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.

I Will, I Will Do Now

My head, my long head burns
in fury as my teeth expand. I can taste gun powder.
It is only what I knew,
not what I begin to know now.

I can become a tomato, only when
I become a tomato.
I am not whole, or ripe,
or sweet, red flesh,
until then.

I will only be a youthful green seed, now.

And what will I do with myself?
I have let fat, green worms slither
around my precious skin.
I have laid root in rocky, dry soil.
I have hidden my aching vines from
sunlight,
and that was all then.

Now, my face pulsates as I grind
my teeth on old leather,
fighting expansion,
embracing the tension,

and I will, I will do with my sweet,
ripe fruit what I know now.

The Bugs

Oh! The bugs are marching
one-by-one
in
my head, my head

my head
it’s latched on by
commitment

Thank God! Else it
would have shaken off
with rickety waves of
apprehension
I am standing on

thousands of microscopic
bug legs
strutting,
fashionably strutting
in hand crafted
black leather wedges

chewing up
the poise that carries me
through rocky terrain
mixing
creating
cement bricks of
disquietude

trampling my resplendent
garden
of backbones.