rejection letter
there is alchemy
in my blood; it draws
you like wildfire, indifferently.
my words build the bridges
your absence pulls down;
while i connect the stars like needlepricks
between synapses, mapping
consciousness and constellations
with the electricity of a penstroke,
you sleep pressed tight
against the cottony pillow
of paper dreams. i am the
metaphysical mistress
to the truths you never knew,
the quiet rejoinder
to all the hopes you ever surrendered.
if one day our tongues meet
across a coffee table or a revolution
don’t speak to me of love poetry:
i prefer your bitter
silence and the offbeat
of brokenhearted arrhythmia.
it’s not personal
your
cookie-cutter forms melting
with the despair of a middle-
aged sun in an epoch which
exhales both injunction and
exhaustion, the way punc-
tuated with river
weeds and regret,
tragedy filling up the edges.
future perfect, subjunctive
fey,
incomprehensible,
i stand alone on the edge of
disaster and skip
pebbles. just might have been
mistaken,
thought perhaps
i had a soul
mate, but i
am not who i
used to be, not yet
halfway there
jumping lightly over
the rocks at low tide i
can’t help
thinking that by
tomorrow’s
tomorrow there might be
nothing left except
ether and flame.
solitary, confinement
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what color is your soul
when shadow ceases to exist?
who are you
locked in at night
behind the darkness
of your eyes?
are you even human?
every dignity gone,
all your dreams naked,
autumn branches
scratching at a bolted window.
the last question
they will ask you is
“If we have to use restraints,
should we call your family?”
last primeval answering cry from
deep in the forge-fires of
your heart, knowing:
there’s no one
you would want to tell.
unapologetic
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this is weregild for a crime never acknowledged, for
the piece of me stolen but never reported missing,
a momentary antidote threaded through
the pulse of the year’s dying
to feed feeling back into numbed fingers and
assuage the inquiet in the hollow place
just to the right of where my heart beats,
where if you put your ear close enough you
can still hear the roar and swell of the ocean,
hungry. each wave as it crashes devastating
over me i will take and
take, losing shoreline with each
breath, hoping to find in the rush of a moment or
a brush of skin something
akin to going home.
naked
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albatross’d shadows
wing their way across
the spongy caverns of my
heartbeat, their darkness
keening into the cup
of my palm and slowing
my hand, swallowing
piecemeal my
spirit until
there is nothing
left of me but
fear.
Evolution
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I’m different now.
I wear shoes and don’t walk
in the woods anymore.
My world is smaller
and my hair is redder
and i forget how
to sing.
I look down a lot.
Cement-colored thoughts
prick the backs
of my arms, sending
goosebumps
up into an unconsciousness
i thought i’d left behind
years ago.
I miss my mother.
Sometimes i don’t
remember how to breathe.
There’s a hollow
just above heart-center
whose sternal contours i can
trace with a finger and
in the darkness sometimes
knock gently, listening
for sounds of a soul.
perfection
his crests are almost golden
in the sodden heat that folds
over these valleys like a heavy cream,
his eyes so
liquid they seem to pour
out of the angles of his face
as he looks at you,
contemplative.
he moves as if
he hadn’t a single care, as if
the troubles that brush
against him through your hands,
the hands of hundreds,
soak into the matte of his skin
just enough
to be reflected in the steadiness
of his gaze,
dripping down strength through
the stones to your feet:
they do not linger.
the state of things, monday june 15, 2009
writing bloodless words just
to read the hieroglyphs hidden
in the blank spaces they leave,
ducking my eyes whenever anyone
asks how i’m doing.
would kill for six hours’ sleep,
craving oblivion like some people
crave cigarettes, wishing
i could unfilter the thoughts
that churn like a steel mill:
that i
am pale and weak
and tired of crying,
eyes given up on their color and
their question; blindly accepting
the possibility i
lost my soul some weeks ago.
self-exhumation
strait of messina by night
lost in the translation of a rage
only an ocean could understand,
one June morning i passed too close
to your shore and found myself
drowning in a whirlpool
of ambiguous damp sheets.
all my life i’ve been homesick
for a place i’ve never been;
that morning i carried my pride
up into the rocks, dashed it
down over scylla’s cliffs
and walked away
knowing that a piece of me
would always remain here,
buried shallow and bloodless
in a lemon-scented land once held
sacred by many hearts.
i left it willingly,
trading a shattered mirror
for the possibility of coming home.
