Always

Sorrow

You come from the juxtapose of joy

As I ate words of love

I had been starving for

Felt your surround like a glory

My body opening for the first time in years

To the rain of you and your outstretched us.

That safe place

Didn’t really exist

I had simply been running in diminishing blindfolds

Emptying myself of protest just as, in one glance, you fill me whole

Anything less is biding time before dying

And it’s not good enough! I want to feel FIRE.

I am

I said into darkness

A strange person

I spent my youth

Acting multiple roles

Watching the stage from ceilings

And words? You have none, I have plenty

But they mean nothing

The purity of your act

Holding my chin and neck

As only one who owns my heart

Tells me more than any soliloquy.

I am a writer

Who doesn’t believe in detail

I’ve had the most fantastic actors

And I’ve seen through them all

But your raw silent search

Slams me with its reality

And I open and open and open

Crying out my betrayal and my hurt

Your fingers beneath my arching

The feel of you, deep in my journey.

Like a wild wind

I pull hard on you

Because I cannot have enough

I want you to live inside me

Like a flower touching my soul, blooms in darkness

Our fingers interlaced

Things I’ll never be able to say.

I smell home in your neck

I touch pain against bliss

And collapse on the other side

Where all meaning resides and you …

You are my all

I want to stay here

Gathered into you and afraid

Because when you feel

You always walk the edge of a blade

Sharp and unknown.

I cannot say anything

But the feel of you against me, is my only sense

I am driven

Like sea is drawn magnetically, every morning

Thundering against shore or stone

Grieving its former peace momentarily

Before losing in the din and rage of passion

All ordinary sense, replaced with certainty.

I am unable to exist without

The burn of following

I follow you

As we are shadows separate and together

Watching me watching you, merge and turn like slivers of ink

Until one, until none

Indivisible we begin over

Unweaving what was you from my depths

Incomplete now

Stay

Stay

Stay please

Always.

Stigmata

 

The day they pricked paint into her back

permanent and violet

she grew a lotus mandala

lending a little stigmata wisdom

to the thin bones of her grow

for she didn’t know that year

whether to follow sharp train tracks and disappear

into the woods not to be discovered

or walk into winter blizzard

feeling her way through to

imposing red bricked hospital

sagging against its frame like

an auburn flame caught in globe

shaken from foothold

placing her wet gloves on chaffing radiator

tell the patient man behind his mahogany desk

littered with prescriptives for disease of the mind

I am not well I am not well I am not well

you must take me from my freedom and tie me up

in a satin bow atop a new gift of hope

somewhere I cannot think or pass

in my mouth the marble and coinage

of my jailer

 

if she had let herself fall then

with his regard whiskering her lament

and plummet like a fire consumed comet

for the first time without control just

the ember of her flaming skirt searing

a series of interrupted tap dances

spanning shortened  life

in the direction of diminishing

sticky mouthfuls of sweet jam taken in dark

tap tap tap tap

braille, wittled cane, white and wooden

hers was the fear of generations

her grandmother, her grandfather

laid to rest in sweet meadow of

Mont-Ventoux, beyond lavender fields

where their metallurgic table of elements

could rest from unquenched desire to end

take your medicine

euthanize the unrest

let the sleep of the dead

usher silence in prayer robe

when he died

holding his dry paintbrush

when she died

clutching her wet scripture

when their loss mixed in formula

writing her DNA prophecy

she learned to lace up her unease

absenting breath needing not to breathe

not today doctor

not ever

these houses for the poor of heart

medicated, inviscerated, shuffle in

do not come out

 

she left her gloves on the radiator

followed her tracks back through virgin snow

easier when you cannot really see where you go

somehow standing amidst the roar

sea on dry land, oceans in desert flowers

it might take defying your legacy to survive

it might take not wishing to be the next pin to escape

bowled over by shared cross-stitched disease

even the empty

even the weak

 

she got a tattoo of a lotus

on the small of her back

where men had whispered hot and slow

you are slender like a branch

I want to bend you in two as green willow

will not snap

supple in bow, play me never

this girl has forged her symphony war

out of rising in morning, ready to give up

she survived percolating tendency

and the ones who thought her lean

pressing her against shiny coffee tables

unbuckling their murmuring distaste

for respect

thinking her a orfice, a receptacle, alabaster secret

and not a girl capable of swallowing fire

 

they did not believe in signs and wonders

nor warriors who wear no armor

she stands in her diluted ink

she is the beginning, the circular, the ending

of ways we are forced to be

a stain lies on her skin

it feels like an angels imprint

lending courage for the quiet

of soul, who gathers the leftovers

surviving beyond her welt

she is merciful to the meek

as a storm gathering in force, swells against

shore, building momentum

turning the raw belly of sky

monochrome