woman

My tits

are swollen

the grandeur

of the woman

bright-eyed

hard-eyed

beaming or shrugging

love love love

each other

I say.

 

The world is love

is terrible

is the infinite connection

of us

every living day

until we die

that we grasp hands

and raise our voices

to the great galactic sky

that we are fighting.

 

The seedlings

are sprouting

tiny green

pieces of the

universe

breathing

the whole structure

of time

to love one another.

 

We stand

howling through the black night

our cry reaching

the blank heavens

for all to hear

that no one is alone.

we have each other.

we have the world.

the dove, the beast

I, the fickle dove, I fear the movement

of sound from sweet lips,

the tone of the words

singing from the great sky

of the infinity of love

you feel for me.

 

I, the tragic beast, I fear

I love you so deeply

that the thought of you

driving in your car

music blaring

in your fantasy mind

will not see those headlights

will fall will fall.

 

I, I fear your bright eyes,

your winsome face,

the depth of your letters

as you stroke my brown hair,

your meaning drives sickness

into my stomach

for fear of losing you.

 

Please love me, little one.

Please understand that

I am trying every minute

to be wonderful for you,

I flick the ashes from my hand

and guilt consumes me,

but I know that I need you

more desperately than

I care to admit

and you will help me now.

for m.g.

Come darling, sleep now.

The moon is waxing, she beckons your weary eyes to close.

I am the moon, I cradle your tender limbs once darkness becomes you,

Bespectacled, blinking

Into the brilliant sky,

So infinitely close to my small pink heart.

for sarah and kevin

The lark, calmly sitting at the edge of the pond,

Swept up in the poetry of the water.

A lark floats down impossibly soft,

Takes her downy feathers in his own,

Breathes into her warm beak,

Her world devoted to his birdsong.

mother

When God raped our dear mother,

He chose the gown she’d wear.

What grew pitted in her belly

For the world to love and share.

 

Her hum blew low among the brush

And swept to corners deep,

Yet none would chance to hear it,

Tucked sightless into sleep.

 

God fucked her for He loved her,

No pretense in His gaze.

He let her burgeon quickly

A child made to amaze.

 

She drank her tea quite slowly,

Her fingers at her lips,

While a poor man held her cleanly

And watched her shaking sips.

 

He believed though God was silent,

Speaking naught to his white face,

While sweet she knew God bluntly,

Stuck with careful grace.

 

She was fated just a mother,

Though this day we bleed cool will.

This was an ancient time then

When God decided still.

 

I think of her so bluely,

Her life rendered apart

By a Lord’s black want for legacy

That He belittled her poor heart.

 

She is nothing but his mother,

A man who yearned for all

The stature of a deity

And so tragically his gall

 

Drove iron through his palms

And thorns upon his brow

That day they murdered God alive,

And somehow it matters now.

timing

the cat, whose whiskers tick like time’s own hands,

will weep, and want, and wait.

the gilded mirror

The duchess, at the mirror, gilded, a wooden hairbrush in her delicate hand.

‘I am in love with a memory,’ she says, her maid pressing a ruby gown in the corner of the room,

‘I miss his ghost.’

‘Think not of this ghost, madam,’ says the maid, ‘for we all have ghosts of our own,

‘And ‘tis by our choosing that they haunt us, for the dead are wont to sleep.’

‘Tarry not, young maid,’ pips the duchess.  ‘The dead must be awoken,

‘For what person should not want to live again?’

‘Ay, the dead are wont to sleep, madam.  We must needs leave them be,

‘They have died by God or Nature’s grace, we must needs leave them be.

‘Nor would they be the same upon awakening, no, no, we must needs leave them be.’

song

oh, sweet,

there has never been a song more beautiful than this,

this flight of words and the deft brilliance of its music,

and i beseech you, that if your lovely feet are stirred to dancing,

dance with me.

lay your jacket on the table, align your tie, and dance with me.

*

the bright melody of this song,

how it drips like candle wax into a puddle on the floor around my feet.

i sit, legs crossed, its luminous colors soaking in through the fabric of my skirt,

seeping across my small belly, my breasts, pinks and blues my face,

the oranges are my eyes, the reds and greens and every dazzling color

of the whole goddamn universe is in my hair tonight.

