candy bowl

every time I reach my hand in,
I find a piece that is stuck inside its own wrapper, 
a bit of chocolate that refuses to melt in my mouth
or my hands.
I spend months 
trying to pry the shrink-wrapped foil off the sweet veneer,
but in the end, I surrender 
to the availability of apples, figs 
already in my own pockets.

heat

skin against skin, like for like

your acetone breath

feeds the sugar craving

in the depths of my lungs

hands wander, without a home

the dermal burn is like a fever,

contagious and unbound.

we share the air,

maneuvering inspiration

in the direction of sight

drawing the blood to the surface

with each ragged exhalation

seeking escape from containment

so ravaged, so drenched in the

humidity of their own heat

that they squeal like steam

billowing forth

until the boiling point is reached,

surpassed,

and there is nothing left in the kettle.

consummation

If the eating is to be done,

best to make it slow,

savoring each morsel,

letting each bite revel

in subtle intercourse

with the regions of the tongue,

individually

then in collaboration,

a melding of sensation that synapses

in a tumultuous spread of reaction.

Sweet,

salty,

bitter,

pungent

passion

spilling from my mouth as

the pressure of

your light-hued perception

sparks the buried flame

as a match to a wick,

raising the blood to the dermal surface

in a flush to stir

even the weakest of vampiric impulse.

That upward glance

pierces through all pretense of veneer,

stripping away all implication of

blockade,

barrier,

catapulting electric arcs

in continuous battery.

But this is no mere look,

no.  With every remaining sensation

you proceed to conquer the

collapse of empty division,

devour your captive in entirety,

appease your burning thirst

in a leisurely slaking,

and relish in the paper-thin threshold,

that duality of painful pleasure,

that sensation of fluid existence

dripping from the humid night air,

staining the cotton sheets in complicity.

i became weaponized

I tied words around my biceps and abdomen 

so that i might pull them from the sheath and 

toss them like daggers. 

The curve of my pen 

sliced the skin, 

removing chunks of viscera, 

cardiac mishappenings; 

the ink flowed in a steady arsenic movement 

from constructed context 

to 

ambivalent inevitability. 

Syllable after syllable, 

thought after thought, 

I used my mental weaponry in 

constant battle against 

any hint of foe 

until I realized there was 

no winning this war. 

My opponents were armed with 

indestructible walls 

closing them in, 

protecting them, 

bending my knives 

until they bounced off and came back to sting me. 

As the poison begins to seep through my veins, 

I realize I have become my own downfall.

amongst words

Words as weapons are a crude sort of stake

that rip and tear at the strongest of skin;

poisonous tips devour the heart within

leaving hungry wounds that no salve can slake.

But when touch is given of which you take,

blood ceases to boil, softens thick to thin.

Brain contracts muscles, the body full in;

eyes deduce intent, genuine from fake.

Now add water to sand, maintain your hold

on a whispered promise not overheard,

a song being sung in the dead of night.

Stoke the fire in the kiln, heat up the mold.

Collect silent letters, press into word.

Charcoal on paper your weakness, your light.

buttons

Do you suffer from an excess of consciousness?

Why no,

I celebrate its vibrations,

its folds,

its refusal to dwell

in your monochromatic dogma

of   white   on   white   and   black   on   black.

I can almost hear my cacophony of color

echo with vivacity upon your sight.

This collage,

this me,

this being of beings,

all and one,

universal and solitary.

A rose is

a rose is

a rose,

even beholden by Napoleon

or Picasso,

though one might imagine it different,

imagine the telling of another soul

having breathed with ever-gouged eyes

how to draw their own likeness.

Would you like it if I told him

where the hand goes,

how the tongue clicks,

what the ear hears;

if I told him, would you like it?

Now?

Not Now?

Now?

Pull curtains closed, shut shutters, and   f e e l .

There.

There.

There.

and There.

Like so.

and so.

and so.

Reach through the pitch,

mold the air into everywhere.

and everything.

and nothing.

Not a thing

comes forward,

or backward,

or sideways,

just a way of                              looking,

thinking,

standing still,

still standing,

moving with movement,

wavering on wave after wave of light

devoured slowly,

   slower,

   slowest

as it sinks

into the dank dark dirty nether.

amiss

I know when I smile,

people are seeing you,

that reflection of embedded memory always with me;

your mischievous eyes,

your toothy grin,

your open and generous heart.  

I kept the best parts of you with me,

and I give them away every single day,

the energy ebbing back and forth like a

perpetual tide.  

