One of those poems

She glitters like disease

like harlequin eyes

like a volcano dance

She holds Africa like a slice

of apple at the back

of her bark covered throat

She keeps straw and orchids

by pillow so sleep is travel

and every morning is a violent un-burial

She is pancakes and sand,

a silent infection, the moon

as it splits the septic sky

She is quietly blurred,

a bloody Cinderella holding

apocalyptic peace in her

happenstance hands

What I'm learning

It turns out that "The Fifth Element" and "Total Recall" are actually terrible movies.  If these new recognitions are mile signs on the long highway of adulthood, I'm getting off at the next exit.

I've been hiding from this for quite some time.  Planting pens and pencils in the garden of my desk, using loose scraps of paper for soil.  I've been letting the ink dry, letting the lead dull. Doing what I can to put poetry in a corrugated field behind me.

But early this morning, tending tall stalks of education and responsibility.  Cutting my arm on their blade thin skin.  I noticed in the valley of a row, a small bud was bursting.  Peeling its four leaf frock off I saw colored shadows.  Not a mirror of what we are, but color enough to denote what we are telling ourselves to be.  Holding the fruit like a tiny crown I sat beneath a hollow oak.  I was so absorbed with taking small bites of my new royalty, I didn't notice the ants as they slowly built their mound around me.

Egg hunt with Malice

I hid it in the yard
beneath the wysteria
coiled like a snake
behind the perpetually falling flowers

I buried it in the sand
along the driveway
I buried it like a body
limbless and cold

I balanced it on the high branch
of a knobby oak
it sat unsteady, afraid
it's feet wouldn't reach the floor

I placed it beneath a stone,
saw a small crack,
heard its 17th century Salem
whisper, "more weight"

I put it in your hand
gold and glittering
waited until I could see
the nails rising from your palm

A Reponse to Jason Ballard

He spoke in strings
that tied our eyes
like windless kites
to his pregnant tongue.

He whittled words
from softwood scripture,
licked splinters, and
sighed alabaster sighs

He coughed out poems,
novellas, whole volumes,
collected works. The books
fell to his feet and in the fire

the billowing smoke then formed a wind
that blew the bulbous kites from our skulls.

Riverbed

I want to feel how real
this muddy bottom is.
i want to dagger my toes
and sink them deep in its
watery womb. I want to
feel how real the fish
are on my skin, wear them
like diamonds, like fur.
I want to be eased
by the un-treed breezes that
shift and groan dsown here, that
bend and moan down here.
I want to hear the silence
beating its fin-thin wings.

I want to stand beneath
the undulating sky and
give up last breaths,
give up last breaths,
give up last breaths,
buried before I die.

Ma Mere

I broke him
into 1200
cigarettes,
1200 perfect
plastic placentas,
1200 weeks
from the week
that I broke him.

I broke him
into ceramic sky,
into olive jungles,
into sea salt,
into light,

into lions,

into light.
I broke him
with a wide-
toothed comb,
with a rake,
with a sentence.

I broke him
like a vase
on my suicide box,
and my last eye
watched rainbows
sunshone
through the prism
of his skin.