in here
oxygen has stopped moving
a body is melting over a dream
that is alive and well
an intention
blackwater
we intertwine like parasites
we love like decay
i could be convinced to move out of here
but every moon begs for this same
consistency
and I am no moon
Mappa mundi. On my back I
sleep without mountains, or oceans,
or broken continents drifting off
in search for more.
Birds turn origami and
I am left with an echo.
Somewhere between maple rain
and God’s sweet thumb I broke
the rules.
Sand has lost all reason.
Sun has lost its meaning.
Direction is meant for the breathing…
So is matter.
Mappa mundi. Inside
I am a universe. The eye of God, on my
back, giving birth to angels with
white wings of clouds.
Thunder claps in approval
while I whistle an old echo
to the vast dark matter
that prays for existence.
When it is day, I do not recognize
this land. We live on
moonlit love and hard water
soaked in oak barrels.
When sunlight takes over
this land, I do not recognize
his hands that
lay me to rest with Strigiformes
and kiss my skin to death
his voice blurs my vision
when it is day, he is
not him
he is a reflection of a
fermented sea I drown in
every night,
when I swim away from this
foreign land I live on.
I chiseled out an ancient face
and hanged it in my head
though it was not quite alive as I
was waiting to be dead
we trudged together through a desert
smoked a fat cigar
nibbled on dirty tortoise shells
burned our feet on tar
it went like this for twenty years
or thirty, or probably more
long enough that desert sand
began dripping from my pores
and now my skin has turned to bone
and my pretty name is aging
my ancient face is chiseled out
my brain is disengaging
and though I’m not quite as alive
as I would like to be
I am grateful for my blistering walk
through the desert sea
Tell me something. As I lay next to my sick sister
in silk, unbalanced; give me an offering.
I burn for truth, for the ignorant man
to bare his torment,
to tell me my body is useless,
to hold me as a black fish stripped of possibility
and soak me in architecture.
Make me into something better than two.
I have been a ruined kingdom
for over an hour. My bed is an ash tray.
My bones are hot with need.
Where is your urgency?
Where is your greed?
Catch my empty hand…save me!!!
Give me something sharp to believe in.
My name is a vicious mirror at a stand off.
I catch my sick sister without her gown,
as naked as the night,
a rough sling shot aiming for the key hole.
She is the lie trembling in my doorway,
the life I cannot live.
We have no place, not now!
Her knees are bruised and I am her salve.
I, her freedom.
She, my prison.
Tell me something to help me
burn this sick girl out of my skin,
to gather my ashes and make me one again.
I’m stuck in this…..nothingness.
The devil tucks me in
at night. I sleep with cannibals.
I am an apple core. Pigs food.
Where did my blood come from?
I am just a trick.
I do not exist.
My sweat is black magic.
I am invisible.
I am air particles and
part of the walls.
I am seams in the carpet.
A blue moon today
is sad sand tomorrow.
My body is borrowed,
taken by the Mexican gun
and his man.
I am abandoned.
I have abandoned this sickly,
trapped in infected placenta.
A dark traveler between
thought and matter.
The water is cold here
but I am colder.
Death is coming.
He’s tied around my shoulders.
My only friend.
My heavy boulder.
“There is a dream outside.Â
I am dark and imagined andÂ
I can’t wake up….”
I have forgotten how I write.
My voice is with the calendar,
in the cemetery,
dusting off a bottle. The sun has moved
in on this town,
drying up oranges,
turning water to dust.
Today, I am a reflection.
A left over.
The wind is locked.
My phone is dead.
People have stopped watching.
I am underground,
away from cancer and traffic.
“…and the dream is inside, too.”
Light is nothing, not even artificial.
The birds are an alarm;
God’s warning.
If someone could crush my hand with
a hammer, I could stop all this.
The world is stretching.
I want my voice back.
It’s 4 in the morning,
it’s every morning quiet
and cold.
Where did the clock go?
Where did the familiar ticks and tocks of time go?
I am pounding from underneath layers of leather skin.
I am buried in a nerveless body
that does not know me.
All that hair is matted up in front of those
eyes.
I cannot see out of her eyes and
she won’t dare look inside for me,
and at 4 am no soul on Earth is laying
next to this body,
no hands are caressing her cold spine
or listening for the deep screams inside to
follow her exhaling breath.
She is a secret to them
as I am to her,
but they want her. They want to touch the
back of her head and wake her
from the dream,
they want to kiss her lips and be warmed
by a return of love and desire,
and some of them know about me,
yet, here it is, 4 in the morning,
it’s every morning quiet
and cold
and I am alone with a body,
trapped inside a body that does not Know
I exist, pounding on her tough skin,
screaming at strangers to wake her
from her dream
and resurface me,
but all they can touch is
her top most layer;
her skin,
her hair,
her lips,
the warmth of her lungs working hard,
the heat of her blood circulating
but no soul on Earth will ever reach far enough
to pull me out from
underneath.
I think I was never born.
My hands are a man’s whose body
escaped Vietnam, but whose
soul was eaten by a war.
I watch these hands dip
a rag in bleach to scrub away
a face of imperfections,
a face that is not mine,
but a man’s who was scalded
by the hot palms of a red-headed woman
who watched her husband
tie off his neck and give it to his son,
and now my daughter is not mine,
and her smile is not her own,
but of a woman who would have
drowned me in her breasts
had I been born,
and I watch her with
eyes that seem to be my own, but
crinkle like the skin of
a man who shrunk himself enough
to fit inside a bottle of Rum
and swim for forty years,
and I was not born, but I remember seeing
these hands wrapped around me,
and this face smiling,
and this blue eyes crinkling,
and all of these dying before
I could have been born.
maggiemaeijustsaythis 