|
| 
Goaded to a fine, ripe point, you sit swilling below
a white rainbow playing with cadmium as light or telling
a new sheath or outfit.
Leaning I explore all visible, possible, measurable
inches of you
jealous of your ravishing suitor, so tan
and varied, original.
What can I do but loiter at your sight
and wait for your man to rough me up again,
with that reddening, beastly stubble on
his surface, man.
| | |
|
Bathroom carpet ladybug
I can only put you upright
you have to breathe on your own
In the curling mist
of my washing
your wings are sponged
and leaden
for the floor
I can't help but
make you into
some wild metaphor
or rather fatalistic object
for how my life is going
so this act of
spooning you up into
a band aid and
moving you to
some ferns is my
own silly way
of evening things
out.
| | |
| 
Goaded by an unnerving sense of
what lay beneath me
I pried my uppermost finger under
the white cracks of that boiling
clay gumbo
Granny pointed to puddles
with fingers of swan-skin
cut slowly by roses into silk
and blue blood beneath them;
always asking me to
do the jumping properly
"No, it would be better that
he get to read to her.
Let him take
the orange
juice to her,
they need time together."
Into supper there
was a loud wind outside
running over the pool surface
shaking the diving board
Several figurines
lay to dry on a glass rolling cart
ladled from the red mud and
made into dogs and cats and dinosaurs
by my small hands
He held out his hand to me and
shook her ashes from his hair and hands
quietly, wagging in undulating waves
the fraying edges
of his home-sewn stole; the gold
thread of that lovely Epitrachelion
soaked straight by
our snake-hole
creek
| | |
| Allegedly, in a recent bedroom
I lied among rolling velvet mountains
and wrote down notes for hours
until dawn
in pearl fountain pen
on some giggly opera singer's belly
about my impressions of
the "selfless act of disappearing"
and some other zeitgeist of mine.
It was boring
and wonderful
and disgusting
rolled up like sashimi
And again; supposedly
my ears heard hard of heavy petting
from gunshot fingers in the dark
Just then, after hours of me sleepless
the sound of her breathing made me cold
at the spine
like flowers on a bamboo shoot
popping out loudly
shivering; white and drooping
like her bust
like her tongue
I was boring
and unavailable
and still I stand excused
rolled up in rice like bland eel
And again; desperately
my eyes searched out that dark
for something to sleep on staring | | |
| 
Saltwater taffy
sucking up the tongue dry
from doors down on the
ocean peering through the crooning pelicans
from the Palazzo, white with shit
They ate at me and
ate at me and
ate at me those gull fucking gulls
with their waxed legs
and thick, far-from-vanishing eyelashes
making water boil and churn
under their webbed feet
Me, turned red as a lobster
gurgling in the vat
while those orange heels splashed
holding my neck down, rubbing my claws under
as their simmering, feathers fell
on the surface as the salt water
fumed in my mouth
under my shell
Wings beat with the sour in my mouth
of sickness and seasoning
collating in the heat
split white from wet
as the sodium soaked
through my skin on the pier
through the Palazzo, white with shit
| | |
|
