Time Travel

Boiling over, I am scraped off the bottom,
the block I belong on,
57th street where the crows sing.
Time travels around the city
-back and forth-
like it doesn’t matter
swooping through me each time.

I swing like a pendulum inside
my brain talks so fast
future and past, but all I see is the street
with a man parked under
his life.
I can’t tell if he’s dead or alive.

He might be another.
From somewhere I haven’t met
with guns and
drugs
and sex crawling up the walls
I’d kill him to tell it all

but he can’t.
His mouth stopped with his heart
a long time ago.
Time comes back again
and I am standing in the kitchen

wine pouring from the window sill,
put a pie out to dry
sugar, there’s no room for you and I
still want to be here.
The clock is purring like a new motor
ticking backward

and I’m watching my mother.
In X-ray, I can see right through her.
I see her fear and her
weak little shoulders – I am a caged, feral animal
ready for the world
My muscles grow stronger and stronger
I spit on the caged bars and twist them from
existence

now I’m standing in the corner
face to face with death in all its honour
a coffin, a casket full of
skeletons of the past
that merge my cells together
maybe we never were two
time splits here into thick poles

North and South I spend my dreams
in Antarctica
reaching for the coldest depth
I can find
freezing myself in time
where nothing happens,
nothing changes,

I’ve let life tick its last time by.

They Try To Erase Me

I never had been born. It was old hands
that sketched my frame. Hands that knew how to suffer
wisely. It was a gift
to my bones, a curse that shifts
with weight and time.
Clocks wait on scales to tip time. I am rushed.
Blood cycles through my life.
Old lines outline my eyes. I am timed.

I slept with a man
and was traced. He recreated me; my child.
My simple face on a prettier canvas.
I didn’t wish for this.
I didn’t dream.
She just belongs to me.
I drag my bones along aching seas
each step pains deeper with memory,
with time.
Dark lines shade over mine.
They try to erase me

From my bones, I cry.
I cannot be
an easy sketch of a memory.

Fruit Family

Some children have spiders in their
brains, pressing buttons at bedtime,
stopping nightmares,
praising mothers.

Other children have tapeworms.
Cynical parasites eating
juvenile appetites and vertebrae.

These children,
my children, come from
fertile plums and pears.
Summer fruit preparing
for decomposition at summer’s end.
As  time goes, so skin shrivels,
hardens,
plump curdles into plush and seeds
become fossils.

A fossil will not suck nutrients from dirt,
as it should,
as parasites do,
from Summer children.

These children prepare for
ripening. Drunk swans arrive in spring
suits,
mild pink bakery sleeps
through exchange
while a Summer child
tosses rotting
petals.

These children sit, arthritic,
decomposing. Smiling at
baby ripe fruit family.
Seeds,
fruits with  tapeworm scorn
creating  fossils for family to mourn.