Below you will find a small collection of some of my poetry. These are what I consider to be some of my best poems and they are meant to serve as a preview of my poetic style/form. I hope you will enjoy reading them!
If you enjoy this sampler of poetry, perhaps you will consider purchasing some of my works in print!
You can view all my books in publication and purchase various editions of my books HERE.
Sometimes
Sometimes the nights are dark and long. And me, I am small and colorless. A filament in the corner. A spirit wavering against the inferno of this thing called life. I dance between the ever-shifting dust of it's stars, trying not to be swallowed.
There's a loneliness in me that calls to be coddled. Dark eyelashes against pale cheeks. I turn the dial past radio stations broadcast from towns whose names I can't pronounce and pretend I am living some other girls' life.
There's a girl two seats in front of me, one seat to the right. She has a too-loud laugh and blonde hair brittle of one-to-many bleach jobs. Her long, silver earrings swing jubilantly as she breathlessly tells a story. I only catch fragments. Something about long lines and dirty bathroom stalls with doors that swing on hinges too lose. A story too bane to recall, except I'm taking notes. She holds her audience captive. Even in plain looks and chubby hands that grasp the arms of her seat as if she's afraid she'll face-fall into the aisle if the plane hits turbulence.
I know we come from different worlds. She in her designer clothes and her willing accomplices. Girls like her fascinate me. They play their friends and lovers like strings in a six-guitar quartet. And here I sit alone in a crowd, books across my knees. I don't feign intelligence or sophistication...I just am. A lot of folks would probably say I'm prettier than she is, but I'm just me. Maybe it's the grit in all my 'real.' The way my words bite, even spoken against soft-toned lullabies. But lying was never my language, my eyes always told the truth. Translucent blue, my last lover called them. But what would he know, anyway?
***
Her Whims
In absentia, a maddened enchantress,
evocative as midnight dusk,
struck fearless by the wane of moon,
vision in sin, I have hitchhiked
my trip across an alcove ofcity skylights,
black-cat amongpenthouse roof,
claw against the light,slick-bellied thing,
aloof, andscatter-brained in mind.
A girl like that is not the feminine type,
her whims are much like mine.
I have constructed from branch,
an oasis among sassafras and cotton-flower,
green grotto in the hollow of hill between two elms.
I trade butterfly-honey for heart-manna,
fill my makeshift shelves of elixirs,herb-salad
and intricate blown-glass trinkets;
chanting, realigning the planets like pockets of time.
An otherworldly girl like that is hard to define,
her whims are much like mine.
I have journeyed in taxis black and yellow,
city lights blurring past strange towns,
all naked eyes and a sigh 'goodbye'
to faces who remain nameless,
constructing myself in the course of
side-routes and traffic-stops.Champion
where black leather still pinches skin,
and my back snaps where the metal bends.
A girl like that is as brave as
the sharp end of a paring knife,
her whims are much like mine.
***
Sleeping...
...you always
invite me
into strange rooms.
I hang maps
on hooks
across colorful walls
in hues I can't
quite remember;
push tacks
into names of towns
I've never known.
'Look' I say,
'we are mere
thumb-prints apart...'
I turn, you are gone.
***
The Wintering
I apologize for the lack in all my letters, Spring tip-toed past my window so quickly. Is October thick with winter where you are? My mind wonders avenues toward you too often. Summer skies, air between us heavy of stars, myself barefoot on some random earth-walk. You know how love is, even when it's gone. You can't help but untangle how it all went wrong. How something so meant to be, so proper could accidentally unravel when you weren't watching, like a cashmere sweater on the eve of some gala event and so you're forced to change into a less-favorable color. Right now the winter has wedged itself between the leaf-less trees. And the cold emptiness, wherever it came from, is inescapable. I wonder if its winter where you've nested? Are your shoulders shaking of cold like mine are? The clouds here are the color of ice prisms, they carry whole invisible islands across their backs. The wind is strangely still and I'm wondering if this is how it ends: my heart rolling across the edge of tomorrow like an old stone. If we ever meet again I'll ask you about the anatomy of wild dandelion.
***
Monochromatic
You need little more than rust
on a chain to pacify old memories.
Stick to one spot long enough
and the ghosts resurrect themselves.
Alongside highway 23 the dust
still swelled itself against the gritty
wind of big-rigs, a Southern kind of whirlwind.