*

this song, this harrowing song, the racing violins, the sonic beauty of his voice,

desperate to adore her properly amidst the surge of percussive love,

alive! alive! at the sunset framed by the window of the car

that exists somehow faraway yet tangible as his gloved fingertips graze the glass,

the sunset that he hopes she is watching too, as it sifts away,

and the sun begets the moon.

darling, things will be better soon.

consciousness.

my uncle is a hunter

BANGan exodus of birds from the trees

                frantic thoughtless beasts

        with no realization of why

                                they are scared

                but they are scared

and they fly away

                screeching, ‘fuck this,

                                        let me be safe’

where are all the infant birds?

                                left in their nests

                                for a prideless kill?

the babies the babies dont kill the babies

they

cant

defend

them

selves

.

sonnet two

The owl is wrought upon the iron gate,

She sits, her head tucked under downy wing,

Aflight in dreams of lovely green green spring,

Though now she must sit patiently and wait.

The night grows ever colder, glowing late,

A time when sifts and stirs nary a thing,

She raises up her voice to sadly sing

That nothing is beyond her iron gate.

Sharp woe is patterned ‘cross her speckled brow,

The cold and colder night she deeply fears,

When candles are snuffed out for timely sleep,

Adrift is man and patient deer and sow

This hour she has nothing but her tears,

But smiles against the urge to wail and weep.

sonnet one

Oh breathe, the fickle air consumes you now,

The candle lit aflame upon your knee,

Alight on the thin stair from where you see

The crease across my dimly furrowed brow.

There are no words with which to tell you how

Deep in my sorrowed soul lingers still me

That burst in flames and burned upon the sea

My eyes are wells that drip, drip down and bow.

The clouds are sparse beneath the silver moon.

And all of this small yard is fast aglow

Oh soft, my little love, please have no fright.

I’ll mend this heart with gold and plastic spoon

And hold you dear so you will always know

I love you yet this bright and solemn night.

Celery. (Part II in my series of food poems)

Two runaways in the sandpaper alley eternally gray and wet as though seized with a broad hand and gently tugged into itself, safe for the coven of orphans with burnt button noses and muffs, so preciously untidy in their rags, like scuffed porcelain dolls against dumpsters, eyes bent to their empty hands, slouching in gradients of grays and blues like fire, the black serpent. Not black, tongueless, he coughs and quick spins into himself, gone. The boy, palms to his belly, thinking of the celery stalk, cracked, and thrown away.

cookie.

The seabird of the bluff.

Dust passes bluely through the screen.

A yellow girl, dancing in smoke, flicker, the old sound.

The importance of blink transcendence,

The narrow-eyed revelation, nose-running, surrounded by candles,

Eyes heavy, wrinkled worn, slightly haggard,

An old woman well kerchiefed at the window sink, holding a dish towel, gazing into the appled woods, dreaming birdsong in sweater boots, autumn.

The wide-eyed epiphany, back flat, face at the sweeping starry starry sky,

Crisp breath gasping smiling in, a tiny laugh, and the will to weep or sing.

The palm knowing that shrieks and giggles in the gusty air,

Music sweeps and stirs, and things are parallel.

Always out of doors, bursting through bracketed yellow frames and walls,

The typewriter letters slouch like mascara.  A single cookie.

Read this if my parachute doesn’t open and I plummet to the earth in certain tragic death, and probably publish it as a testament to my heartbreakingly lost brilliance.

As I sit at my computer at the ungodly hour of 7:34 in the morning, I can only think of one thing: I am willingly jumping out of an airplane today.  Typically, the decision to propel oneself from a plane is based on the premise of an inevitable crash or some sort of terrorist interference.  I am choosing to do so for funsies.  I am awake at this pernicious hour because something in my consciousness said, Kate, you may die today, so you probably want to wake up early for this.  I had been crashing at my friend’s place after the Frankfort Fall Festival beer tent festivities, my first experience in a beer tent, and if I died, I could remedy that fact by knowing that I had recently seen numerous old women in stripper-esque makeup and outfits as promiscuous as those slutty girls wear on Halloween parading around and even pole-dancing on the poles that supported the beer tent itself.  If nothing else, I am comforted by the fact that in my last remaining hours, I saw several people from high school that I had previously been impartial to the fact of whether or not they still existed and noticed how much weight they had gained.

