Reflection

For this time being, she swept dirt away from dirt and from cactus and captured the memory of a small home made of partially buried lava rock and desert rain weeds. She swept Earth away from itself, angrily debating existence. And it was comfortable.

She wanted to sit and invite a sister and a mother to laugh and admire her desert. Without a roof. Without water. Without time. She wanted to stay and wait for a summer moon to smile at her with pride, with knowing.

And night came, but the desert never becomes cold. Coyotes came to practice midnight and bury sharp hunger through the necks of jack rabbits. The universe came to cover her head and remind her of tin roofs and frail wood spines of old women that shriek with each step she steps.

How cold the desert becomes in that small house.

Elvis is alive. Fact or fiction. Electric theory travels across a nation. She meets guitars and drums and sex and drugs. She is seventeen wild in a broken city. She is chained to an old lamp-post that jolts to life at sunset. Her lungs are clogged. Smog takes over. She inhales a damp determination for life that doesn’t smell like rot.

I meet her at twenty two and Newport Beach. Carpet stained by black top walks and coffee. It’s an LA Times kind of morning. Knit tops cover immodest mannequins waving to her from window cages. He head hangs to her knees. Cracks in the sidewalk taunt her. She is guilty and broken. She doesn’t speak or mimic or cry, but she can hear intent. I give her symbols. Ice. Shadow. Flight.

She chooses to choke.

Summer leaves her. I leave her in an hourglass. Her slim smile leaks through the sand. Time is running out.
She starts talking to the desert. A language I can’t understand. Ink leaks from eyes to her young lips. She tastes words for the first time. I stop to watch. She is thick with rage. We are intense and struggling. Our muscles melt together with neurons and we know each other. We are scared.

We see doctors and pills and whiskey and we time it just right so that our bodies do not fail. And we buy reviews and our way into a new way. Oranges explode and we drink fruit rinds. And I miss her when she is not there. We discover each other but we do not know. What is truth? Where does it begin and with who? We softly debate existence and beg for an out. Shamefully we beg for an out.

And here we are. In the middle of the Earth. Gravity. Cells. DNA. Still so unsure. Still begging for an out…

until we step into his driveway at midnight. Our hearts shake. His sharp hunger examines our every layer. One hand behind our neck. We stop breathing. We are out.

A Lifetime Of Love

pretty girl in peach giggles
making wishes,
blowing quiet whispers off
wild flowers
pick all the petals you
can find before they die

green ropes soak up air
from my lungs
I wish
I wish in silence
not for me – I am done

but for a lifetime of
blowing kisses in
spring winds,
making giggles grow faster
than wild flowers
and petals that live forever in
the yellow sunburst around
your pupils

pretty girl in my stilettos
wishing to grow and grow
I wish
I wish in silence
not for me – I am done

but for a slow life
of sweet summer banana juice
and rain
a garden of imagination and
when you are done

I wish
I wish in silence
not for me
but for a lifetime of love

The End

Pink tissue shivers
– pins and needles –

poisonous seeds
grow like mushrooms

in stolen wombs.

Mozart marches
like I’m a
masterpiece

black and white
piano keys

I’m nothing less

than spoiled by
venomous seeds
that started me!

The Dark Island

A gold poetry rests under hand,
he was a painter and
a wrinkle in life.
I am his daughter.

On his lap, music
listened to my breath,
he was a sweet harmonica
smothered in vodka.
I was a drinking flower.

I scooped his footsteps with
a shovel and
slept in his smokey shadow.
In his order, a drunk soldier.
I am covered in armor.

He coughed,
and spewed me
out into a cold ditch.

One day, I painted him red,
myself blue,
and put him in a box that
blocked the sun.
I drifted with his body
along an eight year ocean,
until I became this,
a dark island.