The old backroad that opened its mouth:
A wishing well, the future rolling backward.
A stillness that could hide, behind
the next burning bush, some raw beauty.
I parked the car at a liquor-store-
turned-convenient-mart, something you'd expect
in a shady, nowhere town more
turn-of-the-century than 2012.
Elderly men haggled near the pumps,
in stiff-gray Rip Van Winkle beards,
a few teenage boys were attempting to impress
the only girl: the convenience store clerk
who stood smoking near the hood of a car
where the crowd tinkered, air heavy
with the smell of oil and the thick,
damp woods of an early fall evening.
Did they drive this far into no-where,
or were they born amidst this
country-black that swallowed headlight shadows
and rivaled smoke rings their stale-gray darkness?
Against the 8pm twilight the road was merely
a long strand of Indian-ribbon wrapping
the edges of tree-lined hillsides, which flashed
a hunter-green silhouette against
the wobbly tail-lights of passing cars.
Old farm houses stood in the distance,
isolated as islands across the moon's surface,
abandoned as old bodies, they were mummified
in a perminant stance, black-shingle roofs
bending toward me like empty hands.
I imagined each year the wind of Spring monsoons
pulled their wooden fingers a little closer to the dust
as I stood some distance and marveled
the cool, dry air of this green-orange oasis,
damp wind kissing the backs of my stocking-covered knees
like a lover I once had, and I realized
I remembered too much of some older life;
that there was a deep-seated unease in
the attention I gave to spent memories, yet a
grave-still consolation is the trickery
of the sundials dance, the realization of things
half-dead I might bring back to life
because I no longer believed one aging highway
was any different than the end destination of another.
***
Into the Forest of Myself
I have painfully learned
the principles of exclusion.
By morn I entertain
an empty room, speak
to the soul inside myself:
'come, let's drink some tea
and fold a prayer
between the lotus pose.'
I am other-worldly, that
small dark house behind the hill
that none dare enter
for the fear of yellow light.
It's only the antique lamp I read by,
and all those gents weaved between
the pages of yesterdays New York Times;
they sell to me their lusty prose
and, for a while, I don an evening dress,
love fervently with my body,
each pale, glowing limb
a beacon for some distant sailor.
And, come night, I dine
with the ghosts of my former self.
Like little historians
dressed in pink-on-black,
each one has her own story.
***
My Nocturne
I found the twilight a tawny, withering thing. Feeble in octave, its fingers cool of a cold-front kind of pre-storm frigidity. The moon osculated between clouds of white-gray, a sorry little gloaming for the lone nocturnal mammal. And, of myself atop a balcony where balustrades twisted between the shadows of a quiet night like gray bone. Why, I was elated with the whims of woman. Giddy in my toes for the feel of a kiss. The breeze delivered both, albeit a steady, sultry, late-night sort of moan amidst the trees that formed a myriad of colors as they shadow-danced against the full-moon.
***
Saturday Night at the Diner
Among streetlights and strange faces, curbside prophets and horoscope redemptions, it's hard to decipher even gender. Bored, we all stumble between smoky cigars and the alcohol-induced mania in the euphoric feel before the final Saturday-night let-down: a headache and two handshakes of the aspirin bottle.
The weekend nights were meant for random randevous, but I'm meticulate, always pretending to 'pick my own adventure.' The cafe is closed and the bar-scene is a boring fix so I distract myself with my purse, scatter the contents and await a surprise. I find it: a telephone number written half-heartedly inside the weathered flap of a matchbox by a hand whose face I cannot recall.
I amuse myself with the rainy scene outside the window, rendered dreamy by the shine of headlights against a slow, steady drizzle. A variety of slick-metal cars pass the street, each one selecting from right and left-hand turns; never aware the lottery of a simple wheel-turn. And they travel too quickly, each one, and too far beyond my voice-call to heed such warning.
I'm feeling restless
girl drinking coffee
at a table made
of reflection.
***
Inferior to Time
Long ago when I was raw
and tender, and did not
know the difference
the sky sat before me,
and the wooded edge
rattled behind.
I lay belly-down between the
edge of evening, dream-hungry
and full of the imaginary,
then i was gone. A cough
caught between breathing and speaking.
I named the day across the margin
of my paper and then moved on.
