--

Floral roundabout

I am sure at times my grandmother
visits me when I smell a wisp
of floral. Some days it's different
as if she wakes up in an alternate universe
and chooses rose over antique perfume
in that bottle with two hearts. The perfume
didn't go in there but when Clarence the cat
knocked it over she knew it was time to switch.
Her visits are brief. I may be laying fetal
against a sweat soaked pillow or burying a dead
iguana. His name was Kermit.
Maybe I just punched a brick wall and
this feeling comes over me, a floral scent
that makes my eyes go to the back of my head.
I am not here, I am inside a capsule
of flowers, I am headlining my female roots,
writing the score, channeling her Depression days,
the dust bowl, the cigarettes that killed her,
the cancer, the cancer, the hoarded cans
next to the oven. corn. peas. carrots.
Then I inhale again and it's gone. I smell sweat,
my skin and the litter box. Wherever I am I stretch
and grasp a wall or a bed, drop into a mental haven
that is 75 degrees, hidden beneath thick, lacy curtains
and it's 2 AM; sunrise is on the schedule.
I lay in a bed of floral arrangements.
In certain ways they don't go together: rose, lily,
snapdragons, zinnia. My mother offers
me a bouquet and I accept, run upstairs
and put it in a tiny blue china vase that fits in my palm.
Sometimes I fall fast asleep in that room
but sometimes I stay awake, waiting for the scent again.

"One's real life is often the life that one does not lead." - Oscar Wilde


I never knew regret until I left you and that town
with my tornado leftovers. Reconciliation:
I scratch my words into the trunk of my soul.
I engage with a red hammock tied branch to branch.
I sleep. I dream of the day I wake up from this dream
and depart on another dream.

.

I'd rather be run over by an SUV than see them crow look at me

Crows flock over the city.
Their cackle chased me down
Broadway many times the past week
with a worry that I am next
on their search for garbage, dead birds
homeless beards and leftover
preserved hamburger in a dumpster.
The crows caw-aw-ah to their territory, over
my head, below the sun. I'm haunted
as if Edward Gorey reached down
from a time machine vortex and named them
Ida, Kate, Fanny, Basil,
Timothy Geithner, Sallie Mae, Bart Stupak.
The powers that be gather for crow
intelligence. The crows bend
their skulls down to eh-aw
me below their Nosferatu limb tree.
They boast their freedom,
their money, their ownership of my ovaries.
One day I'll pay in to another
garbage heap. Their dinner will be set.
They'll laugh all the way home
as I am gasping for air by the coffee shop
as I am running deep into SUVs and traffic
as the last of my change and books
turn over like pebbles, as my plastic
shoes reign over their short lifespan.
I'll fall to the fate of my past;
they're all dead, decomposing
under smug crows and fertile mud.

.

6 PM Bus

Tired day on the bus.
A woman threatened to kill
a financial aid adviser
at the University. A woman
and her husband fought
over lottery tickets and carton
Marlboros.

Someone must have dropped
their shoes down a crack
in my soul.
I am drowning
in the debt of my future.
This smells of sewer and boots.

The sky is gray and gold
but I can only see
the fatalist inside of me grasp a gun,
aim and follow legend.
There is blood everywhere. I don't
care what anybody thinks.

"It feels like the 1920s in this bus.
Time to fill a tub with gin I say."
I wish were the 1920s.
At least we'd know
how to get out of this.

.

Note to the elderly of the mind.

Welcome
to the right side dear simple man
and your two-toned mind and car
that smells of celery and pickle juice.
Every day I must appease somebody.
I must appease the transient.
I must appease a faceless internet
wormhole. I must appease
the mentally unstable, the hackers
and the named faces; the ones doing jumping
jacks on the inside of my left brain.
Some day I may never get away like a transient
who lost their ticket
to Nowheresville, Indiana
for the back of their late mother's truck.
Yes, turtle man dressed in polo goo
and pulled up John Wayne jeans,
I let the underground apprehend
my sanity! I asked it to question
our shapeless reality for a cheap beer
and a quick grave.

