The Other Side Of Love

Darkness is the culprit that lingers behind
each slice of sweet Nectarine.

I am late.
I’ve been here before.

The other side of love.
The place that dissects the tongues
of former lovers
and turns them into layers.

love on
anger on
love on
hate on
jealousy on
love

on poison liquid every night before we stumble to sleep
with the darkness that caresses our feet
and convinces us that we love ourselves
to much to live on the other side.

I am late.
I’ve been here before
where I could feed you Mercury
while the sun sets on us forever.

I’d caress your feet and pray to the darkness
to take you far away
from my love.

The Fury Sisters

This desert is muddy today,
rats scamper under fury.
Little girls chew
off November toes. They kneel in provocation, stretched t-shirt
over back yard fences.

Dogs bark like bitches, I count them – they live free
with dirty kneecaps, laughing at me. It is fair, I know.
It’s the clock,
just; disgusting me.

The rats scurry down wet streets
where my sister plays with
spores. I stalk her like cat play
while she plucks
lice from her
eyes.

Her nudity is a familiar tub
where streetlights meet
sloppy abortionists. 

Once, she was me. We shared
charcoal milkshakes and
flirted with shapes of sour
angels. Now, great love,
is dust of dead skin.
She is piles of vomit under
cloistered stubbornness.

In twenty years, I will be solid.
Midnight will dream of my desert
and sick rats walking in
late, chasing yellow
mold across tarred gutters

where her soul growls empty,
nothing to spare.

COUNTERPART

Gather your corn cockle and doll’s eyes,
the apple orchard’s angry.

She shoots her black seeds
down your throat,
eyes pierced through skin
to watch your veins suffocate.

I met her in September
when she was frail – my mistake –
I never knew of her spines, thorns,
and thistles.

But you knew everything of her:
her laughter,
her sentiment,
her tears….
and she hid in her orchard watching

the way I would swing from your branches;

how you picked fruit ripe from my body,

how every night you crossed midnight
twisted in my edible, red
nightshade

while her delicious Golden
nectar kept well
for the worms.

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 Death Of Roses

He’s splashing in cyanide tonight,
elbow deep in death grease, peeling it off
long enough to shout his love at me.

My bed is empty like this,
I lay here, empty, like this,
sipping on his poisonous spit.

The clock hisses,
my eyes burn like his swollen skin,
sleeping beasts await me
and I sit here,
just empty, like this

while he bathes in acid
and cries out his love to me,
he stands long enough to dry a bullet
and point his shaky finger at me,

I take my time,
watching the roses he gave me
dry,
each petal smells toxic,
I can’t touch them they will crush.

The clock spits after midnight,
he washes off in rust
then rushes off to spread his love on me.
I am here, like this,
empty, waiting,

for his cyanide to save me.

To That Bitch

To that bitch:

Dear Claws,

Razor Sapphic! It is not because
you are
rainbow bracelets,
San Francisco night life;
a glint
bitch. It is your kitty
tongue,

your unshaved
mutter
blame

scratching at my back,
your safe post.
Finger fangs dangling from
deep
within.

It’s not you, It’s me.

It’s me! Tonight, I peeled your vocal
bite-sized
fingernails
out of my breadbasket!

It is stuffed
to excess!
I held
as your turkey, your three year turkey,
my shank bitch,
you sliced me
in to several pieces
to consume
over
time, over
time, over
time,

chomping,
chewing,
sucking the protein
out of me.

Tonight though,
my meat is old,
unkept,

Staphylococcus!

Swallow me, Sapphic Bitch!
I want
to be your cramps, fever, nausea!
From your inside,

ejecting myself from you!

It is not because you are Sapphic.
It is
razor sharp
finger-tips
dipping in to my smooth skin!

The Child Within

I promised a seven year old girl
that
sixteen years would never happen

“don’t be afraid of driving, it will never happen”

in her rancor,
she pissed off a ten
year old girl’s
silhouette –
it was a hollow
young thing
but

outlined in
potential

the young early version
stepped into her
vacancy,
thickening
throughout
the
void
angry
silhouette,

she ripened

in body,
in vocabulary,
in age.

Sweet,
sultry,
sinister,
sixteen,
finding small doors
leading to
thinned
ice,

crystal air
loaded,
ready to explode.

She picks at
glass plank
floors, pulling
strips
of her new tool.

That young one
so afraid,
timid,
playing hide-and-seek
with her
developing
womanhood!

Enough!

She clutches
on to
her
shard sticks,

carving away
at her pumpkin
arms,
her pumpkin legs,
digging her out…

that little
phobic brat,
quivering around
her
prime
poisoned internals.

I made a promise
to the little
one,

sixteen would never come,

now here she is;
butchering
my promise
and
my child.