Trying out her wings

Pain killers did not play a part in my death

You

Featured, light fizuring definition, as star

You captured my appetite in a jar

Left it to pickle sour

We dissected my heart and ate slivers

Outside, like a fevered tongue

Merrymakers ran and dragged

Confetti and plastic cups of eels

Young girls with birthing stretch marks, shaking double chins

If they had three lifetimes it would still not be enough

To celebrate their unfolding life of cards

Queen of Hearts, she sat watching oragami crowds

Easier to be cloud cover, sensing rain in the air

The quiet of needing to say nothing, emptied of small talk

She didn’t need to ever attend a party again

That was another version of her out there in time

Straining to be a light bulb

Her long dangling line

Fishing for fragments of who she had been

How did a wizz, bang, bang, pop, crack, fizzle girl

Turn into a wig combing mannequin?

From dancing drizzled with pink champagne, the uppers in her blood churning red

To planting rows of onions and dragonflies, obscured by garden net

Oh she would

Knit herself a ship

Sailing on and on

Paint herself a sea

Rounding over water with butter knife

A transfer from disco ball, to stay and burrow in

Flying overhead, a stray kite, looping the void

Things of nonsense and flight, once she was weightless, then heavy with seed

When it spilt like a tearing river, a part of her she no longer needed

Tore away, a feeble arc of motion, the arrythmia of nameless distress

Catching the air, lifting, cavorting above caucophany

Trying out her wings

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Nightshade

Oh mama

There are days

I am bent double

The stuffing of me kicked quite free

One side is fear that feels like unyielding felt, thick in my dry, slack mouth

Making me the puppet I never was, when good and whole

So is sickness for the soul

A sour well with brackish water and no yield

I long to be your child and retrace in time to your arms

Fantasies that never were, become, our lullaby

A palpable longing for comfort

Nourishment

To be saved against invisible foe

No

I did not invite you, fever dream

No

I did not beckon you visit me and stay, pinning my anxiety as colinder

Cast as we are, sluggish on fortunes wheel

Like chance, we ebb and flow

Moths without hardy wings

I desired wellness 

and while the summer river ran 

I believed it would never turn

Against me in undertow

Disease is a glutted wretch

A terrible betrayal

A war

You stand in rags fighting until your last

We all do 

But when the bees come and honey is glitter in the trees 

We forget our fear of unseen things

Believe ourselves immortal or at least

The sleek otter who can hold his breath

Longer than sense and her confine

For such a time I rested

Against this calm

Taking for granted what I did not own

And as winter will

Reveal herself bare and merciless

Soon those hours of peace lay behind me

Damp with regret and burned yet

To leave plumes of green smoke

Evoking Gods 

Who may be senseless to our call

For the comfort of our childhood

Curled inside a place

As yet unborn

Do not

Let me stay in this cold fear

Or stand alone 

With its frozen clasp about my heart

Squeezing hope til nothing pumps

But the ice of terror 

I am 

Just born

To this strange chill

The waking before dawn of prescient worry

Will I be well? Will I ever be without pain?

Oh mercy and her ink, clouding fortelling

The whine of our need to know, what Fates only jest

My gut is silent and 

Nothing but the fast snare of my pulse

Can be heard over lamment

I am

A statue of fear

Thinking back

To the Happy Prince

He felt pain

Of others

Taking the jewels that were his eyes

Sacrifice I do not have

A lesson

To think and care as we suffer

Of others and their

Equal walk 

In nightshade

Taking my time to die

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I pretend you are there

when the world shows its cold belly

when loved ones become enemy

I reach for your solace in need

forgetful when happy, without equal reason

ill prepared for falling we climb as Icarus, nearer to sun

without parachutes too often startled into early grave

those who do not command their outcome

I believed you when you said I am safe within your arms

this world of ours inviolate

but they were just words

like this is just water mixed with blood and wine

spotting the clean sheets in which I lie

taking my time to die

now that I am alone

just one more soul who cannot

bear the taste of this world without

you