inside my chest, a universe
is born – yet to be touched
by hands of The Creator
he drives over city limits
lips openly rested
tongue saturated with
thoughts of fresh
female
sentiment
one particular body
conception happened
a seed was planted
it took root
in salty palmed
memories
I never have left this desert
where my heart started
he knows I can –
I will be his shadow
you feel like an ocean
in my arms a tidal wave
I have been surfing on
summer since you
found me black shadowed
after trekking winter’s
long desert
waiting for you to
hyphenate me with
your time and your precious
cargo down below a
vacant heart at the time
but now is a roaring lion
ready to claim
this undiscovered body
prepared for your arrival.
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.
Inside egg shell
ostrich bones
form over
and over fire
ostrich feathers fry.
Summer twilight
under seas
dead fish float
trying out moss
5th Ave
cross streets.
It’s a like
a thumb’s up
a smile
a laugh
a new thought
a new way to say
life lives to die
concrete
it is.
not the kind you think of
when the word presents itself
there hasn’t been gifts
or flowers
or cakes
no declarations of love
I am veiled in quicksand
my ankles stolen
right from underneath me
A preacher speaking “blah, blah, blah, God” ….
and all that stuff
my dear family and friends
gathered around me
laughing
a single dove laying on
an altar
plugged into oxygen
plastic wrapped for perfection
suffocating
the caterer
with the smile of a thousand devils
reminds me to pay my bill
tonight we roast the dove
It’s a white night
in a white gown,
lights are dancing in
black windowsills.
In an instant, I’m a crowd;
an infant fevering
for heavy music to sing.
My prison is cumulonimbus.
La la la la la.
The opera is inside of me.
Look inside, there’s
a phantom cradling a breeze.
I will become
a storm under white sheets.
Waiting to be swept up,
my weak field,
my broken wheat.
I see your
Tropic of Cancer
and how tumorous you can be
but I will be
better than the whiteness
that is surviving me.
At that time
I will sow the sound
of wind chimes
over lullabies.
Mozart will come sit with me
about your layers –
we won’t need them,
words don’t mean anything
after you have seen
how beautiful the whiteness
can be.
Confession from Heaven
as you can see
we have potential
although hearts burst out in tears,
locked behind bars, in chains,
against a will of their own,
we carry every blink used
to wipe away the pain,
we stand guard when the Earth
shakes underneath feet full of breath
breathe easy
we have potential
we have not lost the sunlight
of yesterday,
or the smell of a growing world
childhood kisses are fresh on our
souls
we have not passed
we are not the past
we are your honest future
waiting
for our bound hearts
to hold each other
once again.
You have gone. There is no now,
just used to;
cement packed into Earth fragments.
Ironic, it is, that solidity above the surface
is made from what lies beneath.
Think about – oh how you can’t!
I miss that.
Poor baby.
You try to kill me again,
and again,
to show me something new,
a new world inside of sleep.
Is this how it is for you?
A permanent anywhere,
where you never are, but were?
I miss that what it was
will not, and never be anything
but you and me, asleep inside of a
sleep.
The dragon doesn’t wake with the sun. It is warmed
through mock light, on an affected cove. It looks
like it could be made of mopani,
but he cannot tell colors
what they should be
and what they are not.
I left him a note, this morning, by his glass house.
In his rest, he inhaled the pushed warm air
that circulates my blood each night.
I promised him Aspen and Cabbage and
my return.
I am late. I am always pushing the clock
into my lungs, back to my cycle,
back to little hands and little
feet swirling around
a glass house,
tearing cabbage for a dragon that
constantly stares at me.
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