Auto pilot

The day your father died

the day the towers burned

the day she found out she had a tumor

I was doing something irrelevant

caught on auto pilot

like the time the door bell rang and

the pizza man handed over a bag

how did you think a bag could contain a large box?

you said as you ran after him shouting

you gave us the wrong order!

but he sped away on his small red bike

because he too was on auto pilot

and we dreamers who

find reality too hard

yet strive to know

we are often and regrettably lost

choosing puzzles over clarification

wandering the halls of the VA

in search of meaning

watching ruinous faces lose their facades

 

but when you had your first seizure

in the toilets and everyone began

to scream

I recalled my cousin seizing in the field

full of pollen and dragon flies

and held your head firm like a babe

baptized in a steam

in that moment I was not

a child of pretend and play

but an adult seeing the heart monitors of the world

bleeping to wake

the sleeper in me

who does not pretend to know

the journey in you

 

but when I lift my head from

distraction and sound

clear my mind and look around

then in the reflecting glass of true response

I can be as much as possible

the owner of my walk

thinking not of purchase and power

but the small mercies

we often over look

You are not a girl anymore

Girl you are not a girl anymore

you are a woman

woman you are reviled and judged

for being a woman

when you were a girl it was suffice to

have a nice pair of legs and a pretty mouth

do you recall how often you were asked to ‘cheer up and smile love’

when all you were doing was trying to grow-up and be serious?

how men would do your bidding because of your WonderBra and not the sense of your words

now you are a woman

you will inherit

inequality

double-standards

and not be able to find clothes that feel right in stores not meant for your body

because nothing is going to come easy anymore and still

as you sit there in your curves and your burgeoning skin

feeling the surround of yourself lapping at the corners

you will inherit also

the voice of your round bellied ancestors

who have come ringing through time and again

been judged, poked, prodded or worse, flat out ignored

seen how silver haired men get all the fuss like carefully licked jewels

whilst a woman of substance is

lost lost lost

behind the mad din and snuff of youth

for youth it seems needs a distinguished father of any age

but does not require

a mother

a grandmother

a female sage

for women are judged upon their reproductive abilities and

the years they have lived beneath the moon listening to the shore

if too few, they are deemed unintelligent

too many and nobody wants to hear

for women are judged upon

scales created long before

an even playing field was won

if it has, if it has yet

for women it is easier to become lost after the lights have grown less hot

held to a higher standard than the eternal covet of men

who are picked up and dusted off by many worshipful female hands

too eager to say ‘there, there, I will help you, poor thing’

who shall help then, the woman?

Not her own kind, surely, nor men who adore only youngest vintage

Who shall see her? When she is grown and perhaps does not accept her allotted place

or wish to remain invisible or grow old with pressurized grace

who shall listen when she wants to be heard at any age?

or the desires of her are beyond the sanctioned pail

or her damp passion which does not flip and flop and require Viagra

a woman if she is loved

is ten-fold her maiden self

for the wefts and the welts are earned and learned and now they represent

a splendid coat of multicolor

she wears with pride and sometimes regret

but more often silver wisdom and the softening yet

of her edges into rounded corners and eventually

a supple circle come full

the world may dominate her discourse

the youth may clamor for their right to change the channel

she may slip quietly through the bridled noise

with strong thick womanly thighs

and as men chase their tail and young women cast a gaze that seems to say

who the HELL do you think you are, old lady?

woman, you do not bat your eyes or rise to those absurdities left behind

for she is the wake of day and dusted sleep of night

cradling the future in her all-mighty grip

she learns from being kicked

to stand she must let go of the girl within and be

a woman of our time

casting her pearly net wide as she

swallows the sea and sighs

letting the tide tumble out with her exhaled breath

aaahhh yes

aaahhh yes

Intoxicate

I fell hard with relief

for being desired after so long, felt like finding water in a desert

I lost my sense

Captured in your confident swagger

The Butch pretension, drove me to my knees

The strength of your arms and thighs

How you led and pulled my chair, touching me briefly with possession

Beneath you, listening to little cries as you feel your way

Tell me is it wrong to want, the security or promise?