I sat wrapped in a fabric between
braided chains of cotton and fleece,
an overcast sort of Thursday.
Clouds played pictures inside my eyes
while a young man read at my side,
our elbows barely touching.
The smell of October seed
was enveloping, a tang of pine,
calm of cedar and familiar skin,
but I was busy reaching behind,
hand grazing grass for a memory
that passed me while I slept
and soon there was no one
on the grass but myself,
one shade eclipsing the next.
Try being a shadow in some
faded photograph, it's an empty
place between the edges
where the ink runs cross-ways and
the paper curls against time
like an old shoulder turned against you,
and every color is a variation on gray.
But for the sake of things that
stay the same, I will say she
was writing in the woods
and her eyes were wide open.
She was warm and strong
but the shadows between
the trees stole her light.
***
Flood Waters
I dreamed of
river banks and young ankles,
brown water threading
the edges where the land spills
into a blacktop Boulevard.
Saw myself in the fresh
skin of ten, weeding the water,
blonde head bobbing between
the garden's harvest,
a mere dandelion petal
hooked against the wind,
blowing somewhere far south,
a descent too sharp to remember
even the scent of fresh daisy
and chokecherry, talcum powder
and country gravy;
The girl whose heart died inside
while she was still alive
wants to remember the slippery
comfort of warm algae, the
Korean-war fisherman by the shore,
the kids even younger than
her then-cheap ten
dancing along the pavement
like specters against
the windshield of the moon.
An innocence not yet
dead enough to be reborn again,
a time when my bare feet,
wandering poets even then
who refused logic or authority,
still imagine me in.
***
We Are But Flecks of Dust Against the Sky
Early morn I watch the moon
hide behind the sun
he breathes his last fading beams
across the suns crown,
pulls a hood across the stars.
And come early eve
I watch the sun sparkle-dance
at the rounded edge
of a dark, gloaming twilight
she curtains the moon
as he skips across the sky
and I become but
a brushstroke across canvas,
a sack-full of stars
I am a grain among the sand.
And at once I know
I am not magnificent,
at best I am skin and breath.
***
The Moon Won't Leave Her Alone
Every night she assembles her creative space. She hangs painted replicas of the middle ages like props to the most bizarre photo shoot. Tiresomely, she drags her own acrylic masterpieces and rearranges them haphazardly across the yellow-plaster walls of her writing room. Her 'creative think-space' she calls it but really it's nothing more than an over-sized closet nestled into the upstairs corner of her over-priced apartment.
She longs to be an artist, some call her a hobbyist. She flips her hair and her middle finger because even girls in small towns have dreams! She never asked for the inclination of words, the brain-carved pieces of scattered pictures. They homed themselves behind her eyelids long ago. Now days, she merely obeys. Mr. Whiskers observes from the corner (a naturalist among shadows), her tipsy cup of tea and the shutters she bangs shut lest the moon jump across the makeshift balcony to wedge his livid, oval expectancy, between her shoulders.
***
Even Sand is Sacred
The ocean was toiling
its same old
one-thousand-year song,
and two together, yet alone,
we squished the sand
between our toes,
those stiff beach stones,
pressed the backs of our eyes
into the gloaming hour
of a dark-cloud night.
Drunk on young
but never dumb,
We skipped pebbles
and drank cheap wine,
a steeple against the
sorrow of some tomorrow,
spoke to the pigeons and
other shore-swine,
a bridge to gap the hours
and I spoke subliminally,
pity for the harrowing life
in each lost feather, and he
rolled his eyes toward me
like two blue roaming runes,
whispered softly between the
firelight of each ticking second:
"You've got it all wrong,
as long as the stars are
on fire and the heart still moves
its steady beat-groove;
as long as we're alive
and still here, there's nothing
to lose, nothing to fear."
***
Of Bulbs and Stars
Early evening turns the city into a universe of streetlights. The smoky alcove of each lamp showcases a cast of shadows, playwright directing light. Inside the crystalline void of a lone bulb, a firefly beats his wings into the wire. He spins, an ethereal glow against the first wink of the moons edged smile. Translucent as a wood nymph, I am but foot-stepped bone matter amongst the backdrop of bulb and star.
For a moment I dance into the light
infrared as a still-life photo
as I walk into the infinity
of a brick-and-mortar horizon.
