abuse
the sun branches out
its rays of light towards your throat
to burn away the traces of hope
left in you,
and the weeping moon
watches as you plunge the knife
into your chest
while the sun, still there,
watches over her back
to make sure she knows
who is the one
in charge.
Community Convalescence
Those abrasions on her cheeks
were said to be the result of being
fucked from behind and rammed
into the rough shag fibers en vogue
in 1978 by her father’s friends
in her own home on a school-year
weekend so full but empty
with the mother gone
through the decade’s attachment to divorce
and no mention of the mustachioed
father—looking like the era’s TV cops—
but Facebook heals all wounds
even to the face, all the way to the depths,
so she smiles with a daughter
as a “friend suggestion”
among the hundred possible pix
and opportunities to post
every mild success and hope for a toast
by the virtual audience
for whom deep-napped carpets
and their burns have cooled to ice
with a chuckle at a style so passé.
I’m Lucky, I Guess
I sometimes feel like a misanthrope
and the world seems an unbearable horror.
I’m glad I’ve never been able to purchase
a gun, or I doubt I’d still be here now.
At times like this, life seems at best pointless,
at worst it feels like a cruel form of torture.
As soon as I wake, the self loathing
and humiliation come in wave after wave
of sickness. Intoxicants are my only
hope, and oblivion is all that I desire.
I’m lucky, I guess because every time
it’s happened so far, something has
woken me up and dispersed the black clouds.
Shooed away that fucking black dog.
I’m lucky, I guess. What else can I say ?
THE CALL OF NATURE
I hear crickets chirping in my bones,
Cicadas humming in my brain.
Roots grow through my skin,
Weaving in and out like a tapestry.
There are dandelions on my tongue;
They taste like the sun in my teeth.
You may say I’ve gone mad,
Gone with the fishes and the birds,
But I have lived with my head in the clouds,
Since I heard the call of nature –
Of peace, of solace, of tranquility –
Of madness and solitude,
But awakening still.
And so I’d rather be mad than asleep.
Woman disguise
When the sky is gray, Parisian,
Sip coffee and zip it,
Your iris speaks to the tune of
Coltrane, Yo-Yo Ma,
The space between my breath—
If meaning lies there,
Let philosophers argue,
Your lap is better
For my paws to mine
The wolf inside you
Caged, wrapped in an ugly red
Beautiful bow.
Vertigo
Fresh ruffles
of surf, rising, pattering against beams of steel
saturating
the sky with treble interjections; convulsive gyrations
of effortless
rage, lightnings on waves, cold and bare, gather
together
under a spring moon.
He wanted
to tell her between the stretches of electricity that
made the
tulips bleed with poignant scent, filling the air with
sadness;
the thought of it a simple thing, the solid paces of
silence,
God’s own calmness.
What kind
of witness would she be? The rain whispers, intimidates
the dying
to lie down with the dead, disappearing into vapors,
tugging
and sealing down edges of brick and mortar, desperately
seeking
to become eroded.
She stops,
spreads her arms apart, his heroic figure of comfortable
subjectivity
catches her breath between the metaphors of sunlight,
his words,
swirling wants against frozen lips; she knows. Loneliness
reaches
her soul as she looks down suffering vertigo.
Wretch’s prayer for Every Dismal Day
If I get through this one day
that spills into
the void
where I am continually lost
always left
for dead
if I get through this
pattern of screw-ups
this one last bitch smack up
if I get through this blowtorch high
cradling that needle
like Mother Mary cradled baby Jesus
if I get through this Chinese water torture
on my veins
if I live amongst people who
DON’T
shoot up
people who fuck up
but don’t hit it
if I promise I will let every
oozing sore dry up – I don’t want that infection
within me any longer
if I kiss this needle tip
the end
and wake up tomorrow
with just my Newport’s
will you float me a few more good years?