.

Family tree

There goes the Catholic woman
leaving plates out for her cats to store
their caught flies after summer
windows are shut for good.
Now night cargo pant militants
cannot steal her brand-spanking new
twilight guitar, or mother may i journal entries
and all of those dark, dark recollections
of eating Jesus in the past.
There she lies like a centerfold
and her soul like blood on the bathroom sink
after meth, after needles, after night's
drug twosome. "Just me and the guys."
It's 4 AM and her legs are just swaying
up and down, vodka yawns
and death leaves her in a precarious position.
Her hair is crunchy; it's all of this Catholic
she never was.
She channels old relatives and memories
aren't her own. Claw biting
came from somewhere. After drinking
the paranoia comes from someone,
the voices aren't her own.
Rosemary sent her here
and so did Mary Todd. She swipes,
swipes, swipes her gash and drinks
until all the eyes aren't looking anymore.
Her centerfold is her own and there lies
that Hope diamond with the ocean,
indigo, a sapphire lounge of hope
and all the circumstance that took hope away
one rainy day.

.

Hatred

When someone hates me
it's a comedy.
Their hate dances
like a baboon
and licks its own ass.

.

i can't imagine another foot
in the door like you.
a mothership to planet
bygones be bygones,
every color of the rainbow.
one night it's blue and the other
red. a bull's shield
marks every day
you have not seen my naked
body.

---

new york
language
composes a lengthy manual
on how to write music.

---

39th street, Kansas City 2

a man with brown hair
to his ass sings a song
about fire engulfing
the entire city before dawn.
"in flames we shall rise
above the night's full moon!"
the man stands in front
of my apartment, swinging
hair back and forth.
his fist reaches the sky.
"in comes the fire! woooo
in comes the fi-rrrrre!"
an hour later the man,
nostradamus of 39th street,
remained still as hell (so hot
that the devil was a carcass)
rampaged the sidewalk
with two feet, a suit and a gun
threatening all
real left in this world.

.

Before Sleep

I am my most gutsy before sleep.
Time rearranges in a hallucinatory
clarity that can only be managed
when I am so fed up
I rise above routine, ashes, other
people's frowns, smiles and responses.
It's four in the morning, my brother
is having seizures and I will sleep
through my alarm in three hours.
I am my most gutsy before sleep.
I'll go find those doctors and catch
pharma on fire and their way
of taking my age and drugging them
until we're all sitting on a bus, staring
straight into anothers' eye but we can
not be lyrical.
If you want a piece of me
find me before bed, when I pick up
the phone and divulge my secrets
to resonate with a world
where I have none. it's free,
it's 7 AM and there is no alarm,
I break things and walk naked.
My life is held down by a rottweiler
blocking the entrance to the amusement park.
I need an invitation, a straightaway
into a morning fable when the sun
rises and everyone wakes up,
walks away and Lou Reed sings,
"I do what I want
I want what I see!"
Hallucinatory sleep, I feel you coming.
Here it is! My life has begun! My death
is only inches behind me,
I see now. I love you now.
The edge of the world is no fear.
The sound of the gates rampages my nerves
with steel grates and laughter in and out of
train capsules.
I am running to the runway, the flight
to "goodness this winter won't be death
without you!"
Secret monsters breathe before me.
I am my most gutsy before sleep.

.

my love for shit


love is like a song about me. love
is dreaming, dreaming until i reach an airport terminal
and say "goodbye future, goodbye past. i just
want to see you and fuck your brains out
until your glass eye venom is out of me."
love is telepathy. love is having harmonious bedrooms.
love is dirty and ravenous. love is not white
and it's not placenta. it's painterly. it's a bouquet of tiger lilies.
love is knowing. love is not a screen.
love is running, chasing, tearing apart the forest fire of life
for always taking it away from me, letting it get away
even while it burns in front of me.
love quizzes me to submission. oh, my range soul.
love is not real. it's flickering and it's time for bed.
if i thought i could stand a morning after death
wrangling the wretched lost flavors of your fuck while i sleep
i'd be something mental and psychiatric if you're into that.