From years of being a shadow I was intoxicate by your

Certain stroke

As if you knew me as an instrument of your creating

Pressed beneath you, struck by lightning

A woman is never more beautiful than when she is strong and knows what she wants

You wanted me and I longed for your deep kiss awakening me from obscurity

It is a form of madness and when removed the wound is long to heal

Nothing that comes to pass changes the stamp on my soul

Some emotions are as real

As the hand you feel

Clutching your heart

Certain and hard

You were a passing car in the rain, headlights making patterns on oil and tarmac

Leave sensitivity for the empath, it’s not my nature to wring my hands

Over short lived affairs or hungry people who try

To bleed dry and fill themselves, for they are so empty, even the wind can rattle their bones

If I were ever heartbroken it was as a child, not lying next to you

Watching our trajectories turn and mouth the words without emotion

Too many

What do father’s say

To their knock-knee daughters

Not able to sit on their lap and learn to shave

Their distant allegory

A return of themselves in female form

What would they?

A daughter born

Looks up at he who holds the world

Why do men let me drown Daddy?

Her eyes speak of hurt and scorn

Her belly wasted and torn

Why do they tell me I am no good for?

He who reaches

Into ether

Does not know the words for his daughter’s heart

He wants to break the necks of any who hurt her

But there are just

Too many

Mercy

Answer me

Please

Climb out of impossible and

Dipping quill, write backwards in time

Angling mirrors to lipread

Da Vinci’s reflected scrawl

tell us the unravel to the mystery

Where in this hour should we go?

When they let you down slow

Removing fantasy, layer by layer

Are you there?

On the emptied pier, bare of hope

Dour endings posted like nails in my palm

Is that you? Cresting wave in falling darkness

Light, just a slip of a girl spilling over her dress

It is cream and carries each stain like a mast

Are you there?

Crunching underfoot, doubt that goodness is lost

For you, with your thin shadow, still manage to

Fill me with light

A radiant being, rarefied

How often to find, one whose mission isn’t self

But the betterment of others

You, who don’t even know your worth

If you did, you would hiccup and grow embarrassed

It is not your need to be praised, you are a child of mercy

Your pleasure is in lending kindness, to mend the scold

For this world can be so lonely, and you

Are a house to come in from, settling cold.

 

Faulty thinking

By default

I lay in your bed as you

Stared in the mirror at your golden halo

By default

You reminded me how lucky I was to be

Among the rarefied few

Thank you, thank you

By default

You had this idea you were going to swallow the world

With your music and your songs and your tendency

To gloat

By default

nobody who was ordinary and not scraping grateful

would satisfy your feeling you were owed everything

Weren’t you?

By default

Why didn’t I

Hold a wire to your neck

And ask you icily

How you came to be so full of shit?

