry. with his lumpy coat and
strange emotionless
maliciousness
i know his kind of dog and
it’s one gentle pat away from viciousness
it felt just like old times,
reeked bad news in the sunday paper lines and
sliced my memory like a quick surgeon’s incision
so i averted my gaze but
kept him at the corner of my vision.
he talked about how he lived nearby,
he was on his way,
he was on time
but them guys they,
only talk to dealers and they
only tell lies. and i gently squeezed
the scabs on my knees
and tried to hold my breath or at least breathe
shallow
until his presence wasn’t so threatening
but truly, it always was, because,
it was going to be
until he stepped through the automatic sliding subway doors
and surfaced
got swept away in the city above me.
his body had to be far away
from my body
for me to feel safe.

a haiku I: carbonated water rocks

slightly flavorful
carbonated beverage
one liter bottle

a haiku II: ode to seltzer

in massachusetts
seltzer costs eighty-nine cents
one liter bottles?

a haiku III: read and recycle and stuff

NY-MA-ME-CT-VT
five cent deposit (960 mL)
**** haiku format…
you liars that isn’t a ******* liter that is less than a liter **** america for not adapting to the metric system.

i was just recently given the youtube link for my performance, so the live version from Louder Than A Bomb Massachusetts is here as well: http://youtu.be/TaVoQ9si4t8*

we are all disconnected
like rain lashing against the tongues of teenagers
who just want a taste of purity
deep in the battle trenches of the suburbs,
they're dancing in the storm
dancing, in parking garages and derelict strip malls,
empty streets fill with shaky feet
beating at fear like brush fires we can't stomp out

and after the sun sets the air tastes clean
and we breathe in time to the people sleeping in
gingerbread houses creeping up and down the cul de sac
battle wounds that drew blood eventually present themselves,
and sewer water seeping into parking lots as dry as a droughts...
but what we don't know is there, we don't ask any questions about

it's the little things...that are not the big issues
while we're chugging fluoride water bottled in adipose tissue
capitalism splitting at the seams with pyramid schemes
believing new clothes and big macs are a cure for low self esteem...
storing dreams in mcdonalds bags
we look away from the obvious problems
so as not to remind us...
we buy into these lies while we watch our lives pass us by
we're actually not that good at hiding our scars

so please say pharmaceutical...
and it sounds sort of like suicidal
a pill is a bit, a paycheck is a harness,
and your television is a bridle
fox news feasting on the population, brainwashing, whitewashing
suffocating education with hate and justification,
this nation has been sculpted by foolish politicians
so realize this before it's too late:
we are only hooked if we take the bate
waiting for tidal waves to rip up out of the ground
the whole world falling down like dominos
take a look at your own town
everyone is drowning in themselves

our fear of the truth is like putting hands in fires
limbs scorched unaware till we're up to our knuckles
crying fighting screams and watching fried up
dried up muscles go slack suddenly so tender so tired...
repeat after me:
our fires only hurt if we try to stomp them out
try to swallow them and burn our mouths
scream over each other like a pack of braying cattle all saying the same thing
the human race is it's own organism and it's dying...
we are knee deep in a civilization that has lost it's humanity
it's a legacy
to the same old ball and chain clamped around your legs
you do the man a favor and break yourself in his wake

in the age of the apocalypse of the pursuit of happiness
don't surrender yourself to complacency,
we are mechanics not machines
so don't be another agent of this age of conformity
don't self-destruct because it feels necessary
in order to survive in this society

don't allow yourself to hang on to memories like you can rewind time.
repeat after me:
we cannot rewind time.
it is time for this generation to live in the present
change the future for the better

happiness isn't something you can find in another beer...a thrift shop shelf...
in a lie you want so badly to believe...
my happiness is inside of me.

