Am I New

Flapping tongue, to change your name, to change yourself,
to change,
to change,
you say it’s smoking time, maybe if the zone changed,
but we run on desert time,
at devil lake
I wish I was, a reservoir, I wish I was a dog,
rolling in the dirt, a tumble weed,
collecting time and breeze,
in the hustle
rolling,
changing,
flapping in my sleep to change position, to change disposition,
to change,
I meditate, a trumpet sounds,
an angel sings, is it me?
Did I work? Did the clock split my tongue
and now I am two?
Am I new?

Crickets

In spite of great solitude
come the chirp, chirp of
the night
dripping like water droplets
down the sink drain,
straightened out loud,
a philosophy.

Alone as a daydream, deep
in a honeycomb,
nobody comes,
nobody goes,
rolled up in my own cigarettes
horror chirps in
the white plaster.

All day, mold forgets to grow.
It understands it is just a story,
not like the crickets that
chirp, chirp all night,
catching my sleep in their wings.
I miss them terribly
when night falls down drunk
and puts them to bed.

I wait for twelve hours,
picking hair from rubber carpet,
melting soap into black licorice
for the old neighbor man
with the old hat.
I wait till school buses smile
and wave good-bye to
the highway.
I wait until the waves of L.A hold
the last handful of
sun, till the crickets come.

Come With Me

If you have ever bit the skin
of an orange, lifting
flesh from flesh,
life from life,
you can come with me.

If you have ever sat at the wake
of death, eye-to-eye with the
giver and, or, the taker,
you can come with me.

If you have ever put your body to rest
under a sky full of the blackest of
widows,
then come with me, please.

If you have ever coasted over a
thousand scissors cutting
every corner of every thought,
then please, come.

If you have ever melted into
the sun, begging to be rooted
into the eclipse,

If you have ever swallowed a pearl,
hoping to be turned into gold

then come with me.

Termite

I see that one arm is stubbed
by something. No one else can see
this, like it isn’t true.
To them, I am tragedy,
and I let them.

I am a hot potato
and they drool over food.
My crippled hands shove their
mouths full of muscle.
They like it raw
and tough.
So, I give them my back bone
to gnaw on,
they snap it like baby pea stock.

I spend two years in the ground,
done with legs
and feet
and toes
and balance.
I buried myself in dirt,
living with termites.

The thing about termites that no one else can see,
is that they aren’t true. To them, we are tragedy,
and we let them.

Disease

If it was fire, I would be burned across my liver.
If it was water, I would be floating belly-up one hundred miles down stream.
If it was a daydream, I would have plummeted from the heaven’s and crushed by heavy streets below.

I’ve always known the thick romance of being lost, deep in black brain jungles, where tigers eat tigers to build their own stripes.

My birth brought it. It was my placenta. We were strong together and now I am separated from eternity.

New Published Piece – You Haven’t Read This One Yet

I have a new piece published in The Screech Owl today.  It hasn’t been previously published.  I hope you’ll take a minute and check it out.   It’s a little ways down the page….it’s called  – It’s Just That The Moon’s Got Me – Let me know what you think!

~XOXO  MM

The Fury Sisters

This desert is muddy today,
rats scamper under fury.
Little girls chew
off November toes. They kneel in provocation, stretched t-shirt
over back yard fences.

Dogs bark like bitches, I count them – they live free
with dirty kneecaps, laughing at me. It is fair, I know.
It’s the clock,
just; disgusting me.

The rats scurry down wet streets
where my sister plays with
spores. I stalk her like cat play
while she plucks
lice from her
eyes.

Her nudity is a familiar tub
where streetlights meet
sloppy abortionists. 

Once, she was me. We shared
charcoal milkshakes and
flirted with shapes of sour
angels. Now, great love,
is dust of dead skin.
She is piles of vomit under
cloistered stubbornness.

In twenty years, I will be solid.
Midnight will dream of my desert
and sick rats walking in
late, chasing yellow
mold across tarred gutters

where her soul growls empty,
nothing to spare.

a life of a ghost man

It is hard to believe in a dead man,
a ghost,
a life,
a life of a ghost man….

a life that hands my limp direction
over to those that can control it.

They must have told him,
the people,
that his core was rotting,
that his brain was infested and crumbling?

That his daughter was sick with
raw nerves and would never get better?

If the bombs in Vietnam hadn’t sawed his
spirit away,

if his own father
hadn’t dangled lily liver from
the ceiling,

maybe he would have heard
the people,
the ghosts,
the whispers of his daughter’s twisted,
raw nerves grasping
for contact

and saved me from rotting with the same
crumbling infestation.

Janus

By doorways and walls, I pass through
with two faces. I am honoured
and assassinated by fruits and
seeds of the people.

They move their lips, I hear deep shrills.
They whisper like big cannons
at battle. I keep each as a sacred
stone; I throw each as a poisonous tale.

Today, God loves my motion. I merge with
Galileo under seven planets
I am his Dialogue on the Ebb and Flow of the Sea.

But tomorrow will take me suspiciously.
Medusa will come to show
the bogus end of Venus and her beautiful phase.

White weasels come in pack, they smell her
insidiousness; she sits coy on my tongue
while I am categorized.

Back to square rooms, black chairs,
flat carpet,
doorways,
walls,
I pass through with two faces.
I am honoured by amber vials,
assassinated by the pills.

They move their lips,
I hear fuzziness and laughter…
quit laughing at me
quit laughing at me
I am a statue,
I am trapped here.

Whiskey Breath

First greet is at seams
that thread life to life.
She blossoms fresh blue,
nervous laughter sifts through

her eyes. Not me.
I am fog thick of red rage,
a fire smoldered by hard smoke hiatus,
stoned like rolling tonic waves.

She dips her fingers down my throat,
caressed by silence – she knows me at once.
I pour myself onto her.
I tell her how I know the moon,
how I sleep with it’s chill and
am never alone.

She tells me it’s habit, like her
laugh, that I’m addicted, I’m turning
to ashes. I say, “I don’t know if you’re a ghost of
me or I’m a ghost of you.”

She swings bright over Summer where
I plant my roots, under bed sheets
and claim the Earth as our own.
She was a kingdom,
I was in ruin.

I let loose my whiskey hot breath
on her air,
she strips bare of deliberation,
dripping thirst from her soft light
and we creak together in the shadows
of sensation.

And in the mix of time and transcendence,
frost grows over my eyelids.
I am blind.
Mouth froze,
then my insides.

She hammers at me for weeks,
heaving in heavy tumor.
She begs back for the comfort of the
roots we birthed together.

Life drops wet down my cheeks,
she drapes over me
for years,
Or is it me over her?
I wish….
I want….
The seasons have stopped.
I can’t find her blue through the fog.