The People

Starved out of politeness, cockroach-kicked feet
walk across a blue night.
My lungs are stuck together, breathing in
radiation from the hot air
blown in my face.

The people, the people glow
white teeth at every camera. I see
the teapot boiling,
steam rising,
whistle blowing….

my ears ring out electric chords,
far from the classic, ghostly shadow
that sprawl across my nerves
when they start to shiver.

They eat very little,
or a lot, or they drink
or not,
or they lie and mispronounce their own
names on purpose and move around mountains
blending in with the tones of the town.

These people seem largely designed, I
walk on needles. I am little and not
proportionate. I dream about
ages, and eggs and other meals
that are not enough on their own.

Is anyone? Enough with just their teeth and
their camera and light?
“She’s only crazy,” says my mother.
And the hills are long monsters leaking
into my brain. I’m dizzy
and distorted. This image.
This image set up in sanity, or not.

Doctor, Tell Me

I am going to be. Here,
in a sticky womb,
a living room made for
madness; a sautéed fanciness.

The feast is being set,
just above the chandelier,
they call me by number,
my tattooed slumber calls.

White isn’t always padded
or strapped. Most likely
it only surrounds
the dark blue ring
around the sunburst I look at.

I think I am a painting.
Rembrandt is too gross, but
Picasso, he is enough mystery
to create me.
Half of me sprawls across the cold,
I wait for night-watch to
twist me back to form.

The other girl squats in the corner.
I smell feces and antifreeze.
Do I dream? Can I dissect the fumes of
the dead?
Her charred body crawls toward me,
she removes her teeth.
Everything glitters like a shadow.

Then, I am here. In the morning.
It isn’t the sun that tells me,
but the number, tattooed to
my skull.

Doctor, tell me, has Picasso gone home?

This Life And Thereafter

For every one I have killed, I have killed the heart of two,
and taken the hand
of the most Sinister Man – his Red Blood has turned mine Blue;

and, no, I did not whisper under breath, or breath into his ear,
I simply looked through
a man, maybe two, who’s soul had smothered in fear.

I am satisfied! I am satisfied, as I swim throughout their ashes.
I feel their bones,
their dangerous undertones, then my Blue blood flickers and flashes.
Now, I know I am Queen of Sinister things;
this life, and, thereafter!

My Heavy Boulder

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.

Another Part Of The Stage

In three instances, a quarrel. They just happened.
You can imagine, living with an audience for
several years, one might crave affection from the graveyard.

Adorned with diamond rattler’s around her neck,
she hissed! A victim losing her fingernails, clawing concrete,
speaking at a bouquet of guns against her head.
She hissed and spit whore
venom on the Church, on God’s appointments
on the blood of her own Mother.
There was plenty of talk in her head,
like she hadn’t been cooked all the way.
Little Birdie,
we called her.
It.
Whoever she was!
And this, the first quarrel!

The most vicious influence was the lonely lie.
Her handsome face, her warm fingerprints
marking the dry surface of men, her pretty
negligent smile. A suspicious flattery.
We hate that word ‘lonely’. It sounds too much  like
her long, cimmerian hair falling out of
nonsense, into the hands of Marcus,
who was legal and wise.
She was sick with her voices,
but her art flowed with age, though an age she would
never meet. She was never a companion,
never a graceful daisy soaking in a glass on the windowsill.
She was sour. The yellow tart.
She was built by a man of taste,
not by a woman of fertile soil and thick roots.
She was the feel of scandal for fifteen years,
a southern discovery of poor breeding;
thus, of the quarrel! The second!

Until we found her. Marked on
a cotton morning, her delicate apology.
Her body rot little overnight, her palm held smudges of
the colour of  kisses she blew everywhere.
The undeserving. The unpolished drunkards
sleeping in her
empty stairwell.
Most people like that war.
The soldier falling on
desperate knees, giving her awful consent,
her soiled white handkerchief surrendering from
the cup of her bra.
This is the third quarrel. The one they want to hear.
Was there a symphony of blood?
Was she wrapped in her velvet curtain and dropped
from the top floor?
Who played the piano? Who picked up her body
and decided that she wrote this score?
Even the tears cried for her gossiped about this act.

This was the starving quarrel.
Fed like a good husband, yet hollowing still!
Maybe she was a little wild
and sick with threats,
poor Little Birdie, her nervous
beauty gulped her down like a glass of Brandy.
She was tired.
And this, the third quarrel. Act Three.
Curtains down.

If I Did Not Write

If I did not write, I would
have
been sympathy for
family.

If I did not write, they could have
cried on
their partner’s shoulders
about how they could have helped.
Or,
if they could have.

If I did not write,
a rope might not hang so loose;
a ground may not be hollow;
a sister
may miss another sister’s voice.

Instead,
I become ferocious.
Ravenous.
I let ink seep out from under
bitten fingernails to
stain swollen
pages of life.

Seas Of Insanity pt 1

Faintly nights
sail me out to bad seas

where phantom mermaids
sprout silver razor fangs,

the evil legion
of
uncertainty.

They breed for war company,
not companionship.

My body floats through a
blurry
night vision,

disarranged,

my color changes to corrupt
as
salty thin waves shift
to fit
a temporal sea.

These are MY waters!
Taken by vicious fish women
who
slant
unstable nets
to the West way I wander in

my abducted waters arrest me
in mesh tangles and drag me
down,
down deep,
to the bottom of the bad sea.

It is here where I find them,
or they find me,

sick ghostly’s with their guns
and their sabres,
with their sick hats and masks.

I find them in mirrors, metal trays,
window glass, silver spoons,
lurking as gauzy shadows

at the bottom of the mad
seas,
bad seas,

They are women,
stringers
and
scribblers,

jumping from balconies,
blasting out their brains,
taking madness away from themselves and
handing it back to me,

in fins
and ferocious teeth that finally drag me
away from the mad, bad seas

away from uncertainty,
from faintly nights

to meet
the first blush of the sky
over seas of insanity.

Countermeasure

Little Brother Brazen
lives on floor number four
without shoes

the pharmacy is closed
forever indefinitely
like windows
are
up on the fourth floor

Little Puny Palms
hoarded
a wealth of contaminates
swallowing
dosage after dosage
until
an overdosed panic spilled
confession from
his eyes

he was charged
to
green masked men
green masked
women

clear plastic tubes
forced liquid charcoal
to disgorge
rich heaps of self-inflicted
euthanasia

My
Little Brother Brazen
was charged
to floor number four
where Dr. Head
took his windows
and shoes

countermeasure.

He Is Allergic To Peanuts

We cooked, cooked together
smashed meat with boulders and fried it
on rocks. We drilled into eggs and
drank the yolk from it’s own shell.

We smiled at each other with leftovers
in our teeth…

I grated peanuts into piles of peanut dust behind my back, while
he played a song that
reminded him of me.

The music tickled on and he sang
and we sang together. We danced and we
danced together.
To the piano, we were not graceful
but the drums could tell we that we were delicate
and practiced; together.

My hand clutched the peanut dust tightly as
he held, held tightly onto my waist.
He spun me around to
face him, our eyes met.

He closed his eyes, we closed them together.
He leaned in to kiss me.
I leaned my lips to my hand and blew, blew
the dust in his face.

He was stunned – breathless. Choking, he fell to the floor, tears
puddling in his eyes and he cried,
we cried together.