.

Revival, Reunion, waiting by the train
A prose poem


I drop down fifty flights of stairs and the moon beckons me no where except
where a sight-seeing tourist from the inside is exploiting my garnered limp.
His gullet is adorned with crumpled skin and mole colored jewels.

Inside my nose is stinging and I take it as a sign that the
scorpion has just crawled inside. My tongue will speak words
of models drawing out my past vision of vernacular suicide.

I crawl to the coffee shop and order shots of espresso until my chest explodes.
I wait for you by the front window but you're no where to be seen.
I assume it's because I gained weight again and I feel fat again
Since I quit mind surfing I don't ride as smooth anymore.

Limping and leaving, my heart stops and I am clutched to a street light.
The fat gullet trumpet vine has wrapped around my bronchial tubes again.
Manipulation is a tired tactic and I prefer pure fucking instead.
I will wait for you half past five next weekend if I am not dead by then.

I will merge into you but not frighten you.
I will sing to you gently but there will be no song even if you ask for one.
I will leave you one foot to find in the garbage. Most importantly
I don't know how to love. It's your crumbled clutch, displacement
with wine and roses sentiment. Yeah, it's that role I play.

Inside I know that flash you want of that woman standing sprawled
dripping clean with wet and glitter all over your mommy's blanket.
What a coward you've become. God, all gracious, the women,
the women just want to screw you all over, mister vision
of a Robert Plant Fantasy. Go on, bro, grunt and give them your disease.

My skin is still smooth and I still flutter like a pixie
all over your jewels, stealing them. The yawn of the guitar still runs down my leg
and as the new moon raises the energy depletes from your
soul merging with mine accordingly.

Most likely you will have a nightmare about me tonight.
A hallway will rise up in magenta and run like a trumpet vine,
run from your toes to your abdomen to down your trachea
where then you will blossom orange, finally spreading
something half beautiful, even if you're still a weed.

---

Written a year ago, edited in a class and hated by the New Letters editor. All of the editing I removed and am now working from a fresh slate, which is why I posted it. I don't previously edit anything I post on this blog. I could change that to my biography: "Always edited in class and hated by the editor."

.

A rejection letter, sealed


To be frank,
my sexual wavelength
is confused.
It's anywhere but here. Maybe
tomorrow, in space
or laying flat in Icelandic tundra
after a sneeze. Or maybe we can
do it in New York or while feeding
ducks. Or maybe never. Somewhere else,
not in this flesh next to you
or anyone in this bed, red sheets
or not.

My own history leads
me to examine my
sexual prowess; my selfish performance
like a predator. I am who Cosmo
says a woman should be: hard to get,
playing mysterious. I didn't ask for this.
I am real. Instead, I am a lioness
who already ate. There is nothing there,
no mystery, no embedded story.
Cosmo has exploited my character.

Yet, there were still men who believed
that one day I would come back to Earth
for their big dicks and pancakes in the morning.

I am just bold enough to say
that spreading my disease like pollen
is about as American as leaving your flag
swaying town. Maybe one day
I'll send it off in rocket ships,
in the streets of India, in a painting;
everywhere I have never been. But,
if you ask me now I can't say that in this time
and space I would care or want to create
anything but these words.

.

Past

That's right! Past, we must make amends.
If I were to lose you, what would my muse become?
Past, I must say it to your face.
You must reveal your fiction
that is now lost somewhere between couples
playing house, couples after breeding, couples eating
mashed potatoes after dark, couples doing things
that have a point. I don't want a point.
Like a shark I'd rather devour a school of fish
and pronounce fear and mystery upon the land's humans.
I'd watch my name scroll on the tv screen like a comic book villain,
and leave those who are trained to play house to never attend
the outdoors again.

.