Lately, I’ve tried talking to you.  

I don’t dwell on whether or not you can hear me;

I simply imagine it to be true. 

I still can’t look at your picture for very long, though. 

It stings,

slowly,

reaching into that ink-dark pool within me that is,

even now,

untouched by sunlight. 

The waters are choked with nitrified muck,

the stains of continuous

consuming,

living,

defecating in the same place,

every single day since

that wine-soaked night;

every single day since

the last words exchanged

in haste,

impatience,

perturbance at your expansion of self,

my turn of the other cheek,

the other way. 

I wonder,

do you see me trip,

fall,

get back up,

this heavy burden across my shoulders? 

Do you see me wishing I could see you

one more time? 

As I get closer and closer to your age

I think I should forgive them all

for taking you away from me,

us. 

I should forgive you

for wanting more

than you were able to receive. 

I should,

I could,

I may.

adrift

A dream somewhere 
now long forgotten
a nightmare
swallowing days 
in a consecutive hunger
a passion lost
to the scattered seas
a whisper of failure
like a feather in the wind
a hollowed shell
vacated in a hurry
a slow, muddy, meandering existence
drifting directionless towards the inevitable
end

What was the war about, again?

We fought day in and out
against what we thought was an oppressive force
trying to embed itself
into our daily routines, 
into our bedrooms and internal organs. We resisted
against the onslaught of neon messages
telling us how to dress,
how to eat,
how to think,
but in the end
the electric movement was too powerful
for our hand-made ideas.
Our organic thoughts shriveled
and browned
before implementation was ever conceived.

And so, we assimilated into the daily pattern
of breathing in and out,
walking side to side (never forward).

It became the way days were lived,
until our memory of a freer, more fluid time period
was abandoned,
forgotten.

Here we are now,
soldiers with bayonets loosened from our grasp,
their purpose unknown.

Here we are,
a collective of individual veneers,
fumbling through unrecalled wants.

What war?

A Terrible Promise to Lady L

Instead of healing my wounds,
they slathered some ointment on the injury,
slapped a band-aid on it, 
and let me leave.

I knew the scar that would grow
would be deeply etched and irrevocable.

I knew the disease that had seeped into the gash,
now swimming in my blood,
would slowly cause me to rot internally
before there was ever a visible clue to my condition.

But they weren’t interested
in actually addressing the disease
resulting in my slow death.
They were only bartering on borrowed time
to get me out their door,
hoping I’d forget their disinterest and
continue payment on their exorbitant tab.

The fundamentals of understanding

First, you must seek acceptance,
complete and (w)ho(l)ly your own,
through the exchange of oxygen and carbon,
as you expand to intake the universe
and expel it in a slow steady caress.

Second, you must taste the tang of empathy
titillating the tip of your tongue
the central vein,
as it washes in whispering waves
against the cavity of your throat.

Third, you must nourish the path your feet tread
rooting into the strength and unwavering sootiness
that keeps you uplifted and away from the abyss.
This darkness is the negation of light that
embodies a complete misunderstanding
of that word “human”, so often misapplied
and mistaken for upright ambulatory movement.

Then, you can send love into the fire of your soul
and keep the embers in a burning glow.
Just allow yourself to breathe,
open your eyes,
and see.

a modern construction

The walls in this house are like a blood-brain barrier,
letting the strange voices seep through,
sustaining me on vitriolic echoes while
preventing the infiltration of
biological refuse from disintegrating emotion, 
that conversion of exothermic to endothermic reaction,
that peripheral touch that might have caused me
not to wake from my slumber,
not stumble across the house
with my mussed hair and cloudy vision,
not witness the death of anything resembling wholesome familial connection.

The heat in the room sparks and sizzles
with syllabic exactitude between their bifurcated origins.
I am left cold
with fear and confusion.

Weeks later,
the biggest, strongest man I know
will spill his salty sadness upon my pillow,
leaving me, at the mature age of five,
to pick up the pieces and
reassemble the puzzle of our days.

