two honey bees scribble
across Rupi’s milk
her tragic black paperback
blooms
on a blank kitchenette
empty plastic cup
waiting for a purpose
I tell it
“go”
but who am I to
say anything
Rupi says it all
if her grace has been missed
you should find it
gather up her past
in her shadow
and twist it
into purple origami
for me to dry
each drop
that falls because
of ways men
have touched her
I am going to be. Here,
in a sticky womb,
a living room made for
madness; a sautéed fanciness.
The feast is being set,
just above the chandelier,
they call me by number,
my tattooed slumber calls.
White isn’t always padded
or strapped. Most likely
it only surrounds
the dark blue ring
around the sunburst I look at.
I think I am a painting.
Rembrandt is too gross, but
Picasso, he is enough mystery
to create me.
Half of me sprawls across the cold,
I wait for night-watch to
twist me back to form.
The other girl squats in the corner.
I smell feces and antifreeze.
Do I dream? Can I dissect the fumes of
the dead?
Her charred body crawls toward me,
she removes her teeth.
Everything glitters like a shadow.
Then, I am here. In the morning.
It isn’t the sun that tells me,
but the number, tattooed to
my skull.
Doctor, tell me, has Picasso gone home?
Wide antic eyes, Salvador, you are your brother
dead, but better. Do you rest on his grave and
tell him about 17th century moustache and
Gala, everything he misses out on.
No need, he sweeps your bones when
they need to grow.
He plants ideas and colors in Spain
where people steal your dreams.
I will give you hopeful fruit
that can be nailed to a wall,
make it my four walls please – a trapezoid leaning in
like egg yolk – protein for my absent
skill. If I had yours,
if only,
I would be she, your catastrophe theory,
feeding you death on a spoon.
I could be your nervous system, taking your wishes
from your guts.
We are not “in fact or intention”
We are surrealism
and I know this because I live inside you,
inside your brother.
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.
Lindsey, in perfect fifths,
let’s shatter the veil
between worlds.
The universe is sold out,
but your bridge is precise
and the dead watch your maple
neckline
while I anesthetize myself
in words.
Your snakewood grows on dried gut,
I am glued to paper –
We are limited in time;
in stranded worlds.
Let’s shatter the veil
and bring them together.
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.
Ballerina toes stretch toward
feathers, white blossoms that kiss
starved necks. Embrace
each black swan that
glides gloss pages.
A tongue is a miracle,
lapping up salt rocks,
serving colour to dull
business skirts. Charlie
waits in a back drop suit,
drenched in wallflowers
while the Hunger Crew
takes its place as
hard flesh grain.
*See HUNGER MAGAZINE
Dreams are being dreamed
in the fog, tonight
I am a wanderer. Lost
with Fish Ghost’s, sleeping
under the sea.
I have forgotten how to breathe,
not quite forgotten –
It is destiny that calls me.
Wake me up from this walking dream!
Windows here are lucid paintings, in my head
I step into acrylic gardens, abstract
daylight, fading from realism,
a genuine art.
I am not free.
The glass captures me;
a rock spirit holds me in, forced air
thick like the sea, I cannot breathe!
And dreams are being dreamed
while the fog rolls in, white cotton torment
filling my lungs, I choke on
the Ghosts of Love, Envy, and Trust
while the dreamers
sleep with safety locks on their throats.
Where do they sail off to in
their midnight ships?
To the high deserts of the moon?
To the warm geysers of the North Star?
I want to close my eyes and follow
their pretty foot prints through
Sand Man’s castle and out to rest high
on constellations.
I want to be cradled in a comfortable Mother.
I want to swallow the Milky Way
without choking on Universal Decay.
I want to dream what the sweet dreamer’s dream,
instead of sinking deep
and deeper
into the black cold of the under water.
Sunlight spills out over the sky
and I watch the women dance,
strings from Heaven attached to each limb,
red lips painted with French curls,
I love them so much.
I loathe them so much.
They lift off the ground with majestic beauty,
gliding from toe to toe.
They seem to sleep on clouds,
pretty ballerinas that Pas
around town.
In the library, they seat quiet children
who are stainless and educated from
high value,
they swim in holy water with
moulded figures sticking out and I drool
along with the men,
and I love them so much.
Oh! I loathe them so much.
They fall like pink snowflakes,
kissed with Latter Day sprinkles,
the daughters of God who walk on Earth
next to me, searching for my palms,
serving me with the grace that Sunday could bring
but I will not listen.
I cannot.
My ears have been cut from my head by
Van Gogh’s paint strokes,
Mozart is pounding his fingers against my
chest in C-Minor, and
all of the words that have ever been written
by limbless men
and lipless women
sing as a group of cellos,
rooted deep in my naval,
where I began.
I am laying in wet cement, gray
mud
blanket gobbling up my plague.
It is thick like me,
like the twenty years of
plaster inside.
Everything is hardening.
Kidney.
Liver.
Fallopian Tubes.
Guts.
Heart.
I have been treated like a statue.
It isn’t hard to
be still,
motionless. Erect.
Allowing curious wanderers to
make up my background,
my story.
A man brought oranges
to paint
me with. He was a soft liquid.
I was set to stone.
He sliced his moist fruit,
dripping
sweet citrus over my rough skin, melting
my rind.
Away, away I went with delicate fruit.
A new sculpture.
A beautiful, fluid seed.
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