***
Saturday Almanac
It's not yet summer, but
the weather is catching wind
of whatever gust is
shattering the air and I'm a
Flora-full of dandelion,
stuffy nose and fly-away hair.
My apartment once housed
a fifties bus-station,
sometimes I fancy the
late-evening shadows cast
by evening rush-traffic
are really old ghosts still
trying to find their way home.
My backyard is the front-view
world for busy red-breasted robins,
the winter vultures who have tired
of sharing the sky their wing-span.
It's something I always wanted
to understand in childhood dreams
of rocket ships and stars, a first-class
window seat to some other planet;
ideas now as alien as distant
life from planets dwarfed.
I wish I had a porch
with some real privacy to write,
a place to hang my head and cry
when the words refuse my fingers.
Instead, my neighbor is an old man
who hides Budweiser in a
make-shift smokehouse.
I'm sure he smells of diesel fuel
and armpits, the stale tobacco-breath
of someone else's grandfather.
The streets of my home are
cracked replicas of the 1920's,
the same cold-stone and
city-stingy now as back then.
And somewhere on the sidewalk
near my front stoop, someone's been
writing letters to God in chalk.
Too guilty to read someone else's
silly confessions, I don't stop.
If you walk three more minutes down
the alley past the high-rise boardwalk
you'll find old love letters
ripped apart alongside broken whisky bottles
left by the drunkards and whores
that walk this parking-lot boulevard.
Sometimes I can't believe Sylvia is dead,
perhaps she had a pact with Anne,
and why was the truth of this tragedy
never written in a book, all bubble-gum
glossy and delightful as a pre-sixties screenplay?
I need more places to visit in this
little shitty city where the cops are corrupt
and the officials steal pennies from
the water meters on the daily like gift tips
for the taking. No, I want somewhere
mysterious to wear my black: always
yoga pants or slacks, bifocals in
sharp, dark frames that hide my eyes,
ever-sly in polyester-hipster jeans,
well-read and spy-movie savvy.
But I can't because there's no such a place.
My boyfriend once called this town
the strangest place on earth,
Twilight Zone worthy and penniless.
I agreed back then and I think I still do.
Yes, I come from a town
that houses political criminals,
welfare-republicans and schools
that exploit educational materials
for the superficial worship of sports
so the as-yet-married hussies, with
three kids in tow, can wax their
make-believe sexy to the still-single truckers.
It's a place where no one is ever
really worth remembering until they're dead
except maybe the church whores in high heels
because every good man has to get his fix
rather it's under the table or in the horse stable
out back where the artificial wise men gather.
A young girl drowned here just the other day,
surrounded by friends on the edge
of a cliff on a lake where men gather
the cold, slick bodies of bluegill.
She died surrounded by friends
just out of reach of her hands,
a weird sort of halfway suicide:
just another young thing unfinished.
The story reminds me of the words from an old
lost letter, an epitaph to my last relationship,
the ripped scrapped half of an
acrylic paper: love you forever.
But love, just like unicorns, is
a concept shiny and clever, born
of daydreams as real as the concept never.
Except in rare cases such as the
rabbit made of Velveteen. I believe
he earned the scruff of his fur,
jumped circles across the moon
after the courtesy of fork and spoon.
I guess everybody wants to live free
and love hard but what I fear most
is dark crawl spaces and too-quiet places,
silence thick as grave and falling:
into love, people, strange places.
Yet this city is full of bridges,
swinging the empty of their footholds
next to busy highways and ram-shackled
apartment buildings at the edge of town.
Dilapidated, pull-string, rusty-hinged
of wood and straw, they await the brave,
the hurried who are scurrying,
the deadbeats and the drug dealers,
the gullible woman-child inside us all,
dressed in quick-black and knappy-sack,
moving too quickly to be saved by air
yet much too slow to really make it anywhere.
***
Fortunate Things
Superstitious, I pluck
fortunes from cookies at a
red-marble table at Peking.
I have walked exceptionally well
across city concrete, careful
of the cracks, dedicated
hourly conversations to my mother
via cellphone bills barely affordable.
The paper in the center
of the cookie says I am
creative, original, alert.
I laugh a little, my steady mind
must be a passing homage to
all the poetry I've read,
the inner world I've sketched
into as many lonely nights,
brittle hours of solitude crumbling
me into the pulp of what I am now.