Possession

Reveal

Our quaking skin

Submerge the infernal din

Riot of juicy hominids

Purple iris, yellow bud within

For a forest can yield

More I have found

In any art gallery

In manic city vault

Or speakers corner

Where

Scabbing over

The flatulent masses

Thinking their somulant gravy heads

Notable

Wallow in rhetoric and

The absence of things beautiful

Where O where

In dell, in valley, cliff and crag

Scattered like spell

Forever stretches infinite

Sleek as a seal

Catching waves coiling surge

Magic possesses quiet urge

Rune

They ran through markets

elms strung with sari’s

bedecked with jewels and

girls kenning their heads

babes at their breast

growing crowns of red and indigo

she pressed into my palm

the spell of her rune

smelling of Finnish water stone

rubbed over and over beneath time

leaves still containing their flung pigment

where slippered feet ran and picked them

casting their glass throng to glory

she has the shiny hair of a child and

cheeks full for her pressed size

she who is gone and now returned

talking in other languages with Irish accent

she who manifests and disappears and is reborn

doesn’t look large enough to give birth

or sing at the top of a road the song of her

we were

separated by water and fear and longing

broken in sea, put back together by current

I was always swimming in her direction and the

light tread of her spring

she is a carnival of paper-cut outs

wearing scarlet hose and rings on her toes

yet upward / yet down in earth where

roots inform her choices as well as ancestor

she is of me and I

am stranger and intimate

familiarity is a rubbed sleeve on silver

her thin knees beneath duvet

twitching dreams caught in muslin

tents in high wind holding their claim

sheared gravity, she is lifted from her sail

and through the tarot of her eyes

I see each snapshot and Rorschach blot

when they told us friendship will expire

they did not know

the language of ink and how

it leaves itself

swirling for paper

on which to draw

us

The song of rape

It took one finger to break into her

one finger to make her feel violated and dirty

two to make her scream

the boys laughed afterward mockingly

why you so upset girl? we didn’t deflower you

you should thank us bitch

or maybe we should just do what we came here to do

they pinned her down, her tights stretched between her legs

like her fractured hymen

she saw the beginning of tears and inside felt

the raw and hurt center cry out

don’t come back don’t ever come back

they were only eleven years old

lying on the floor in the outside toilets

staring at the stars hardly there because of all the smog

her lungs filled with hurt

they were her friends

until they became rabid dogs

she didn’t know what switched the switch or why

they felt she was there to poke and prod

they were too small and she was too small and everything about it

was premature

which meant

waiting until it happened again

she wasn’t a victim but some things reoccur

as if on some awful cycle

sometimes she’d shudder thinking about

their little hard cocks

trying to pry their way in

the way it felt to be hurt like that

with unwashed fingers scrabbling and opening

the parts of her nobody should

she could visualize the cement beneath her

the smell of urinals and their unwashed genitals

if they had known enough to put them in her mouth

they would have

thankful for small mercies she knew

kids these days wouldn’t be so innocent

they see porn before they know how to spell

pornography

what ideas they must get and how

many bad things go on behind closed doors

or even ones held shut by little boys

seeking to immitate older brothers

she would have impaled them with

her rage if she wasn’t so ashamed

so she said absolutely nothing to anyone

least of all the teachers who would have

called her a slut who asked for it

even at eleven years old.

***

When she reached fourteen

the Golem returned

held her down, muffled her mouth

stuck it in like a needle threading through skin

her scream pierced every limb

and nobody heard

nobody wondered why

she wasn’t home for dinner

her plate was left in the fridge

she was emptied of the last piece

of her soul

left gasping where her privacy had been

legs spread and men hustling in

one after the other took their turn

after all wasn’t it a party? Make it count!

her face closed off and remote like she was dead

some of them were small and bony

their penises hardly large enough to feel

between the soreness and the swelling

others bore into her like a metalic truck

thrusting her back onto her thin tail bone

hands around her neck

fingers pinching her nipples and breasts

they filled her with a disgusting smell

she was never going to be whole again

or clean

and when it was over, it had just begun

face after face, cock after cock

a tape on repeat of her worst nightmare

they came, they came and they went

the only evidence there staining the bed

and her rubbery legs unable to flee

tied and sodomized like a string of beads

she flew out of her crumpled body

a bird of wing and feather only

she saw someone she almost recognized

torn and ribboned and splayed

a garish doll, a parody, a destroyed shape

someone she was no longer

as she lifted, higher and higher, beyond that point

no pain anymore just the thick blush of shame

hidden in plumage

she felt nothing but

a choking word on her tongue

WRONG

WRONG

WRONG

her child’s form

her hardly grown self

the silence of nothing

then it did not matter

what time she wasn’t coming home

all the world was quiet now

movement had stilled

the door was shut

nobody knocked

nobody unbuttoned their pants

and sank to their knees

lifting her up for one more final

free fuck

as if she were no more than a hole

not a human

not a worthy soul

immitation the greatest form of flattery

is not

she was cold now to the touch

her spirit somewhere in the stars

it took one finger to break into her

and a record set on repeat playing

over and over until it scratched

and could not play

anymore

the song of rape.

For all the survivors whose voices are quashed.