A few remain missing, though;
I can still see through the veneer.

romance & cigarettes

you lie there, 
recklessly, 
amongst the folds of wrinkled cotton sheets, 
your breasts pressed against a strewn pillow,
your derriere, like a ripe peach,
almost touching my thigh,
the soft fuzzy hairs
seeking me out with a passive electricity,
like cilia.
The cheeks still blushed red from my handprints,
my loving caresses
that had caused you to dig your heels in,
rocking with increasing fervor
as you pitched and swayed
your way to fulfillment.
I had watched the glorious bloom rise
from your hips to your face and back,
as you panted with pleasure,
eyes closed,
intent on your own cresting wave
steadily crashing into mine,
the echo of which
begins to fire synapses
along the length of my nerves
as I raise my hands to my lips
and suck long,
hard,
and deep
on the cigarette resting between my lips,
a prelude to my intent,
my means of waking you from your slumber,
as I set the nicotine in the tray next to me,
a mere afterthought,
a minor stimulus
compared to that drug
between your legs.

You’ve changed

Your smile is reluctant
where it once was welcoming,
ready. 
Your eyes are cloudy
with a hint of grey;
gone is the warm clear gaze.

You have forgotten
what the promise of the moon feels like.
You are generally unkempt, uncaring.
Your skin is rough, callused,
brown from excessive melanin.
You think you might have fallen asleep
in the sand
on your afternoon stroll,
but the details are in disagreement with each other.
You are adamant that you gazed out
over the ocean stillness while
being sandblasted smooth by a fierce desert wind.
Never mind that you haven’t seen the sea in decades,
and it’s been raining soft and steady
for weeks on end.

There is a weak impression of the sun
somewhere overhead,
a dull burning echo of you,
a mere existence.

memorial

The night sky glows

from the glare of this human ant pile,

the scurry worry flurry

of movement with no purpose;

this fear of silence,

this dread of drowning in solitude.

Even the moon is afraid of stardust,

that it might illuminate her perceived imperfections.

For days in a row, she feigned a peaceful sleep of acceptance

only to swallow her tears, her quiet heaving breaths

in the summery song of crickets

rubbing their legs together

in a semblance of warmth,

of emotion.

evening in the city park

i.

The nocturnal cacophony

hollows her cheeks

and glistens her eyes.

ii.

The hare gathers his courage,

lopes across the dark pavement

in search of drier pastures.

iii.

The pines remain stalwart

through the dense and dampened air,

preparing for the coming storm.

iv.

The stars do not shine where

humans choose to tread, instead

spilling grace on deserts and fields.

v.

She lays under the thick of night

in her own acidic solution,

wanting to  be overexposed.

vi.

Her mental box of limitations

opens at twilight

and scatters her to the wind.

desert bound

you thought you wanted to be a boxer
once,
a scrappy fighter from down to undercut,
in the jaw,
under the eye,
but what about the overbite,
the hammer down                                                                                                                                                  down
down 

onto that pretty face? 

so you dissolve into the asphalt;
you float like driftwood,
fighting gloveless,
fistless,
bitter beauty buried in cannabis dreams,
watered with carrot juice
and tequila. 
you won’t swallow the worm, though; 

that would infer a certain level of commitment 

that leaves you in a singular state of indigestion.  

instead, you squint into the glare of the sun’s eye, 

Eastwood-esque, 

unsure if you’re good, bad, 

or indifferent

until, slowly, you turn away from that 

sting of reality, 

apathetic to the burn, 

roll another joint, 

and fade into the soft green of your mind’s eye, 

a coastal grassland littered with 

alligators and lost tourists.

the humid air boils within you

and silently evaporates 

from the surface of your bare skin,

one more thing to leave you.

Fe-Male

You should be

beautiful,

popular,

sweet,

soft. 

How dare you be

mighty,

broken,

unbeautiful,

arousing,

an expansion

beyond the confines of your weaker sex,

bounded by preconception,

fear,

a lack of blood to your

cranial thoughts. 

Look happy,

keep smiling,

be a pretty face,

what more is there for a woman? 

Ambition?

Why waste the

footprints

and breaths

and wrinkles. 

Be still. 

Be satisfied with less. 

For you are less.

a neutral stagger

I should have known better…
stick with chocolate and cheese.

The Swiss were never known for their sandwiches.
The bread was neither hearty or soft, somewhere lost
between whole grain and white.
I would have expected a dark Pumpernickel,
grilled, filled with a tangy cheese
born into being between two solid plates of fortitude.

But there was no conviction at all,
merely a mess of ingredients that left me unfulfilled.

That was many years ago,
during the war
the “War to end all Wars”
that didn’t actually end up ending anything.

Recently I returned to the Alps,
searching for the memory of
something I once presumed lost.

It was after the fall of the Eastern Bloc.
There were too many –istans to remember,
long complex words full of letters and guttural beliefs
as full of presumed resentment as the German language,
waiting to hack up syllables in phlegmatic distate at
the “Englishness” of the new world order.

