mania (august 2013)

I spent my life today

All hundred years of it

Lighting american spirits

Under the rose dusk

Of light pollution,

Rising rising

High in my own smoke dream,

Arcing my fingers deep

Deep

Deep

Into a girl with a lion heart

Taken from the chest

Of my father

The alcoholic. Take me

Heroin fiend

I will forgive

Your emptiness;

I am a ghost too

A feverish woman

Like a burning altar

An ashy memory

Only remembered in the dark

Of an evil thing

This love

Not for you

Not for me

But for this city

That you just exist within,

Lighting white sticks

Of surrender.

Don’t you recall

me

Loving you

Here

Here

Outside the 72^nd street entrance

To central park east,

With this sprinkling

Of cigarette butts

Around your feet. 

My lips touched

One of them

Or ten

I have been in this place

My body heavy

With vodka and pinot

Laughing and coughing

Laughing and coughing

Coughing and manic

Ten fingers in.

I saw god here

I bit the apple here

And knew your soul

Your night heart

Your white powder

That soaked through my lungs

Filling my veins

Blurring

Worlds to infinity

Your soul to firewood

Charring the damp soil

God to Anaheim

Hidden in the tourist shops

Fingering the trinkets. 

It felt like retribution,

Touching your lips, it felt like eden

(it felt like velvet stiff with love).

When you kissed me

For the four thousandth time

A wave washed

All the shame

From the first thousand

Loveless fuckings,

The sting of your body

Pressing me to the cement,

The scratches healing

Just to be ripped open

Again

Again

(again)

Some days

I still watch the dawn

Fill the world

With fog

Until it bursts

Into day—

It feels like you,

Filling me with nicotine

And cherry wine,

My lost body brimming
With smoke. 

cruelty, beauty, truth

I remember the dusk,
gold dust converging,angel girls
with mica smiles, slivers of shine,
with fiberglass tongues,
biting
into my sparrow soul,
leaving small pieces
that itch and sting. 

I remember a pin up woman,
wasteland lover,
smoking cigarettes
in the dark,
bringing me with touch to spill
over sand dunes
and rickety beach homes,
into your landlocked body.
become me
and I will become you. 

alcoholic—
i believe your slurs,
your empty hallowed words. 
your hands shake
like my father’s,
your lips tremble
like mine.

a love poem, august 2013

what I understand of myself
is this:

I learned to never return
to those who swallowed
my innocence
in their darkness, whole. 
and yet I return to you—
sinking in your gray vastness,
your pull of god. 

home of sirens,
you became them,
filling me
with the deepest blue
of the marianas,
crushing me
in the black water
a thousand meters
below the dying reefs,
the dead anemone. 

in summer you drag me
with the heaving breaks of tide
across the broken slipper shells,
cutting my thighs
a hundred tiny times,
and I hold for you nothing
but an enduring, archaic love.

if all I can do
in this life
is end it
within your still-full belly,
I will turn my marrow to cement
and surrender
to you, I will let you pull me
into the dream
that is death.

a first draft of catharsis, september 2013

Under the velveteen dusk

It feels like there are ghosts

Slipping under my petal thin skin

Rising like smoke

Up into my fragile rafters. 

No one knew me then,

My soul held

In mason jars—

My wet back striped

With the dirt of loss. 

I can feel

Arms snake around my waist,

My hollowness—

You cannot hold that,

An emptiness— 

A sliver silvered

By time. 

God told me

He loved you

That you were one

Made to bruise my bones

Under the burning water

That still remains no more holy

Than I was.  

Wind wore away

My crevasses and mountains

Like old sand dunes. 

I dust the earth

Wherever you lie.

And after that summer
I aged like copper,

Filled with want

For the life you took. 

I cannot say the words,

I cannot take a breath

Monstrous enough

To form letters

That make up the past;

Its sounds fill me.

They echo and jump
About me.  

No one knew me then,

My mouth full

Of silences,

My hands wet

With the dew

Of spring pansies. 

But she held me

Her hair smelling of tobacco,

Like I was made of precious stones,

And I let her.