As I sit at my desk now, still slightly drunk off of Franzia and reeling from the innumerable cigarettes I smoked while peering timidly around the tent for fear of spotting various local aunts and uncles, I ponder, is this really a good idea?  Assuming that life is really as precious as my mother and various chick flicks say it is, is it really the best idea in the world to acknowledge that by plummeting from the sky to almost certain doom?  I suppose it’s not to almost certain doom.  The trained professional that I will be flying tandem with has, according to a recent commercial on television, at least four hours of parachuting experience.  This comforts me as I know that my life remains tenderly in his or her hands.  My fear, though, is that I will end up harnessed to an individual with some form of irreconcilable depression, who will, as we freefall through the air, decide that they are not so keen to pull that ripcord.  Are there people so selfish out there?  I’m not sure.  I suppose if one intends to end their life, and if they do not believe in an afterlife in which justice will be realized, they may find, in the end, no moral qualms in taking someone else down with them.  In fact, I may be paired with the sucker that wants to destroy another unlucky human being.  Maybe this person has been planning this throughout the entirety of their four hours of training.  They think, we are upon our fifth hour.  The time is ripe for apathy.  I shall perish, and another shall perish with me, and thus I will control all the power in the universe.  For a few shining and glorious moments, I will be God, I will decide whether this young woman lives or dies, and I will feel the blood boiling in my fingertips as I choose whether or not to pull that ripcord.  I hope, perhaps, that though these thoughts may enter their mind, they will kindly elect to deploy the parachute, satisfied with knowing that they could have let us plunge to a rocky death had they so chose, because I imagine that we will be parachuting over the treacherous rocky depths below.  My faith is that this will be the case, and if not, I have every intention of strangling them before we splatter against the earth.

I suppose I ought to reflect on things now, and write something very wise and good, though I am not sure what.  They say you are supposed to angle yourself forward so as to slide across the ground if your parachute doesn‘t open.  Then, you will break every bone in your body, but somehow, you will survive.  I will try to remember this as I crash toward the ground.  Now think, Kate.  You will be Olympian in your skydiving if you succeed in skidding across the probable cornfield.  Check your arm position, monitor your breathing, and remember to smile.  It’s always difficult to remember to smile in moments of high concentration.

I imagine I should say some sort of a goodbye to the people in my life, in case the unfortunate occurs.  There are very few people whom I truly love in this world, and I will miss them greatly if I die.  Well I guess I won’t miss them at all, as I will be nothing more than mashed potatoes in the midst of some great field.  I suppose there is a metaphor for life in there somewhere, but I do not think that will be my concern as they are scooping me into an urn with a shovel, unless they just vacuum you up nowadays to expedite the process.  Maybe it will, I am always looking for that sort of thing, and perhaps in some great and final irony I will, by smashing into the ground, fragile as an egg, enact some kind of poetic justice that I am always dreaming about and yearning to find.  That would be alright, I think, if there was something conclusive about the whole thing.  My parents would be pissed that I never finished cleaning my room though.

a hawk.

she cries, screeching out to the infinite sun,

bolstered up by her thin beauty that fades with the coming night.

she screams at the bee, leaping from high branch

and catapulting herself into the sky to skirt his sting.

the world is bees! she shouts, it is billions of sleek buzzing bees.

eyes open, with diligently open eyes she searches the skyline.

the world is eternally open, but for the bees.

party (not the original structural layout but i don’t know html)

drink up,

pussy!

up drink more. up up drink up.

up up up up

up up up up

up up up you dont think

you can drink anymore?

fuck you. pussy.

drink the fuck up,

dont be such a bitch.

driiiiiiiiiiiiink.

shes looking at you.

shes looking at you.

talk to her.

talk to her.

yeah, shes drunk.

she wants it.

she wants you.

shes playing hard to get.

go for it.

go for it. now.

pussy.

shes s w a y i n g now.

shes holding onto your arm.

her eyez are bleary bum slits

nearly bleeding from

blooded ruddiness..

y o u g o t h e r.

take her to the open bedroom.

strip her of her pants,

pull up her skirt.

[she wants you she wants you]

show. her. what. a. man. you. are.

[she wants you]

do it, pussy.

[she wants

the voyage of a voyeur

I.

A queasy word salad.

Breath soft black shoe burn cigarette blink pill pen shit gone.

The words don’t come.

II.

The coyote–

Shallowly wandering the summer wood.

Padded paws move slowly westward through the blanket of shit creasing the seams of the forest.

Her feet are full of it, sinking into the raw piles of stinking black filth– shoes of shit–

Her breath softly nodding her realities.

III.

I dipped into the water, gripping the rough edge of the pool tightly in my whitening hands.

The burn cooled on my wrist, the water kept me as i slipped beneath the glassy surface.

from below–

Everything that has been began again.

