"My mistress' eyes are nothing…"
Now available on Amazon. My poem’s on page 80.
My second year taking part in this beast, a hell of my own making but a great creative distillery, I managed to squeeze out one worthy poem at least. I’m grateful for the Jans’ generosity in hosting this annual event and in compiling this anthology of selected poems from the event.
Peace (and purchase :)). The proceeds go to the next year’s marathon.
Gaze
You sleep with your mind awake.
I see you twitch and worry as I
Lie inside your watching, along.
Your body tells your story, the
One about anxious defenses, and
Hilly motoric reflex, fortress wall.
A rage induced, childhood fascists,
A jealous brother usurping control,
Lorded over a boyhood’s landscape.
And the son who became the man,
Who took fury to the world, coated
Like enamel, wolfish covetousness.
Stuff it all, beers and candy, yearn
To a carefree kid, the promised life
Of firstborn fortune, fiefs forever.
Lost, love, in stifled cries un-yelled
Swallow in dragon-ful dreamscapes
Yawn fire through loins and islands.
Bleed worlds inside a wall-safe, keep
Cupped palm close a vampire’d lust.
Despise the rest as marauding cheats.
Still I watch, tender-horrified aghast,
Thumb to forefinger circle poked hate
Necessity, wrench-tightens hope-bolt.
Awaken yet, chestnut eye transcribes
Silence to story and mawkish, stolen
Laments death, sleep and secrets bare.
Sleeping with the enemy, I gaze, boring
Holes in the skull’s soft, vulnerable hind
Sight, believe too in my own enemy-love.
Lovers-valentine-lying: pixabay
The noise keeps me awake,
And the static on the TV
I don’t know how to turn on
Let alone turn off.
The vibrations trip me up,
Topple me as I walk and think,
Make my knuckles swell,
Ache to type the arthritic words.
There’s more too, like the faces,
Eyes wrung in red rashes,
Stench like piss and rum from
Dirty denim and leaky shoes.
Don’t sit in my breathing space;
You’re money’s no good here.
Turn up the air and open the door.
Nod off your head twisted neck, go.
And I cringe and shake in despair,
Fight off the crusts of anger flung
Face off in my corner here, where?
The door, the door, where’s the door?
I am.
Soh hahm.
Not affirmation.
Confirmation.
Truth.
I shed my skin slowly.
Infinitely slow.
But I discard it nevertheless.
For it serves no longer any purpose.
I change my clothes.
And no one sees me new.
Yet I emerge from the dressing door clothed.
Different shoes than when I went in.
Eternal womb.
Pixabay: butterfly
A deep melancholy weaves itself inside a house leaking in
the first cool night of October.
It shadows the shades with daylight endings
with no thought to warmer, longer days.
It’s a passing of sorts, the dying season.
The year’s swan song in golden ochre and chestnut hurrahs.
Only this first cold day, a day where I search for socks
in a squeaky disused drawer overflowing unmatched orphans,
endings haunt the costumed furniture.
Almost Halloween, though none know it’s Halloween inside.
And only I know my mismatched socks stretch
hodge-podge high up my booted shins.
These and many others are fall’s secrets,
hidden under leaf piles and broken relationships.
I’m sorry to see some go. I’m sorry.
Only spring light may reveal a return on investing
in you all these years, but only if you count it out–
the season of us has dried up and gone.
My skin flicks daggers when they box me in, droves of rolling wind-shielded, multi-tasking dryvexters, head bowed, praying to the light of their battery’d gods.
Then those days of aromas, perfumes and incense, like silken smokey kisses, nibblers at my tongue and ear, lean heavy, move me, like longing in a store front window.
Our emanations, I believe, send some forest denizen half way round the world toppling hoof over antler, for the sheer shot-stream blast crumpling poise and balance.
Imagine anger and love, thrust to the sky, cannoned from skulls, like New Year’s pistols shot to heaven on midnight’s stroke, only to meet drop-down death in upturned eyes.
And so I say to fresh-plucked sprigs of another’s birthing, my charges today, “Be careful of how you speak, your intentions, jealousy and greed, for they bite hard from behind.”
