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.

The Accident

Embarrassment tugs his eyes to the
left, cradling his infant courage.
He is new skin – crawling
for Jesus – drowning
in sin.

My own infant, white lipped,
sleeps like a giant next
to my hip. My blood
is metallic lead
leaking out.

The scent of iron is dark and heavy.
Mary cycles through every
woman, he reminds me.
I know. Serpents
slither – then
go.

He is the color of silence – naked eyes
following mine, stalking my quiet
like prey. His sharp honesty
brings deep claw marks
across my chest. I
still beat
life. His eyes lift,

hungry. My flesh is real,
sincerity exposed. He prays over
me, Jesus take this pain.
It was an accident, he is just.

On The Day

Oh young, on the day she turns
over a new leaf, sun-damaged
veins, shrivelled death

six-feet to go, to sleep,
to walk in to
her dreams, flat-lined
sex, drawn out of virgin
delirium

strawberry fields in
fast decay, on the day
she turns, sixteen
nights after the drunken man
is fast asleep

on the edge,
on metal terror
pumping through her
veins

this is the one,
the hidden light,
night fury flies past her eyes

everything is tight
blood crushes blood, through
life-less young eye lids
she cries, he’s too fast,

a shrivelled raisin on black top
oh young, that night, and what it means,
the night takes, the air
rips

open, stealing her lungs on the day
she turns.

Oh, Poor House

This old house,
this old skeleton home
stands as cold as a gravestone.

I once stood warm in the middle,
on soft ground,
on proud carpet
and let the seams out,
unravelling my solid foundation.

My blood didn’t mix well.
It was dry gin,
a steady confrontation
within.

These old thoughts,
these moldy walls,
we’ve sunk deep.
It hasn’t slept since I left.
I chose to be deaf.

I chose this aloneness,
a silent voice sipping on charcoal,
dreaming about a house
that once was a home.

Oh, poor house.
Your empty threshold is tempting but,
now I know,
I have shed you,
and my boiling red blood has
calmed to blue.

I do not miss you.

It’s Not December Anymore

Your good beauty is suffering
on my nightstand. Here, you are
gray sand; a sleeping portrait
framed for mortality, unworthy
of a name.

I miss that one sunset. I gathered you
after the rain;
a bouquet of loose eyes
and tight words. My hair curled
around my face.
I watched you watch the sun
burst around my pupils
and we both wanted…

Then,
you were distinct like
wet leaves crushed under our feet,
like stained lips’ plumb kiss.
Silent admissions were made
under our spirited breath.
I inhaled for
you, exhaled for…

I did you no wrong.

We made storms that carved
time and
broke wind chimes.
I painted your hands over mine,
then erased them.
You gave up.

Since,
seasons have exchanged
heated glances; volcanic disregard
erupted from our mouths, but
there were not words,

and silence could have been generous,
but it was not. Not
to you,
nor to I.

That season has come back and I feel
the sunset waiting,
time has dug a cave in
new clouds.
I am silent no more,
my voice is a proud thunder

I am waiting for you!

The Girl In The Mirror

Over and over,
dry skin flakes off my shoulders,
crumbs of a younger me,
revealing new layers that nobody
has seen.

I watch the girl in the mirror watch
back. We do not know each
other and, I think, we never will.

 

Loose Old Man

I know that his balls are old under his brown
slacks. I know that his old charming ways
slither softer than ever before. I bet the hard morning air, where sex used
to greet young, fertile sex, now stings
blue.

I bet his bones pick up the slack
from the way he bent himself in his
twenty’s. I imagine he spent many hours
on all four’s, in preparation, for
salivation and conception.

All these things that he dashes off in pride;
the streets,
the actresses,
the cosmos,

must not make up, now, for the way his skin sags.
This must be why his poor, old tongue sags.

My grandfather told me that loose lips are the sign
of a boy, not a man.

And The World Doesn’t Agree With Me

My time is 15.
I am round cheeks
and naked with definition.
I don’t know how to hide under
the thick film that buries me later.

He is built with reddish, muddy hair.
He flares and expands in size,
greater than any other young torso.
I watch him hold hands with Grace
and Innocence, I listen to him
sing with rebellion and defiance.
He strums, and he strums me along
to the quiet, unexposed nights.

My time is 16,
and he has left. He has found liberty;
liberty, or abandon.
I have found a stuffy old pharmacy.
I sit on sidewalks eating tiny tablets, remembering
abandon from times: 8, 9, and 10; it is
sadly comfortable,
like I am with him.

3 months later, he brings back the East Coast.
His air is accented and tired,
thick for me to breathe.
He smells like 15, though, and he tastes like
the cigarette we shared on the night he left.
He brought himself and his guitar
just to me,
and he strings, and he strings me along
to the quiet, prudish night for two more weeks,
and then he is gone.

Now, I listen to the music,
to motorcycles drive by
my dark basement, with strings that
I will learn to play later.
Not yet, it is not time for me yet.

Right now, the film is building.
Right now, I am being defined.
Abandon has timed itself, lined perfectly
with my over-exposed skin.
I need him.

Now.
Later.
I need him.
I will,

and the world will never agree with me
and nobody believes me.

Miss Serpentine

The bells began to spin without chime. I noticed them
long before her blue hair reached out beyond arms length;
azure fire serpents striking!
The bells twirled and whirled, and I noticed them
before her coiled locks hissed at a lush, worked field.

She had been a craving. Jellied breasts flopping
under moon beams,
underneath heavy breath sheets.
There is nothing like a beat red short bed,
the first bit of skin stretched,
meeting dropped blood-lets by a first night sunrise.

She was a place of blue bells,
lemonade peels,
sleepy grass on lazy jazz fields.
Her mind marked with umbrella lace covering May days.
She was marked by a farm boy first night.

I watched her as she carried the bells.
Big steel bells, pretty stainless chimes. She danced with them,
her long, gold locks wrapped in a warm embrace around them.
She chimed. She jingled with southern foliage while
her feet remembered his.

That’s when the bells began to spin. They twirled and swirled
and she didn’t notice them. She was wrapped in a warm night
with another’s appetite. She was cuddling with the crickets and
midnight winds.
On and on and on this went.

Forever couldn’t measure the time. The sun had went blind.
The moon sweat itself dry.
I watched and realized just how thin my own breasts were,
and I was grateful.
For one day came when she noticed the silence of the bells,
she recognized the twists,
and the turns,
and the absence of the crickets and midnight and feet.

Shock came at her, a black bat of attack. Her golden strands
suffocated, turning as blue as that cold moment.
And there she became.
She stood with force against the night fields,
Miss Serpentine, on fire,
blazing lush, worked fields back at Mister Red Short Bed and
her overstretched skin!

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.