I crack the sugary back of another,
a handful of slippery, golden prism
that tells me in not so many words:
I am admired for my adventurous ways.
I owe the stout metaphor of my mind
to books well-read during childhood,
the strong lineage of my dedication
to words and homespun recipes to
to my fore-mothers, the muse of
their perfect-knit sweaters and the
molasses bread that always did
rise just right on Sundays.
Everything serves to further everything.
I walk past the buffet, smiling,
and back into the slick white world
where skyline meets molten mortar,
careful of black cats in their sleek claws
as I uncross the same street I just walked.
***
I've Lost Myself Again
So lonely am I,
this night of no moon.
My heart, thinking,
I have loved thirty by three:
To love someone,
a thing which fades.
I wonder: Is there no way for us to meet again?
Recklessly...from darkness,
like a silk worm weaving,
the stars have given me:
Autumns bright moon
in the sky, clearest blue;
a blue coat, the taxi, a slow rain,
dark song, childhood lineage
and strange men in the city.
***
Sky Tapestry
I was nineteen when I found the stars,
Hot July summer boiling my black-sky dreams.
I stood back-packed, slack-jawed and calling.
I longed for a soft body made of love but words kept calling
So I laid upon the grass of fall, conversed with leaves, swallowed stars
Flailing beyond gray-haired storm-skies toward white-clean poet-dreams.
Now thirty-four has found me drinking dreams
Like chamomile tea, black-creamed and calling
Me back from books of the Beatniks, sun-signs, and lost stars.
Bohemian sister with my basket full of dreams, calling out names of stars from a busy city street.
***
Coffee-Table Wednesday
(a Haibun)
She’s a 6am fray of fleece slippers, unraveling. She wears coffee-stains on the left shoulder of her shirt like a metaphorical holster. Coffee-black and pen poised, words have been haunting her all night. Syllable by rank, impulsive syllable and thrashed from slumber, they summon her to the click-click of her pen-drip no matter a Wednesday or Sunday.
She takes the suggestion of every finger-winding soliloquy to heart, ignoring the thorn-twist of each melodramatic ending; ignores the too-stiff enunciations, fumbles with secrets like clumsy thumbs across a closed heart-locket. Impractical as a raincoat on a cloudless day, she’s always careful to dot the i’s and cross the t’s.
She’s the smoky bar
To Kerouacs’ lost car keys;
A stiff shot half-drank.
***
Words and I
You first slithered yourself
Around my waist,
All 6am belly button
And shower-creamed skin
Made of words
Like Sexton and Sappho.
We'd sleep late, bed-full
Of poet-speak and brown bean,
Then meet one another
Come evening, all hush-lipped
Lullaby and wine
At back-tables of fancy
Dining halls where bowls
Of Eve’s fresh fruit sat:
My willing accomplice,
The black ink of my
Only-sometimes-starry night,
The tip to my ten brown
Curious, vagabond toes
Freshly sunned, notebook in tow,
You’d step me across dim-lit
Thresholds into worlds
Saturated of taste and color,
Fresh-tongued and tingling hands
Always willing me to wander.
***
The Back-Porch Blues
The moon
Lights the sky
A half-frosted
Chocolate cake.
Wicker against
Bare shins,
Bone against brick.
I sat poised
with notebook,
work the slippery
print of gel pen
into a flurry
of fuzzy firefly,
blood-drop
of mosquito.
I want most
To commemorate
Something,
Become something
Outside myself
For a while
But tonight
The java has
Turned my brain
Into skittish text,
Uncomprehensible.
The cars spin
Across the highway,
bright-eyed and
soft moth-winged,
Voiceless and noisy.
I am hungry
For wine and pretzels,
For soft hands
And strawberry lotion,
for classic music,
someone else's
face to fall into.
Right now
There’s only me
And the quiet sounds
Unseen things
Alive in the grass,
Unsaid words
Thrown across
The porch like
Friendless widows
And my candles
Are burning into
A spiderweb mass
Of melted wax.
I need to sleep,
I need to keep
Reading about the
Magic lives of
Girls in the
Chick lit novels.
