It will always be walking through tough cement, lemon rinds and jack-one swift sailor high on a Black Sea
drifting for eternity, fighting off starvation, making friends with an idea.
Love is not sold on silent blue moons or Ancient Greek mistresses riding them bareback
but deep inside a reflection, an abbreviated determination that divides calm nights.
I watch you pray for those hours. God isn’t listening;
He is creating.
Curl up raw, stranger. Where is your
husband’s thick pockets?
You must be one of those different
colours.
I’m dead on my feet, you’re
sleeping in the gutter. Five days
in February – we both struggle.
Half a dozen snowflakes
ring the city, one man
hangs high above the river
two blocks down –
I can’t get my gown down
when I hear the secrets –
you shiver under the ice
and I like it,
biting my bottom lip, I’m nervous
for the next move.
Who’s it to be? Me or You?
All is well and dead on this side
but you look alive –
try to get a grip around your neck, but
you slump over
the cold.
Where did he go with his large gloves?
Are you beating like a cat fish or more
like drums?
Your colour is looking frozen.
Don’t pull those tears off too early or
you won’t recognize me.
I’m sorry for you, sister, losing
in this land, but when I see your secrets,
I tremble from a cursed realm
and I am ready to fade into the big city,
9 o’clock,
locked up with something like a vacuum cleaner
and let you go.
I spend a thousand blinks on old memories.
Each taste like cocaine
broken teeth, pressing
truth against my cheek, a cold shock
like this one –
crying on the beach, sleeping in empty sea shells.
My mother eats her hands,
choking on emptiness,
on regret – I understand,
then –
fireflies above my nose.
Bathing with my naked sisters,
collecting our shadows full
of sea water – and with a rush of the moon
a tip of years comes rushing back
and I choke, not on emptiness
but on regret, and I understand
then –
it’s the same sun that passed away,
roasting flames with me on
Sunday; and what does He do?
He moves.
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.
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.
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.
He’s splashing in cyanide tonight,
elbow deep in death grease, peeling it off
long enough to shout his love at me.
My bed is empty like this,
I lay here, empty, like this,
sipping on his poisonous spit.
The clock hisses,
my eyes burn like his swollen skin,
sleeping beasts await me
and I sit here,
just empty, like this
while he bathes in acid
and cries out his love to me,
he stands long enough to dry a bullet
and point his shaky finger at me,
I take my time,
watching the roses he gave me
dry,
each petal smells toxic,
I can’t touch them they will crush.
The clock spits after midnight,
he washes off in rust
then rushes off to spread his love on me.
I am here, like this,
empty, waiting,
for his cyanide to save me.
it won’t be long
the Japanese death garden sings wildly
across the world
I whistle back, a soft. black tune
and lose my eyes to winter
I sleep with her on desperate nights,
her hard skin teaches me
God’s lessons.
I am a body of ache for men to pour their
pain into, she tells me how to behave.
I cry that I am to be a desert,
I am naked, on my way there.
She holds me quick, against her cold
and blows me into prayer,
I lay deep in hell, but I swear, God touches me here.
He reaches through me and pulls
out a song. He whispers, “it won’t be long”
then asks me, again, for prayer.
Stone clouds tell her story.
Today was dry before grey stomped
over head.
I wish I was her. She reminds me
how to cry like my pupils are perfect moons,
ten thousand drops on the prick
of every sharp edge .
She shapes me,
she wraps me in her moisture
when I am filth, then leaves.
I forget. I fly around memory
and time like
it still exists,
like one floor leads to
the next floor,
like today isn’t meant to say anything,
I hope
for silence underwater,
my big head under
water
breathing out every last danger
until my old body is
roaring grey stone,
floating in over head,
reminding someone to fly around
memories
and time
like they still exist.
She is fierce perfection,
parallel to the sky,
matching rock for rock.
The sky’s diamonds sparkle for her
and we stomp on her beauty,
each day, yet she is soft leather
under our ignorance.
They talk about her like I do not know
already. She is arid,
angry!
She stretches over death,
impregnating fire
with fire. She is malignant perfection
and I am her sister.
maggiemaeijustsaythis 