One quiet morning in the hotel lobby,
enjoying a chocolate and coffee (lesson learned),
I witnessed a treasure trove of personalities
stroll up to the front desk to check in.

The clerk must have made the mistake of misspoken identity,
For I was just close enough to hear the new guests utter in disdain
deeply and unforgiving, with perfect pitch and grammatical structure:

Russian? Russian?! You people all look alike to me as well.
I proudly hail from Kazakhstan, and no, we don’t want any vodka.
Champagne, for our celebration, see to it!

“Straight away”, the clerk muttered hurriedly,
rushing embarrassedly through their paperwork,
snapping for the bellboy to lead them up to their rooms.

I chuckled at the exchange, the irony, and asked for some Polish vodka,
a mild form of protest.

invader

a rash under my skin
a niacinic flush
an illegal drug
I long to scratch through,
find that trail
those shedded scales
betraying the cells that allowed you entrance
into my constant waking.

From one turn of a thought:
one step forward,
ten years back.

The child in me is frightened with wonder while
the woman in me is bracing for
six more weeks of winter.

The wind is howling,
and the thunderclouds are rolling forward
with a visceral hunger.
The sky is almost green,
and the first hint of rain has begun to spit on me.
I feel the acid collecting in the bottom of my belly,
and I shiver, an almost tremor.

rough love

Your chin rubbed against my inner thigh
like burnt toast on butter, 
the way a knife sounds spreading the yellow fat
against the dark and brittle skin. 
I resisted the temptation to wrench your peppered hair, 
instead grounding myself
in the fortitude of your forearms
majestic masts through the softened air.

sew, reap, bury, & bargain

you put your head down my shirt

searching for my womanhood,

the apple, Adam's undoing,

but all you see are seeds,

cyanidic and bitter from overexposure.

shark-bite

nip a little
               tug a little

nip a little
               tug a little

bite
bite
bite

then they tear a little more from you and

then you strike out,

hit a little, rip a little bit off

then you lash out,

hurt a little, cry a little bit more

still the sting burns,

yes it burns, an electric griddle

slow build and burn,

like a snake bite, see the red spot growing

soon you’re all numb,

from the nose to the bloody footprints.

they’ll think again,

‘fore they stab you with syllabic knife-falls

you’ve kept ‘em quiet,

kept them distant, now the silence swallows.

lone, you’re alone,

quite successful, just a broken shadow.

listen to the crickets

how they sing, always for another.

now’s when you feel

feel the cold, how it seeps into ya.

you’re now that shark

the solitary ‘mongst the fluid flurry.

cold beats the heart

beats the drum that will kill you some day.

like bees do

drink from the nectar
pooling
‘gainst my glands
before it seeps into the skin
and disperses,
like dew on dappled grass. 

rip out the petals
sweetly,
one by one,
as they peek out
from the covetous
calyx of my nodes.

savor the silky sensation
on the tip of your tongue,
as I pollinate your eyes,
your chin,
that delicate hollow at the base of
your throat.

you seek to make honey,
as you sting me once more.  
the viscous sap hangs low
in a swollen drip,
not daring to drop.

downwind from skinned

when you look at me
the molecules

of my being

are disheveled and rearranged
into a frenetic movement

of primordial and philosophic longing. 

The slight of your stare,
the curve of your mouth
distracts me from the cranial crash of
alphabet soup known as language. 

I falter in the light of your power,
the disarming delicatessen of

tug,

pull,

crash,

fall,

rise,

swell,

attack,

retreat. 

I contract,

e x p a n d,

swell,

and weep

in a small,

silent,

dry

manner that leaves me

puckering,

a parched, shriveled lime

with seeds gaping inwardly,

a fig once ripe,

frigid with freeze burn,

cold and tasteless,

for you are the crocus on another lily’s leaf,

floating on the sea salt roof of the world,

far above the valley that consumes me,

a      slow      savory      destruction.

Fire & Ice

I have an Old World beauty

Rubensesque in nature

not quite the image of Danu,

Earth Mother,

lithe as a snake,

a twisted pretzel.

I have an Old Soul,

worn and weathered,

my supple skin

belying the wisdom in my glance,

with the nose of a Spanish monarch,

the eyes of a Syrian dancer,

the life passion of a zealot,

and the caution of Eastern Europe

trickling through my limbs.

Never give me cause to

exhume the Celtic curse

buried at the base of my

spine.

The venom would most certainly

kill you.