I need to spin
The wheels of thread
For my daughter's dress,
The oven clock
Is ticking like
A death perch
Across the upcoming
Day and all I really
Want right now
Is to turn
this piece of town
Into a train-station,
A parkway,
A piece of sky
With too many
Hanging moons
To ever count,
To be in the vast,
Sparkling, timeless
Innuendo of too
Many disappearing
Pieces of starlight
To ever again feel
Such a thing
As 2am loneliness,
The sun rising
Across sleepless eyes,
Biscuits burning,
The surprise of
Someone else leaving,
Taillights fading
Into the dark
On a night
Not unlike this one.
***
Incineration of Summers Past
Five summers ago
I won you,
A kind of brittle love
Embryonic as a
Winning raffle ticket.
I pushed your ideas
Between pages of poetry,
All those unread books
That lined the walls
Of my livingroom.
Too many books,
You’d always say.
The same summer
I gathered the words
Of your throw-away stories,
The poems you shunned
Like an angry Whitman,
As if Whitman could
Ever be angered.
Still, I stuffed them
Inside my own mouth,
So that when I spoke
Only you would come out.
We’d spend whole days
Writing inside leather-bound
Journals, sometimes you
Falling asleep while I sneaked
A look at the things
You had to say about me.
And at night we’d drive
Miles outside the city,
Our long conversations spoken
To the harmony of
Cicadas and country frogs.
We’d eat barbecue wings
On the back porch,
Old as the oldest couple
At heart, while slathering ribs,
Negating modern-day philosophy.
We’d hold hands, an
Affectionate thing we did
Without emotional dependency,
And listen to the radio,
Voice of the newsman
Foreshadowing the rain
We would await, although
Sometimes it never came.
I rarely remember those days now,
Precocious children blocked
Inside an old dated calendar
No one keeps time to anymore.
The walls of my bedroom
Now absent your half-completed
Pages of poetry, the wildlife murals,
Shelves-full of Rumi and
The old college-dorm expressionist
Art you found in the
Parking lot dumpster that day.
Friday night has succumbed
To a dreary corner chair,
The lonesome melody of
My steady laptop keys,
A muse whose grip is
Greater than any greed.
Each summer since then
Has been a cerulean,
Teary-eyed homecoming,
A loft-full of whispering eaves,
Each afternoon a recession
Of the one before, time-lapse
Of history paused on repeat,
Days full of sun folded between
Perfectly-woven croissants,
My rare, home-made delicacy,
And dandelions in a clay tea-pot,
Pouring petals, their wings
full of my wishes as
they swim toward the sky.
Steady, weightless things.
***
My Muse
She is a sky priest
Who practices palm magic
And coughs stars.
She burns old books
And creates letterhead
From their smoky ash
With crooked, wrinkled fingers.
She is the buoyant pirouette
In a floorless room,
Transforms herself into
A net when I’m most broken,
Just to catch the
Discarded sonnets of
My ripped-apart pages.
She’s a hanging lamp
In the dark-graveled distance
Of a long walk home,
Dangling like a fairy.
Loyal as a housemaid,
She dances me into the
Moonlight when I am lonesome,
Two witches howling
Toward the empty windowsills
When no letters arrive
And the telephone dials
Its last, wrong jingle.
She’s as hopeful as
A silent prayer, kissing
Each of my bruised knees.
The un-tongued confidant
Who wills me to speak
Of my tragedies.
She’s a long door,
To a buried room full
Of my self-treasures.
And I’m always scared
To summon her, but
Usually she’s already there,
Sitting in my favorite chair,
Smoke rings and Marlboros,
Mary Janes and school books,
Ever the shape-shifter
In an image from my past,
Willing me, with the
Secret language of her eyes,
To write. Telling me
To sit atop her knee,
Be covered with the warm
Shaw that’s been waiting.
She’s also a connoisseur
Of the best green tea,
Mother God of coffee.
She’s made of all
That sort of stuff,
My wrinkly mother of
Other worlds, inside worlds,
And words upon words
That write by thick candlelight:
Heart-healer, brain-serum,
Tricky dictionary sprite.
***
The Star-Seeker
There’s something magnificent
To be said about the sky.
I used to make a habit
Of sitting by the window
In a dark room, come evening,
Notebook across my knees
Like a silly-couch poet.
I’d watch the Gods turn on
The stars one by one,
Always in awe of how complete
Galaxies could disappear
Into the vast pock-holes in between.
