Copper Loaded Love

A green barrette, a gun.
Good-bye, my lady.

If I cut my hands off, my lucky gun would fit.

I gave three seconds and died
happy, life is just a lesson.
You are thirty seconds to the grave,
I am just a prison.

You’re Irish season swallows poison,
we terrified your liver. Good-
bye, my lady,
I am drowning in a river.

Everybody is looking,
I have your money here.
You cheat! You’re a cheat, painting courage over
with fear.

My white girl, I love you,
with a dark and heavy gun.
I shot you up, a million shots
with copper loaded love.

Drink your dark poison,
swallow your tainted love.
Good-bye. my lovely lady,
your green barrette, your gun.

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!

The Great Crime

You will lay aside your suspicions of me.
Slide the doormat over your back,
be still.
I turn silver coin accusation
between my finger tips
and flip.

The great crime, I ask you,
a civil war inside me,
or you?

My innocence is like this!

Your guilt is a private loss,
but the way you droop confidence
downward, as if the ground
will forgive you,
shows my victory,

and in my voice, forgiveness,
but my gut smirks.
I am a temple of construction.

The Children In Their Sleep

A woman wrinkles over her chair,
soaked in religion, 
piling God’s children on gravel. 
They eat with her disciples
where bread is dry, yet
milk is sweet. 

I stand by with clover. 
I paint the children green and set them up
as chess pieces. 
Confused feet step over boundaries, 
but it is her game. 

Her weight stomps chicken bones. 
Her voice pours like gravy 
over our heads, till I put them to sleep, 
and the lullaby’s rock me
as I bleach time from my head. 

The woman is asleep
in God’s arms, I rest at his feet, 
and the children, 

in their sleep, sing. 

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.

Against Time

Dear Young Man,

I saw your skin smooth like the fountain of youth,
pouring down your river,
your delicate body of water.

Your body is a peach,
ripening,
a firm seed planted in your centre,
ready to harvest in the soil of fertility.

I once took your age and manipulated it.
My skin was an innocent organ,
but my mind played ignorant instruments
and I danced to drums,
too drunk to
notice hands like yours, trembling
down my back side,
searching for my treasure.

I was a golden egg, cracking over a camp fire,
cooking from the inside, out,  flirting
with the fruit of the Earth,

and now, Young Man, I feel naivety drip from
your skin, mixing with my worn complexion as
I grind against your skin,
searching for your core,
going back,
back ward in time.

Earthquakes And Eruptions

I live with a turtle
in cold corn field rows. He is hard.

Last time we visited a moon together,
he took my pen, his tricky art,
pliable concern caked dirty under
turtle nails.

He has not always been
a beast. Once, he had wings.
He hovered above sandstone.
I thought of his death. Afraid.
He would be ghost treasure feeding
corn field soil.

He was a well-made horse. Gallant.
Reinforced.
I bridled him. Caged him.
The Big Blue Marble called to him
with a voice
of adventure,
of freedom.

But, he was kept.
Trained.

I nailed his shoes to the dirt. One day,
I felt the Earth crumble beneath my
dainty feet.
Earthquakes and Eruptions.
The horse ran free!

I cried for a year,
spent one more in guilt,
then another in admission..

until, one firewater night brought him
back to me. He stood like a horse.
He spoke like a horse.
He drank like a horse.

But, he was not a horse.
His eyes had become chicken neck yellow.
Shifty.
He tried to stand as a horse,
but he startled
and ducked,
tucked himself inside.

A turtle. With a shell.
In a field.
Cold.
Hard.
Taking my pen because he hasn’t any thumbs.

The Book

There is a book that you do
not know. Hard bound.
Gummy.

It was a long trip.
I took a machete to its ink soaked
dress, paddled through
its mysterious
sea of
bad clams. But he wrote it.

He with his ego gala hidden
underneath his racy
beard. The claps,
the bouquets of fraud that
come calling
when a new page is written,
sealed.

The rules are boundless, without
architecture or
makeup.
There would have been a beefy,
apple pie house
but
a pig’s pen
stamped itself onto Arch’s A-E.
From the start….
crippled pages held compact in
iron arms.

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.