The blinking chill of my breath as I floated downward, limbs splayed,

Paralyzed by the cold water’s power.

The things I thought were utter shit then, and as I sank,

I saw the blooded knife, the pale paper pills, the dove.

The chaos of the reckoning sea– how it stayed me!

I saw him fucking me, an image from every malicious nightmare that plagued my devouring mind.

I saw the flesh of my mother rotting,

Her corpse consumed by black licorice flies singing brightly–

oh feast! upon this wretched deathly soul,

we’ll eat her every bit apart, for she cannot care a wink about it…

she is dead

she is dead

dead

ddae

edda

deeeeeeeeeeaaaaaa

d.

It came to me as a lullaby for the spongy troubled mind that HE lingers ’round every corner,

Nary a damned soul can run away…

away…

a

w

a

y

———————————————————————————————————————-

I sank to the floor of a ship that day and landed feet firmly on the decaying deck of the sky.

It loomed around me, more menacing than god,

And from my purse I took one cigarette, a wicker match, and a pen.

I lit the pen on fire, carved into my arm the words–

here lies a little soul,

becoming littler still.

And then I went to sleep.

When I awoke I was much braver and more foolish than I had ever been before.

a driving poem, again.

The line below.

It irks me this billowing rain afternoon

In the scurry of cold cars huddled together at the edge of the city.

I want to see you.

I want to fuck you.

I want you to pull my hair as I touch you.

That is enough for now.

II.

The city is ocean night,

Faintly whispering from the faraway sky to life below.

I want to swim,

I want to bury myself in the dark water, staring at the impossible clouds

With wide, wild eyes to the tune of the bellowing dolphins

As they fuck each other, so lovely it brings tears to my full wet belly in the night.

III.

Repetition.

Each wordly wave embracing the stern sand banks

As I press my feet into this burgeoning morning.

I am not there.

I forgot.

I have drowned.

Oh god?

I see apple trees–

Blossoms pattering against the tickling crystalline grass

But the world is underwater.

Heaven is apple trees

Heaven is the clownfish

Heaven is whatever I want it to be.

I am not there.

I forgot.

I have drowned.

IV.

I will fuck you tonight in the cool chill of the fluttering windows,

tucked deep inside your pink drenched bed.

Is this all I think about as I sit, bored to drowning, in this stormy exhaust of mudding tires and windows?

god dammit.

V.

(blank)

teashop

the teaspoon hits the wooden floor.

we are new here, nomadic feet patter against this oaken earth.

the people drink their teacups and spit at each other as yellow light streaks in

through the fingerprinted windows this warm morning.

swing! the buses–

sing! the taxis–

the city finds us today.

the ice simpers away in the tall glass,

the onions are sweet in the dish,

alas! americana!

he says the world is windy every evening, when the clouds go down

in the hum universe as it sinks into black muck of apple pigs in the sty.

the world is an oyster damned shut in the deep belly of the sea– an analogy.

to be is as is as like a like deems wisdom to me.

she says the dog is starving.

i fed him at eight o’clock and at eight forty-five his mittened paws sunk

through the tile in the hot bellow of his hunger,

clamoring for one small bite of bread or foot–

i shut the notebook.

blanket

i could not sleep.

i laid splayed beneath the thick knit blanket beside you,

dreaming of flying fast cars and televisions,

of the elf,

of the ox.

i pulled the golden wool over my face and the world was different there.

i reached out, felt the lily between my finger and thumb,

its pearly petal so beautiful to me that cool morning.

the ink ran from my fingertips as i grazed each strand,

the fibers whispering to me–

hush, my darling, we must be quiet.

a boy sleeps here outside our tender grasp.

he turns, he barely rests at the thought of caring for you those long hours,

when you failed him again.–

under the blanket, i was a secret,

kept warm against the harshing hours of that dwindling summer.

the world is real, i see it.

it curses at me for my wretched sins when i slowly, carefully,

sheared the heads of my keepers,

collected their bright-hued hair from the broom and the bin

and made my clothes of it.

they will protect me

like this blanket protects me,

framing my sight with slanted,  gridded lines.

when i peer closely, i see through to the growing sun,

but no! no! i pull away and there is the blanket,

a baby light peeking through.

it is not enough to warm me,

but the wool does, but only while i wear it.

when i shed its gilded cloth, it grows ever cold again.

i must come out.

i must find the sun.

tomorrow.