those words hang stolen
weeping willow feelings
a translation
so desperate
so sudden
a panic slighted by
memories that
only sleep can
bribe from
a hidden cave
i think
i thought of you
as love
a piece of heaven
dangling over
a crimson counter-top
tempting my
sensations
a reverberation
of a gift
offered only
by the Universe
you stole
them from another
love
that flourished
in a time
that I could not exist
not for you
Her conversation created craters
around fine dining – she
is one glass too many,
I read her like wine before we sat down.
The light was getting too frisky
when she reached South for
my heart.
Her eyes crossed like a thieves fingers,
pure white bled through.
“I thought I knew you” she said
as I mopped up the puddle of hatred on the floor.
More often than not, I’d plant false
seeds of little baby heartlings
where the girls’ pretty fingers would reach,
but now I have turned.
My shape is funny. It fits like
butterfly wings.
Honest. Divine. Free.
She wears a wet blue dress
and if you undress her
she is not vulnerable or
violated. She is a curved
and proud body;
fertile.
He is molded. He is ceramic mannequins turning sick
against the sea. Noon splits pavement and silicon swallows
in a frenzied gulp.
She is airless, something to know and fear.
When clouds steal our stars, she calls to the moon, carrying all of her love and loyalty back to shore,
while he steals her pearls
in the dark.
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 you should find me with my head in the oven,
and my other head hanging from the broom closet,
and my torso flattened under tire,
and my hands in a bowl of oranges,
and my neck breaking for a man I barely know,
if you should find me like this,
please let me know what waits on the other side.
Please give my words a violent bath
in ammonia and make my skin
as fresh as a mothers’ skin should be.
Please wrap me up in plastic and place
me under heating lamps
and interrogate me before I leave.
I want my guts to spew outside of myself and
my skeleton to dry out in fresh air.
The air has become so stale in here,
I am as dry as an old loaf of bread.
I am collecting spores of green mold and nobody
knows about it
and all of the living organisms go around and around
their clocks;
the women with their perky breasts and the
men with their swollen cocks
and all of their concern with pro-creation,
while I sit here and rot in
the truth of who I am.
and who was I at midnight?
Your throat on firewater, swallowing
baggy, flabby tongues.
It is no matter,
tonight is seven hundred stories high
and I am ready to jump. Before I do, though,
I remember you
and sitting on your lap,
the shot,
the bounce,
your heavy gunman.
The moon has a chain on it,
this I never told you,
I put it there myself, several years ago.
It lingers patiently, sleepily awaiting me,
tied up and braced for thunder.
I will come pounding from the top
of your world, the last one I was shown,
up seven hundred staircases
to reach,
to grab,
to attach myself to the moon.
I have a long connection from brain
to chest, in gentle condition,
you were always soft,
not like this scratched metal chain
stabbing in to thin purple veins, on purpose,
a reminder.
A reminder that it is always just after midnight,
no matter what anyone says.
She snaps like a
twig from a
dead oak tree
She snaps
her fingers,
one,
two,
THREE!!!!!!
Standstill! Who will
draw first
Three sisters, count them.
One.
Two.
Three.
Huddled in her meat cleaver,
she leaves them.
Dead meat.
Red, raw
meat for the taking.
Marinated to
manipulated savory.
Three girls with
guilt blonde hair. Three
scared
little witches, fixing burns,
breaking dishes.
That’s what happens when the
flip switches,
she twitches into
rags –
stomping floorboards,
dropping little blonde
hair into body
bags
feeds dirty lies
from her
mothering, smothering hands.
I live angrily as
a nest keeper. Of giant twigs,
stressed circles, cradled
meadow sprigs –
a sharp bed intrusive to Slumber-
land. A rude
carnivore bites at my tanned
leg lines.
Once, I rolled toward
nest Head,
Bed Bug…
his bullish limbs
clutched my merit,
kindred as
orange and red compass.
We slammed hammers to habit,
congested air particles with
polluted hate vomit, we
danced each other into cement,
off skyscrapers to meat cleaver sidewalks.
Until, nests became pine boxes.
Boulders rolled in,
crushed my nose into
lines of dead life, I inhaled.
With everything I had, I inhaled, as
shards of pine darted
from his eyes.
Lies followed, grabbing each arm, lifting
my body
through gray skies. Tears wobbled out mortified
ducts,
raining small crux drops
over orange-red meadow sprigs,
ambiguous layers shed under liquid
suffering.
Now, I live angrily as
nest keeper,
whistling out at dead meadow
straw to rope Lynch Law in,
Justice for Him.
Two twisted ropes
young
ripened
hair
jumping
twirling
giggling
squealing
lengthy brown
cuts
length covers
the truth
scented as innocence
in white cloaked
purity
misleading
boys
girls
men
women
thick strands would lay
gentle across
hairy chests
lace
bare breasts
camouflaging promiscuity
as tender
bloody
raw pieces of
a heart
one-by-one
single strands fell
attaching faithfully
to each different
fingerprint that combed
intimacy down
down
down
to the bottom of every
tiny
split
end
desertion
so subtle
so discreet
went unnoticed
but
thinned
dissipated
to
nearly stark
abolishing
fabricated scents
publishing
scandalous stories
wrapped around
fingertips
lovers
who loved
innocent hair.
maggiemaeijustsaythis 