Wednesday, December 15, 2010

fennel for you, and columbines.

there's a lot of dripping
dropping around my feet, so funny
since i don't go swimming
anymore
and i haven't cried since
we buried that bird in the
backyard,
the one the neighbor's cat caught
--despite not even being hungry--
we were children then.

where the water comes from, i don't know
its not in my nature to know
i'm not a woman of water, i don't move with the
tide,
i am like ophelia, yes, but not because i fed the river.

there are other ways of being ophelia,
you don't need water to drown.



Tuesday, November 16, 2010

caged tiger

i woke up with the weather sticking to my skin.

last night still powders my hair and
echoes in my tapping fingernails,
ruinous debris of limb-smashing, hot-breathed, god-yes,
dancehall embattlement.

i wanted you. but that's not good enough.

there was a chase like tigers
a clawing, a sabre-toothed trade-off of
exotic animal perfumes and pheromonal purrs.

i breathed in what you breathed out
and my teeth disintegrated
into powders that wafted right up into your nose
taking you to heaven, taking us to the Congo
i mean it must have
how else can i explain the pounding and the
hot scents that burned me and evoked the jaguar howling
when my bones pushed through my skin
in a vain effort to get closer to you,
to be gnawed on.

you wanted me too. but that wasn't good enough.

i slept in my own tent and let myself be coated in indian summer.

Monday, November 15, 2010

caverns

and it was into the cave
salt crashes and ex-train tracks and stuck in the mud
and light, the cliche light
at the cliche end
and i wasn't afraid to not hold hands
to break against the ledge
alone, in the debris that roared roared roared
i thought,
this is how i'd kill myself, if i thought i deserved a death that good
there was hemming and hawing about
tide traps and skulls mixed with foam, smashing against like jelly-filled shells
shivers and
fear of footing

and i thought, that's how i'd like to kill myself

but i kept mute because
landmarks are supposed to light you up
tighten your grip on what is and isn't natural
pat our backs for keeping one littered run-down piece of geology from turning into
burger kings
beach houses
big, beautiful frothing landfills
but
that doesn't keep me healthy.

i want my body to nourish the scrambling soil, my bones to be
a cragged beach spine
because the only time i feel as alive
is when my muscles snap from poor decisions like
him
poor decisions i want to make.

i would toss myself into the whirlpool
when and if i deserved to die.

Sunday, September 5, 2010

psychotherapy

water draining from between my toes and smoke billowing between each breath
like some red-lipped girl in a three-star film, the porcelain holds my bones in place
as your bones rattle my brain.

lung cancers and broken homes aside, some people never learn
and the cycle which has left ashes in my bathroom
and bile in my stomach
is born, without so much as a pat on the back or have a cigar.

"you're better than this," i pout into the camera
but what is it i am better than?
point of references aside, i don't know if i'm actually all that good at all
or the angst just makes for a fine photograph.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

matins

i'm not scared of you anymore, or the blanks in my brain. i waited, and you never came, and that was the worst that could happen and now i've numbed.
you forced me into a nunnery of the psych and i can't say i'm ungrateful, spending my days on pressed flowers and knit gloves and heavenly verse, there's nothing worse than lies treated like gospel, and now i know what i can live through:
anything.
but still,
i would prefer to still be unaware of my own powers if i meant you still sometimes pushed the hair off my shoulders and whispered things someone else wrote but you meant more into my skin.

Monday, July 26, 2010

shady

i used to be filled with stupid factory romances
marriage to me meant our names in a tree
there was an unspoken sexiness in our childlike blood oathes and
newborn bedroom war cries
you'd whisper, but i don't know
i don't think you really knew the weight of your own mouth
and how it pillowed over my lungs

traditional blooms of the femme, you attributed to my bareness
little did you know
i'd be content just lying in the shadow of beauty, not even being a shade of it
you pushed too hard

when i wept on your grass, i felt a spin
but i didn't feel you
you had gone
you had gone long, long ago.
and i knew that i had to grow up and take some responsibility for cracks and floods.


