Beautiful bedclothes
wrap me up warm
vanity mirror
shows where I’m torn
pictures of pain
stolen when born
blood on the bedclothes
cause me to mourn
Day turns to night
childless mother
weeps to forget
weeps to remember
bring me to morning
my son and my daughter
blood on the bedclothes
look for no other
Beautiful bedclothes
wrap me up please
body is aching
heart cannot breathe
cradle is empty
no mouth to feed
beautiful bedclothes
I surrender to thee
I
If I wanted a husband I would marry someone who needs to be in charge.
But I don’t want someone who needs to be in charge -
I need someone to work with me in the ebb and flow, and
make things work when they’d rather not, and
bend for me.
(more…)
The green light of my new alarm clock
spreads, lapping at
the blackness of our room.
I am fidgeting, fluffing the pillow.
Sleep swims an elusive swell.
The lime-colored rays squirming from
those digital numbers
leech your cheeks, sagged with slumber.
You look sour,
painted that macabre green,
the lines of your face
blackened, carious.
Your arms drape like noodles
across your supine figure;
but for the hiss of breath,
an image of death.
I wish I’d opted for the red one.
A double acrostic I wrote last year:
Tuesday this year brings your birthday. Each
hand claps another for the king. Adieu,
aerialist. Once the wire held your feet down;
now snapped ends lie touching air. We, awestruck,
karaoke your memory appassionato.
Your rhinestones at the last were off,
obbligato forgotten, your gyrations occluded by flab;
ubiquity buried you.
Vagabondage maybe was your curse. Your
entropic rushes between snapshots ran…
ran down. Your trips to the stage became ennui
yawning, a hunk of hunk of burnin’
mediocrity. This year your deathday will fall
unnoticed on a Saturday. Your outgo
crammed into “this day in 1977…” TV,
having electric memory, might run a tape.
Into the still air it curls
Nervous tendrils of chaos
Clasping itself like a snake
Entwining cursive logos
Now she knows the shape of death
She tastes sweet smoke with each breath
Entering the temple gates
Madrigal ecstasy
Under the stars
Somnolent symphony
Intro: four bars
Candle inside of me –
I came, a random derivative.
One sperm
threw an elbow and so, I am
my father’s son.
His hackneyed jabs
at the edges of things
always bounced awry, and so
do I.
Always with the half-formed plans
of drunken imagination, he loved
procrastination until he died.
The barman cried.
I trace his steps in cool
darkness. I stand thirsty,
my father’s son. His blood
is the sound of whiskey on ice.
There is a photograph. Two boys stand
in straw hats, their arms draped
over each other’s shoulders, freckled
faces grinning into the camera. Behind them,
I remember, is a leaning barn, and an ancient orchard
scattered through pines. I can still feel
the summer heat blowing across the creek,
picking up the fragrance of tadpoles and rattlesnakes.
The older boy is ten, and is me.
My brother John is eight. He has already lived
more years than he has left. (more…)
A stranger to geography, I woke
to find the world in me. I do not know
how it sneaked in, but every mirror shows
I’ve been transformed. I think myself a joke
of God. My alloyed blood is Amazon
mixed up with Nile. Baobab forests squat
across my face, those eyebrows frame a knot:
the orphaned hills of southern Lebanon.
My English hand is swiping at the scruff
of Northern Ireland, blowing angry breath.
Divided heart, Jerusalem, courts death
while Sarajevo rumbles in my gut.
At first amused, I now fear I’ll succumb
as Abel falls to Cain ad nauseum.
My lower intestine
is locked in clandestine
disgraceful embrace
with a biotic case
of questionable
gestation.
My gallbladder belches
brown steam downstream.
My liver is a bag of dog shit
burning on Crabapple’s porch.
My catawampus tongue
spits alliterative assonance,
a philological enema
gushing soft soap.
Go away.
The room is occupied.