In A Laugh

his laugh is familiar

like an old couch that swallowed me
every night, while I dreamed of
an old waxen witch

my hands are angry tonight,
but all I can think about is
that old couch,

wrapping me in its faded blue
arms, holding my fright in
its warped interior,
sucking me away from solitude

before any man, I found intimacy
in stretched fabric, I relinquished my
sweet innocence to an upholstered
mass

and find it all again,
in a laugh.

 

In This Dark Hour

It is at this dark hour,
it is at this inferno,
it is in this block of rage
that I notice how stale I have become.

I am cracking,
in every fold of my skin and
in each dry bend of my skinny bones,
I become mosaic.

I did not read life properly, I think.
Big doors slammed on my little fingers
so many times and even
though they broke and ached,
I made them wrap themselves around
heavy door knobs and
step beyond explanation.

What is to understand?
Skies are a warning. Wind is creation.
We stirred life up together.
What is to understand?

Age is a gift and a curse.
The past sings me to sleep in
rough fusion, a symphony of screams
that shred my nights out before me.

I remember when she stood in front of the mirror,
red lips pursed deeply at my innocence and
my tremor. She terrified me more than
the thunder that rattled the world outside.

I chose the storms over her natured arms,
but I did not understand. I read her
wrinkles and her pores
and her treacherous explosions
as if they were life,

and now I have age to help me read,
but I am too old to understand.
My body is cracking under misunderstandings
and exposure.

I want the bright day back that I found
when I ran barefoot over boulders,
before boulders fell on top of the four
chambers of my life.
I want what was taken from me by the
thick chalk of her pursed lips.

Tree Legs

I have peculiar bark on my long tree legs,
it grows in layers.

When I was eight, I was a fresh baked apple pie.
My mother never told me why, but I know
it was because of the tears.

My tree legs drank them every day,
while mother explored my cold sweats.
She picked them off my forehead with
smiling fingertips. Eager for discovery!

She poked through my warm crust, straight to my soft apples,
spoiling my fruit,
rotting them with her murky breath.
I was an apple pie

until the world never died.
I realized, at that precise moment,
that I was a foul smell;
putrid. I had dried up and crumbled.

There was nothing left for me but
these long, strong tree legs….

and bark.

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.

She Snaps Like A

She snaps like a
twig from a
dead oak tree
She snaps
her fingers,
one,
two,

THREE!!!!!!

Standstill! Who will
draw first

Three sisters, count them.
One.
Two.
Three.

Huddled in her meat cleaver,
she leaves them.
Dead meat.

Red, raw
meat for the taking.
Marinated to
manipulated savory.

Three girls with
guilt blonde hair. Three
scared
little witches, fixing burns,
breaking dishes.

That’s what happens when the
flip switches,
she twitches into
rags –
stomping floorboards,
dropping little blonde
hair into body
bags

feeds dirty lies
from her
mothering, smothering hands.

The Tolley House At Green Gate

I share a broom with Virginia
and Miriam, I
have not had the pleasure
of either of the two
Green Gate
maids,

but I know
that their knees squeak louder
than mine
and
that
elbow oil lubricates their
twists.

I can tell by
the way they leave
my broom settled
in
corners.

Its
terse whisker
stick
mocks my grip,
my sweeping angle.
I try
to lead our waltz but my
broom laughs at me,
certain of my clumsiness.

We fight for direction
over the
trite,
Tolley boards
of the old Tolley
House.

Mr. Tolley had taken a wife…

Sarah;
a one-legged chicken farm
who burst babies
all over these elderly boards, then
cleaned them
herself as ten of her children
rolled their deathbeds atop.

Virginia and Miriam must
remind my offensive broom
of Sarah.

Sarah and her discipline.
Sarah and her doctrine.
Sarah and her ten dead babies.

I think my broom is in love with Sarah.

It refuses
my suggestive
movements to clear
old dust from the floors.

I have no choice, I decide.

I toss the broom out
to
a patio
that hosted a Tolley family portrait once,

grab my very own electronic
sucking machine
and suck the dead babies
out from
abysmal,
woe coated
slits.