I Saw It First

so the world curves in and folds
over bottomless
alto-cumulus like
a second cloud
thundering over a handful
of broken hearts
I mean for you to find
out first
but it’s always my eyes
that watch storms
rolling in

swiftly from cracks in old
dreams angrily toward
nights that cradle infants
softly

strangling sleep that holds
and heals
I am tethered to heavy
weather on one of those old
Sunday’s watching my body
drift silently into you
I mean for you to taste these
memories trapped but my
heart is pyrite and I
saw it first.

Where Dead Mice Sleep

Bring your church to the key – back rooms –
chimney sweep – flushed with soot –
black like cats – deep in Winter sleep.

Bring your arm to my ball – and chain
me up – downstairs – I
am a slave

to black waves of adultery –
and let’s not leave out the China, please? – In
the hutch, where dead mice sleep.

Take me to your temple – here, now go
to sleep – shackled to me –
wrapped in spite –
or luxury.

I won’t drop or swallow – your metal is safe
against my chest – One of us
is naked on the inside –

Christ would like how we make it here –
every Winter –
while the cats let the mice sleep.

DayDream

I can’t have you come back like August
without water. Your limbs shriveled and
cracking, bare knuckled,
moving like a tree
away from fire.

We built moons in the back of Cadillac’s,
coffee black leather seats
trimmed back – to make
room for the
others.

I wore thorns under my skirt, then.
I let the pure taste rise from your voice
and settle on the rhythm that
rocked us into daylight.
For you, sound lined up
and agreed with me.

You will come back like August always does;
a dirty deed to compliment me,
to bring me to naught!
But, the moon sails on
and without it,
I cannot.

Skull Crushed

He mounts himself before me
un-zips his stiff skin,
wraps his violent arms around me – to crush

against his ribs. I brush his chest,
boiling veins coil through me,
eyes bulge from my head.

His affection is silent. I see through
muscles and bone – his frail components.
They cannot move. He refuses.

I lay my soft nature over his void.
He is unaware. His nourishment is silent.
He moans. I am starved.

He is heavy in hand and heart, dangles his love on a brick,
then hits me with it. I swell – with thirst,
hungry for his deep devotion,

for his full, dark desire to tie me to him,
vein to vein,
lung to lung,
bone to bone

forever.

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.

Berries and Bullets

The night is thick with hot lead,
bullet dust. His empty pockets
strangle his hands that once were full
with pride.

Beer drips from his words, he buries his head six-feet deep in my lap. Catching the scent of love, he moves faster than tomorrow.

I laid out my arms,
and across the world to make it,
but his poison comes with the smallest gesture,

his lips against my back, a
hot cyanide whisper as he rises,
“I’m sorry.”

He throws on his shadow like an old jacket, hands back in his pockets.
5 a.m. I’m alone.
Face down in a puddle of his poison, I drown.

Tomorrow will catch up with me,
I’ll eat the sun for breakfast.
The earth will grow wild berries
and he will come to find me,

on a Hot Sunday,
melting lead
back into bullets,

he’ll spread my arms by my wrists, untangle my naked fists, furious at his abandon…

but, for him, I will lay across the world to make it,

This Wild Death

I am sitting in a mirror,
hurrying truth faster than it has time
to find itself,
my skin is catching up
and I am missing everything.

I let the tigers out, they crawl
around, scratching my walls,
guarding the music that played three years ago
while I unwrapped myself
for love. I can not
make them leave!

This room is buried
deeper than his coffin. I breathe
less than the body he left
behind, tight blue lips
whisper
how cold it is down here!

Dig me out of this mirror,
this wild death! Is killing me
a plan? Is taking life
straight from my skin
a revenge? I can not
start a dead heart. I can not.

Blurry Thursday

I woke up stained this morning,
dripping off last night’s polish.
My black eyes watched
him cover his tattoos,
blurry Thursday.

He left early and I wrung myself out.
My senses were in shock and I drifted
away with them, deep into
his shadow. He isn’t coming back.

Skin

Tonight, I peel indifference from my face
and hang it up for tomorrow.
Ice is melting. A flood will take me soon
as my body tries to mend. A two-inch puddle
of regret is enough to drown in.
I can never go home again.

One day, I might rent a floor in a busy city.
I might spread my nerves around just enough
to find them.
I will step quickly, palpitate on
hard wood, and scrub off old footprints
that walked there before me.
Empty space for my Self to rot in.

I will peel the skin of potatoes and think
of the last time I kept someone warm,
and like my face, I will lay the skin aside,
to shrivel and dry, as I,

and home will become so long ago,
from a place where my body was fresh, but cold,
from a time when a young man whispered his flames
against my bare shoulder, and
I fell in to him and froze.

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!