She wrapped me in her quilted smile
then torched the salty fabric of us,
tear stained and aching.
She knees cruel in the balls.
And I love her that way just the same.
She hangs me up to dry,
then cuts me down for air.
The breathing windows of us,
pulsating walls setting chairs rocking,
us inside, lulled in four-arm sleep.
What shall I do when my skin pickles and my mind dries splintered?
I won’t stare into dirty window panes.
What shall I do when my eyeballs glitch shudder open-shut, right to left?
I won’t run, slaughter, spin out, or crash in stupor-ful grim.
Where shall I go when cars slam openings cabin space so tight it pierces skin?
To nowhere regret drives home.
How shall I survive the sandwiched time of somatic stares and twitching sleep–
unparalleled movement unceasingly on?
By leaving love notes in your lunch box and writing letters home.
Why do we contrive without power un-surrendering ourselves to the perpetual?
We won’t let the wheel go, let the world spin a’wheel.
Which is in? Which is out?
What matters?
When will the uncleaved door bend, ope-crack and whistle in the sizzling windy train of space,
belly breathe hoary air eons long, trellised and clinging to cilial body, shivering sensoranticipatorily?
When still–
Yet still–
Stillness is.
Pixabay: waterstillnesswoodnets
Awake. Dark room, light shivering between slatted tears in sleep’s cloth curtain, no,
It’s not cold.
Frozen eyes, shuttered left, off kilter for Sunday morning’s churchyard calm, dazed and scarcely hunted.
It feels encrusted shut, my eye, right, no left–at the shake of a quiet mind’s head.
I’m not sick.
It’s just…just…not like a Sunday.
Swollen, itchy, red…no, I feel pink but not like a wisp of ultra violet setting rays into the dusk.
Like pulled cotton candy, taut, sticky, stretched to disappearing.
I have pink eye.
It’s red and puffy, and the itch that can’t be scratched for the contagion that she brings.
I’m catching.
Do I call in, call up, call out this small disease, this lodged discomfort, virulent invader?
I look it up.
Warning signs, good sense and no regrets; I confess to all I anticipate in a day’s walk-about,
a Sunday.
“I…I have pink eye. No, I think my hands touching my eye, touching you.” Can I see you without touching you?
Will your money be repulsed, sweet-toothed craving not crusty but cultured,
the dissonance like shimmied NO, a gulp, grimace and gag.
I should stay.
But I go, and I lie without guilt, smile without repercussion, moan without regret and leave, sailing
like the marine layer over our beach city, puffy, cloudy, windy and cool-breezy could care less.
I’ve planted seeds now.
The growing season well nigh past still yields a muddy crop, sunken, aphid-riddled, shriveled dawn.
I took camera digitally clicked snapshots.
Thick waist sloped into fleshy hips, fortresses to meaty buttock questions to the sheets.
Am I asleep?
Or am I just pretending you loved me kindly, tenderly with your chestnut grin and molten eyes,
clear, clean and molasses.
No, not pink. Ink. Like night, pintip pupil black.
Noisy bars bring them out, words, flyby’s, glances, guffaws and shouts,
The teeming television barrage: run, skate, tackle, hit, fly, and fall.
It’s all that motion that sickens me, I think, causes me to open the wrong door,
Trying to get out, the populous din of greasy chomps and cheer, too much.
And my left eye, the throbbing reminded me that nights like these…
Well, running into your past hurts, like the face plant into the wall it is.
The years, the years, the years swimming in your clogged ears,
Suck out the details, the exact dates, times, names and numbers.
Never any good at any of them, I just kept doing what needed doing–as I do.
And tonight’s no different with all that begged to be said and felt, all along
With your voice inside my head, telling me not to go, and asking who’s there
With that menace, that hint of cabined, caged control ripping at your will
Your mind round with edges like that pool, your legs wrapped around me
By the waist, by the mouth, by the threads unraveling between our fingers,
That darned holes in our visions, sepia snapshots on silk screen partitions.
In the gaze of the other 