Saturday, July 24, 2010

trails

tell me all about your soul
what it chases and why you think you'll die
how much can your bones hold

i feel newness in your peace
youth in our sudden lulls
you cut me up but i don't bleed
i'm neutral to your vulture tricks

and why you come in first, i don't know
but i close in on the swooping of your hands
slam your mind, slam your words
rolling windows up to speak
i want to know just how cold
just how cold this space can feel
but we breathe out only heat

Sunday, May 23, 2010

helium

empty of intimacy, like real intimacy, as in i touched the world and it smoothed my face with its breath, that kind of intimacy, i start to compile songs at 2am, the ones that glorify dying.

i think about the things i could do differently to be earth-mama pretty; to be romantically moved, byronic even; to forsake the wispy beauty that comes with pronouncing "wallflower" slowly to pictures i'm not in, and participate.

but really, i'd rather just sleep.

i feel old. my fingers are brown, bitten and achy, like fox paws in a trap. maybe its all the concrete, the lack of spontaneous greenery, the ocean hidden behind apartment complexes and frothy clouds of marijuana, that make me lonely for newness and a mouth that WANTS me.

everything comes in patterns and i've never been good at matching.

i make the most glorious resolutions of identity revolution, while i twist my body on the sofa-bed around the sandman's hostility. i plan a summer life where there are books and spontaneous deep sea dives and people who can look at me and GET IT, and its not even soothing-- just stupid. i want one thing to be easy and real, but maybe i'm too young for that, or maybe too old, i don't know. most of the time i just feel like i'm a ghost haunting everyone's expectations and re-living the moment when i died, on that lawn beneath those blossoms with paint spilled beside me from the tumble of our skin and the preciousness of finding ourselves alone.

i really wish i was as empty as i feel, i'd be easier to live with.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

the ocean

well man, 17 seems awfully young to have your heart broken
but then
i guess 70 might seem so too.

quick as a blink you'll find yourself washed up in tinted bones and pleas that will make your stomach turn, years later. there will be crawling and black streaks and requests to ignore the subject. but you'll cling as you swing from you convictions up up and away

we were born
to taint each others blood
make it bloom at thrown-away memory jogs
and insist
"but i am happy"

and before you know it, you'll find yourself between waking and sleeping and sleeping and dreaming and dreaming and emptiness and anyways, that is just my experience, as the product of a stolen season swollen with hollow beats and hazy desires to feel, you know---him.

outside of the sea, we're strange and awkward and our tongues hurt

but you and i both know, you and i both live with one thing:

you are going to chase my memory until you die. and then i will chase yours.


Thursday, April 15, 2010

sun francisco.

one of these days, i'm gonna climb to the top of that bubblegumwrapper&cigarette throne i composed at age 17 in the middle of dying and i will tear open my sticky lips and let you all know once and for all that the rumours you read in the backs of your textbooks are true:

i'm Queen of the Bohemes, and there's pepper in my veins and a hole in my nose.

stomping like a clumsy troll-lette, cloaked as a tigress, i have only to blow the mane out of my eyes and throw my head to the skies for you to know i don't belong to anything but the grass, and i know you'll want to follow me. stalking, slink-sliding through the tall ferns and the street posts, legend has it i'll lead the revolution of this urban forest back to the hippiedaisical mythology of open-toed shoes and still more open romantic lip-smacking. you've just got to muddle through how easy it is to hate someone like me and hum through the stares thrown on people with good posture like that and believe that there's actually a spot of sun in this city we can lie in where people will stop standing to watch us and start joining us. then we can stick out our tongues and play tambourine music and our ragtag royalty will reign unwisely for one whole skipping-school day, and you'll just get it.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

finger space.


There is more than one “smooth”.


My own fingers, silken-tipped
Slide across the warm ruffling
And over the cool feathered slip
To find hands different from mine,
Blunt, porous, radiating masculinity
And above all, breathing.


Some smoothness has breath.
It has sweat, it has rippling
Quiet musculature and the flickering
Flame-feeling of pulse
And this smoothness is different from sculpture
So different from wood
That my hands know language’s mistake.


My fingers brushing his fingers
Unlike my fingers lacing with my fingers
Or swimming over a child’s palm
I feel the tense pounce of his
The miniscule shaking of crinkled nerves
And what he will not say
My hands know.