Maybe it’s the astrologist in me,
Or perhaps I’m just a dreamer,
But I’d imagine the vast-ink sky
Was a roadmap and each winking star
Was waning me towards some grand destiny.
And I couldn’t help but wonder,
As I sipped coffee and counted
The cars that slipped past my street
Beneath the veil of early evening,
Of what secrets the sky kept,
What spirits hovered there
At the edge of in-coming clouds.
***
I Dream of December
Funny how I always
Dreamed of kissing
You in the snow,
On a street where we,
Slippery-feet and groping,
Would always remain
A n o n y m o u s,
Two shiny illuminations,
Concrete in our limbs and grip,
Too-cold to care
For the flash-bulbs
Of headlights from cars
Awaiting a parking spot.
No valet in a tiny town
Where ancient, church-towers
Warn the ‘lost’ souls
Of the blood in lust,
Sins of the skin
We so loved to touch
Like giddy, experimental children
Hiding in the kitchen pantry.
Funny how the dream always
Ended, our hands interlaced,
Me, shotgun in the passenger seat
Of your car, a vessel glowing
Into the endless miles
Of a starless night.
Us two, always driving towards
The twilight of some new life.
***
Things Someone's Grandma Once Said
Don’t be in such a hurry,
It’s easy to grow old,
Even easier to find yourself
At that place alone,
A shadow on a veranda
Waving goodbye to someone.
You need to know you’re beautiful,
In the soft cave of your belly fat
And your well-formed upper thighs.
And listen, it’s okay to wear fishnet,
Decorate yourself in sequins,
Glamorize your life, flash the lights
On and off like the paparazzi,
Like whole days and nights
Spinning by in mere seconds;
Don’t worry about blown light-bulbs
Or rather or not your lipstick
Is too red for the shirt you wear
Because one day the total sum
Of your youth might be mingled
To a single black and white Polaroid.
You don’t always have to stand
As straight as your father said,
And you can say anything you like.
Life’s too short for proper grammaticism,
For driving between two perfect lines.
No, life is a rollercoaster,
So let your hair be tussled,
Spin until you fall into the arms of
Whoever might be standing closest.
Lose a shoe or two.
And don’t be afraid to walk
Your own self home from the party.
And sometimes it’s okay to let yourself go.
You know, at my age, everyday
Someone dies, people I know,
Whose voice I’ve heard, skin I’ve touched,
Maybe even accidentally while
Drinking from their coffee cup
having tea together, sharing books and secrets.
We all die by chance but it’s still our destiny
So don’t forget the amazing feel
Of your own beating heart
Between ice cream with your kids
And grad school dissertations,
Jury duty and the shitty jobs.
Don’t go gentle into no good night,
Knock the street-lamps out with rocks,
Burn his dinner when he’s
No longer what he’s been,
Teach your kids how to fold their own clothes,
Wear your body till it’s as silky
As a second-hand shirt,
And write whatever you like,
Write everything, actually.
Leave no shame unnamed, no wine undrank.
Prowl the earth like a lioness with a lasso.
Know that anything you catch
Is really caught by chance.
Know also that for anything you don’t like,
You can sever the line like a vegetable limb
and swing that baby again.
***
The Moon Nymph
When she enters,
Snow-booted footfalls
A rabbits’ whisper
Across the long-tail carpet
Of the campus library,
She spills the coffee of herself
All over the room
Like a stubborn stain.
Her eyes glide toward your table,
Quick as a cloud-swirl,
Then blink past you
Like a chance.
She moves like air
That blows surprisingly
Into a windowless room,
Clutching paintbrushes
To her chest
As if each bristle
Were made of hand-flesh.
Her walk is reminiscent
Of a swiftly-forgotten mission,
Hands fluttering
As if she’d just picked
A basketful of burning stars.
When she walks past you
She smells of smoke cinders
And pine wood, her hair
A nest to catch
The rattled needles
And lose leaves of
An unforgiving fall.
Her smile is as clever
As a secret language,
And when she speaks to you
Her words are as ripe and fleeting
As the hand-sweep
Of a dandelion dream.
You’d saw off your own hands
Just to capture her,
This nymph of another world.
You sing praises to the worship
Of her skin temple
As she dances naked against
The lusting fingers of the moon,
her body full of God.
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