i expect no valentine’s, i expect no promises. i’ve broken every one i have ever made, i’ve been broken down into unrecognizable parts. i sift through joints and fissures, i misalign and fail. nothing fits. i no longer fit. i am trying, i am still irrevocably broken, off set, a juxtaposition of betrayal, of something once human, once tender. i am hysteria and rage, i am the drowning thing out of the sea and gasping for relief. i’ve run out of denials, i draw strength from losing time, i draw strength from my time being short. i expect no valentine’s, i expect vengeance, i am pleading to be judged and rendered.
Monthly Archives: February 2008
surface skin
I’m dead on the surface but I’m screaming underneath. – Coldplay, Amsterdam
and i wake out of storms to find the surface tension of your skin taut along the palm of my hand the beat of drum whose rhythm i ignored because i countered it with my own the echo space that mimics silence but explodes into grace
doing this to hide
she asks, are you doing this
are you doing this to hide her? and i said
no, no more her, of her, hiding her, i am not
i’m no longer hiding, hide me here
and i point to between her legs, i point
to the soft part of her neck where the skin plies
off the bone of her skull and i kiss her, hide me, i said
i’m doing this for you to keep me hidden
stage fright
you step forward, the spotlight finds you. glare pitch white, your skin pales, the crowd mutters to itself whispers of disbelief, of mocking. you gaze over stage right. he is there, waiting for the role you cannot suspend the crowd’s disbelief that you are him. she brushes past him, joins you on stage. another light, harsher, makes her red lips black. the crowd finally falls silent. you take her hand, place the other slightly above her hip. the pianist starts a tune, you begin.
garbage of the poor
how do poor people produce so much garbage?
dream sleep daughter
and in my sleep i try to toss and turn but my daughter claws onto me desperately and i fall back into exhaustion and i want to be that edge of warmth that gives her comfort and i want her to be the anchor that keeps me steady the dream that denies all the monster that i’ve become
pawing trace
the phantom limb traces over her cheek. he traces over her lips. the ghost, the echo, the wind pushes against the pane, rattles the door. she turns over and draw the sheets around her, buries herself. he feel the phantom limb touch his arm as he moves out of each room. how useless that extra limb. the house moves through the night and the moon stops it cold. outside a cat huddles behind a tire, paws a leaf trapped beneath the tread.
bystander
I lack the eloquence to untwine out of bounds and unmarred but find myself instead with rope burns and chaffed lips, splits in the skin between fingers and the delusion that I had seen her between clouds bursting into weeping grey sheets of rain.
I inhale ravenously a cigarette drenched in gasoline.
the stealing difference
there’s stealing, the shape of an echo, the mimic of a stance, the yearning to ascend, transcend, that’s pleasing, amiable, soft on the eye because it’s a certain kind of nostalgia, an homage built out of respect and love that serves as a springboard for something different.
then there’s outright thievery, the stabbing in the dark, the punch in the face while the other hand tears away the chain, the foot on the neck as two hands yank out the solitary gold tooth, a mean, vicious taking that screams in your face, nothing can ever be yours.
all things i took i tried to give back somewhere else, someone else, at any given point in time. everything taken from me was always blindsided and in the dark.
chewing on knuckles
the compression of that
slow thing into a snowball
fist of hate and rage from something
beautiful like the shiny points
a fork makes plunged deep into the belly
of forgetting. i had said once
in the beginning, i know
how to disappear,
and the curb stretches even further
away from reaching it. i chew
my knuckles to keep them
from breaking