The Passage

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.

I Love Her More

She has a name hanging
in a back orchard somewhere.

Cowbells are ringing. I gave it up
like an omelet to a woman married
to perfection.

I am missing limbs for limbs,
heart for heart. Who am I to promise
life to another broken life?

Her name stands on a balance beam
between two tongues, heated tongues,
a melting puddle of ownership.
Where did she come from?
Where does she belong?

Tug-of-war. I own her more.
Someone who should have been born
is hanging in a back orchard somewhere.

I let her go. I love her more.

A Lifetime Of Love

pretty girl in peach giggles
making wishes,
blowing quiet whispers off
wild flowers
pick all the petals you
can find before they die

green ropes soak up air
from my lungs
I wish
I wish in silence
not for me – I am done

but for a lifetime of
blowing kisses in
spring winds,
making giggles grow faster
than wild flowers
and petals that live forever in
the yellow sunburst around
your pupils

pretty girl in my stilettos
wishing to grow and grow
I wish
I wish in silence
not for me – I am done

but for a slow life
of sweet summer banana juice
and rain
a garden of imagination and
when you are done

I wish
I wish in silence
not for me
but for a lifetime of love

a life of a ghost man

It is hard to believe in a dead man,
a ghost,
a life,
a life of a ghost man….

a life that hands my limp direction
over to those that can control it.

They must have told him,
the people,
that his core was rotting,
that his brain was infested and crumbling?

That his daughter was sick with
raw nerves and would never get better?

If the bombs in Vietnam hadn’t sawed his
spirit away,

if his own father
hadn’t dangled lily liver from
the ceiling,

maybe he would have heard
the people,
the ghosts,
the whispers of his daughter’s twisted,
raw nerves grasping
for contact

and saved me from rotting with the same
crumbling infestation.

The Bone Yard

I fold my dirty body next to the sun as it falls to sleep across a boneyard.

Our Daughters sleep in there, clinging on to life and on to death.
They strip down to breast and bone for swine,
gnawing on their own skeletons for some Great Man to tame them.

They play in ash playgrounds, burnt down by thieving snakes of virginity.
Our hands can do nothing.
Our Book does nothing.

Our Sons are bound, shackled by veins to elusion.
They strain, barefoot in the desert where demons build their muscles on doubt and hesitation.
Fear is a great interruption to the infant shadows that remain young nuisances
until trepidation grips its claws around their hollow shoulders and carry them away.

And, as the boneyard grows next to me. I lay, with burnt wings, in a chill that never dies.

They Try To Erase Me

I never had been born. It was old hands
that sketched my frame. Hands that knew how to suffer
wisely. It was a gift
to my bones, a curse that shifts
with weight and time.
Clocks wait on scales to tip time. I am rushed.
Blood cycles through my life.
Old lines outline my eyes. I am timed.

I slept with a man
and was traced. He recreated me; my child.
My simple face on a prettier canvas.
I didn’t wish for this.
I didn’t dream.
She just belongs to me.
I drag my bones along aching seas
each step pains deeper with memory,
with time.
Dark lines shade over mine.
They try to erase me

From my bones, I cry.
I cannot be
an easy sketch of a memory.

Morning Greets Me

Each morning greets me differently;
she kisses my cheek for love, or
spits down my throat for some other reason.
I used to hate her obnoxious light.
When I was a child I threw sticks
at her and swore I would do myself
in before she could. I made rope from vines
that her sun rays grew. I gathered
poison that lived on her sickly Earth
and piled them next to my bare toes
as they dug deep through the planets
coarse skin.
I think I sat in this spot, with my back toward
her for years on top of years.
She burned and blistered through my anger,
but I couldn’t see.

Until, one morning, my daughter greeted me,
sat softly next to my feet and reached deep into
the pile of poison
that I’d been saving for me.

The Twins

I have been brought a morning in bed,
yellow hands expand my eyes.
I rise as a vulture,
slender billed, nut beaked,
baking for a sun day.
The night salted me; an open wound,

the darkness delivered my twins.
She was duplicated, the little girl,
the golden daughter of heroin and hope,
she was on ice,
waiting for me, to grow.

It was a discrete joy, a time to prevent
a murdered life, to create
an identical heaven.
This time, she was mine.

But, the golden splatter was received
as the sun rose above
shadow boxes, as my blemished hands
become liver,

and we yellowed.
With tattered feathers, “we”
became “I”.
No duplication.
No sweet, heavenly replication
waiting for me, to grow.

What I Am And What I Should Be

I was 26 when I became a rope,
stretched from loud brown cocktails to
the hush of burnt oven mits.

I was too thin to be stepped on,
so I just laid,
spread, fine butter for
Homemade Bread Men.

I went on as rope for two years,
reaching both ends of
limit. Ginger snaps
snapped back at me when
I raised a mother’s hand.
A trained ham clamming up, shaking
during the Spirits Earthquake.

I baked them by the dozen,
hard bread snaps to
braid me when I was bad.
Two years rowed its boat swiftly
and now
here I am.

A rope.
Spread thin over aging.
Frayed ends begging to be stayed.
They will not.
Time can not allow it, but time
will be easy on
middle belly.
Center ground.
That is what I should be.

Texas LongHorn

Up north, near borders and manure,
a woman lives with a Texas LongHorn.
She grows red potatoes and
asparagus in spring water.

She nudged her children
with long pitchforks, for all the years
that she could.
Poking,
prodding,
until ladybugs and snake skin
wrapped her
thick construction sick.

I had a son. White ash hair,
marble blue sight.
The woman’s Ladybug’s tampered him.
So, he trampled them!
One after another.
Crunch. Crunch. 

Like good mother’s do, I told him “NO!”
He cried.
I sneezed,
and when I did, my poor soul
escaped.
No woman blessed me.
No child cried.

But, that woman! That woman with her potatoes,
and her asparagus,
and her giant Texas LongHorn
grew beastly horns that
poked,
that prodded,
sharper than pitchforks.