Monday, April 5, 2010

confidence.



so one day i got a job.
i can do grown-up things! --and still read picture books and bark like a pup and live how i like to live, which is naked and loud and summer-haired and in love and absolutely cuckoo.

i like the evolution of myself.
present and open-eyed.

i live in a fallen angel city and arrange words at scholarly leisure and sleep with the love of my life and i embrace the idea of what is "woman" and reclaim it from politics and Hollywood and morality and pundits i make it

MINE

and i draw all over the blueprints and

if all these things don't make me beautiful, tell me

what ever could?

Thursday, April 1, 2010

months and years.

i used to like the
whimsy-feathered look of your lower lip as you
fought the trembling because you liked me too much and
maybe i didn't like you that way, but still, you bubbled with happy to see me and
dropped your keys once or twice and slipped up your tongue and said things a little too
mmmmmmm maybee you should have not? i brushed your fingers and felt your blood and my own ghosts flickered in and out and behind my eyes, but i tried. i promise i tried. you were so warm on my neck, so delicately delightfully warm, i had to try.

i wasn't numb. i was haunted, but i wasn't numb. my lungs expanded when you blew into them, like birthday balloons. i shook when you shook. it was like swimming, inhaling the water and choking. it was panic and relief, it was my teeth, it was a battle. you were a thing so new.

now, i'm used to it.

Monday, March 29, 2010

studio

i turn off that goddamn tv
it makes a crispy breakfast cereal sound
popping sizzling electrical shut down
and then, its silent
as silent as a room buzzing with electronic whir can ever be
my refrigerator mmmmumbles
and the computer snores
and the lights burp
and there's always some sort of dripping and traffic and chattering and birdsound
some sort of disgruntled appliance pouring out its two cents and
running up my bills with its pollution

the american version of quiet.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

city rat.

i am not a stick or a stone
just lazy bones
i am not of the glory of nature

i rub dirt in my skin
commit reptile sin
but am still just an urban creature

catch flies with my tongue
catch smoke in my lungs
i wish i was a more simple mammal

but i'm a slave to the clock
and fashionable shock
never the right kind of animal


Monday, March 1, 2010

taking notes in class.

THE ARK

cryptozoology is the cause of my concern.
late-night whimsies that were
too busy to be bothered with
Noah's schedule flicker across
the screen of my eyelids
and beg description,
as most bedtime curiosities do.

it is difficult to order coffee
with a gryffin perched on my brain;
more difficult, still,
to convince the cable-washed children
that unicorns still have a place
other than in garish sticker-books.

small town.

where i live, you would never hear a woman on the street screaming obscenities about heartbreak, not on those quiet lamplit streets, no. but in secret, blue-eyed boys wear mascara, and girls with blue, red, and green in their hair sneak out to kiss in water. they sleep in beds on beaches, feeling old and drunk, and stay up all night trying to rhyme words with 'orange'. 80-year-old men with 36-year-old russian mail order brides sit in the bath tub, because where i live, money is no object but women are. in the sunlight, little girls in flourescent green boots carry sleeping puppies in backpacks, and people slap hands and sing. but at night, that is when some swim through the sky, jumping from the cable cars and prowling like tigers.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Something Old & Something New

September of 2008(The Past) makes more sense now than it did then.

on tip-toes, i press open the screen door
gateway to my midnight balcony nap
a frigid tumble of feather pillows
and sweeping branches which are
forming a latticed canopy dripping with stars above
wooden boards, creaking and cold, beneath
to remind me not to float away.

i shiver in my thin and cloudy quilt
partly for rapture, partly for chill
i'm alive now in the loneliness
that in my bedroom i felt too much to bear

here i can pretend the crisp edges of night are your hands
running smooth over my angled shoulders
kissing my blue-toned face and
tracing the nape of my neck with cherished subtlety

my own bed feels foreign without you there
but when i slip into the night
you are everywhere



January, Thinking About You While Driving (The Present)

i'll write you a song, i promised
about lions brushing against trees
and the copper willowed fingers that snap
beneath their paws
and how still that moment is, despite all breath.

i won't sing it, but i will write it
with white bird hands across the savanna
of your back,
and ROARRrrr into your mouth,
collecting teeth.

i'll sip from your whisper like an oasis
then with energy like orchestras
take off in a run
barefoot through the lantern-lit grasses
build a nest in your neck, and breathe through your lungs,
to slumber in the jungle that hums with your song.

Followers