he picked apart the movements
of girls' hips
like he forgot what his momma looked like
like he never knew how to believe a female tongue
he never thinks too hard
about the sentences she can make
only what she'd look like if he
forced himself inside of her

he ate his words like
a picky child who only ate cigarettes
and ******
he bathed in the brute fury
of how they never payed much attention to him
until they were screaming stop
and he was going anyways
he hated them for being beautiful
he hated beautiful things in general

but he liked the feeling of cornering his prey
in a dark stairwell
he liked playing the devil
and walking to meet sin with a backwards heart
a heedless skull
a set of fingernails that always chipped
as he picked away at them with his teeth

he liked to think he could have anything his way
if he made it so
he liked to know that if he made himself
the faceless shadow in a dark corridor
he could become the boogyman
he could wrap around bodies like silicon
and swallow them like tremors cracking the earth

every girl he'd ever hated for her body
would have nightmares about him
and he liked them better as dead bodies
because it's the only time they'll shut up and **** him
he boasts tire tracks running along main bloodlines
a broken brain like a land mine
a chance of luck that he could **** some time
following the scent of something feminine
the idea that his presence alone
could shake her down to her knees

he wants to take every thing
that has never been given to him
he takes joy in the distorted
the sick satisfaction
of tasting the caviar that no one ever served him
the princess, trapped, in a black dress
pinned down in the dust
behind the restaurant dumpster after dusk
what an interesting view from above
he thought as he perforated the flesh
and though he never cared for the victim's clothing choice
he liked her best in red

he was not a mommy's boy
and it showed
he took care to take in a way
that he knew left limbs hollow
in it's wake
slit wounds in a human
that were harsh
in places where white legs flashed beacons
a wraithlike shape that closes in
on women wreathed in dark streets
and poetry that hasn't been written yet

she had a sonnet to spout and a poison
of malignant parasites she couldn't shake out
that latched onto her veins
as she arranges them over her arms
and lower around her knees
and he never showed much promise
and he's angry that he has never been able to please
the world
so he waits for her
and he takes from her

and now he traipses out
with the blood
and leaves her to lie there kissing an ink spill
from her pen to the tar
have a billion conversations with the pavement
until the wounds dry up
she'll stumble into the arms of gravity
and leave her dead body behind
live with the infestation of his invasion
fused into her spine

making her squirm and shiver
years after she wormed herself out of your grip
she will always feel sick
of all the ways you almost got away with it
even when you've also died and gone
she knows
you've never been a mama's boy
and you'll never be a ladies' man
you'll only ever be the amens she made
after praying you would die
at point blank range

i asked people for writing prompts and one that was given to me was to write about the kennedy assassination from the point of view of a school teacher.

"It is time for a new generation of leadership, to cope with new problems and new opportunities. For there is a new world to be won."* -John F. Kennedy

i'm a mathematical woman and i know
a bullet from a bolt action rifle
travels at a velocity of two thousand feet per second

i'm a mathematical woman and i know
if you fire three bullets straight at the target
there is more than a fifty percent chance
they will bite hungrily into bone

i am a mathematical woman but
i can know all of these things and still
i cannot derail a national tragedy
and i cannot lift a bleeding skull
from jackie's hands

i always thought the black and white truth
could show you facts through polaroid
laying bare the negatives and the positives
but now i stare at grainy pictures of the crime scene
and the parade that felt so hopeful
is exposed to be garish
the stains on mr kennedy's suit
are too dark for brave convictions
i can see the evil spattered across him
i wonder what kind of person would ever
spit wounds on such a face
like that

i was bringing these pictures
back to my children
lined up in elementary school rows
my instinct now is to not show them
the chronic pain that pulses
through frescos of execution
the pollution of optimism
curdling in the wake
bottoming out and trickling down
pooling into pipe dreams
maybe when they're older they can understand
the way he was pitched headlong
into the arms of crying doves

i wonder if my influence will determine
the presence of another lee harvey oswald
in the births of my classroom
does he sits in the back
in one of those plastic seats
is he hungering for the encumbrance of
a fresh pistol with a safety that never shuts up
a barrel that hums against his shoulder blade
a friendly trigger to hold hands with
is there any possibility i could hold the responsibility
of taking the attendance
maybe calling the name of an impending killer
can i possibly bear the weight of human suffering
in equations of newspaper pages devoted to assassination
and half developed pictures of growing people

i love children
i pray for their ability to flourish
i teach them to measure their worth
beyond the lengths of wooden rulers
their transformation to flowering petals
from pygmy buds
is full of pollen ambitions
the promise and possibility
of barren soil blooming into gardens
i'm a mathematical woman
but my love has no limits
no square roots or dividends
and i never
claimed to have the answers
and though i am here to edify
i still have a lot of questions

so let me ask you this
if i do not pluck dandelions
from my garden by their stems
if i allow them to grow and do not
sever them from their soil
is a murderer growing in my garden
or am i growing a murderer