Voices on 39th street

sounds of voices echo through
39th street's corridors.
they warp like thoughts racking
in Van Gogh's head,
like the endless stream
of college freshman's gossip
five years ago,
the mix of image and sound
in a fleeting glance before i passed out
drunk once on a heat vent
and played Medusa.
voices on 39th street
are from a nightmare,
a trip through space, a gathering in a room
of multilingual Europeans
practicing their vocabularies
and schizophrenia. each voice saying the same
nuance, each taking me where
i wish i were still, where i wish i weren't,
and what i'd like to forge
as a list of "concerns" for a therapist
reminding me of what a genius actress
i can become.
the voices say if only i could really write.
they're like A sharp
and like my mind the time i stared at a white ceiling
in a blue room
after my loss of virginity was reported online
by a spiky- haired new found glory teenager.
whatever they say, the nightmare
is probably just sitting around the dinner table
selling crack and yelling down the street.

.

A summation of two years time


walking out of ash
and a golden atheist steeple
an ear tickle guides me
to a series of fickle fascinations
with pathology.

and in all serious ruminations
a ghostly figure stands stagnant
underneath my rib cage waiting for dinner.
this is god awful, i think! the horror!

feed me, feed me, it demands
attention until i zap it out
like a cheap bulb of yellowed light
cracked from its own
overheating

consume no more, i tell myself
as i gravel on, one foot after another
a smile from ear to earring,

without cheap and feeble remarks
of another apology shooting
out from another steeple
like ribbons,
i am a step closer to the freedom
of range dust-angels.

hey you, the march still seems a joke!
but i did not crack, not ask for pity
and as time still does not hurrah for me,
i am young. i am too young.

.

39th Street, Kansas City


The tattoo guys next door are playing
Ella Fitzgerald

And those who wait for nightfall
to sell crack

are swaying in the street.

Suddenly
there is silence
no cicadas
no automobiles

Just Ella and the swaying
How romantic.

.

Morning dead thoughts, Sept 1


this morning I step out onto my balcony,
sirens rage in the distance.
the musicians next door wake up with hangovers.
I stand watering yellowed parsley.

this morning I miss the deadline for the day,
so I slip on high waist long johns and roll a cigarette
while the ambulance comes barreling down my block
and my cats turn my curtains into dinner noodles.

robots on wheels carry human beings to the office
all while I miss the deadline for the day.
I stand in the trees, I stare at September.

Now that summer is over, I'm back
and I'm tired of red and orange before it's here.
I'd rather watch love water
sunflowers in the afternoon.

.

About the redefinition of the word "bitch"


Here we go, an ego bloated spark
full of hot pink spandex rags
and bleached hair.
Oh, another long haired sag who they all assume
to be the All Knowing Bitch of the Midwest.
Plowing down trellises of men, mocking
presence of emotion, touch,
looking for selfish satisfaction and walls to plunder,
and assumed to be an example for the rest of us sullen
sedentary, little ladies sprawled out
underneath their throne
as "the strong woman we dare
to become."
ah
dear,
that
is no
bitch.

.

Response to Force


The rain falls formless in this world.
With this same form
of man-eating assumptions
about how and where to set your brain on a bookshelf
and how to create your sentences
to be intelligent,
to articulate emptiness

we will win the prize
an IQ prize
the prize of money despite the lack
We will be rewarded for our vapid identity
with nothing but running mouths attacking the sunset
ruining all that is art

It is said again
as battlestar dementia double takes
a star-studded mouth of diamond
articulates.

After all, we must die in the guts of these people
die with the colorful thoughts that bring us out
of sleep.

.

For the Thought that is not Human


The rain falls in a pattern of musical composition driving me fluidly
away from gargantuan thoughts of rash decisions
and leprosy of my immediate reality.

My life is a stream of non-encounters substituting song for fear.

Coffee leaps in octopus wings to wring wishes after dark
Black ink blocks out the image of you and your clean bedroom
sparkled just for me after a midnight showing of beer in your fridge.

I long to drink total shit with you
but now it's a joke, an entirely too difficult and realistic one to take,
as adults must despise their passion for the significant bits of a soulless life.

All of those wild horses I thought I would avoid for you are plastic figurines.