blue black hours

you exhaust me

with your perpetual need

you who is I, I who is me

this hungering for solace

rubbed like frankincense

on pulse points

used to be said, a woman’s evocation

was found in the thread of her blood

tasting her, found, a salt and an admonishment

for knowing mystery is not permitted

you exhaust me

with your perpetual need

you who is I, I who is me

attempting free fall, finding balance in

tender pretend, the chime and rounding of days

a music without orchestra, still she sings

heal me from the want

expunge that holy desire for more

give me a reflecting glass

that I might climb through

touch my limbs as they break into fire sticks

combusting in torrent, the woman, the girl

the crone

she sits with sun on her face

careless of time

she has put aside her duty

listening instead

to the song of a bird

whose feathers remind her

of blue black hours

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In search of wonder

nobody reads in between the lines

or maybe everyone does

the day she removes her wig and stands

bare skulled for all to see the shroud of mud

her halo, her halo, he is four feet under, he is

not still, neither she, neither we

the ancestors who

fallow the earth, when heaven is closed

from their potential remains, beauty emerges

like a song setting the vibration in your pores

a string instrument without music

pushing back to the day before you

realized you were weeping uncontrolably

as you cycled along overgrown tow path

in search of blackberries, to stain the urge

a badger or a fox would do

something with color and freedom in its movement

take me, take me, I am not content or part

of this stifled world of pretend

I cannot even stitch straight

I see in the glassy eyes of the stuffed, pressed

hotly behind restraining glass, their silent

screaming visage

please let me become part of your make believe

I would live as Mr Fox did, beneath the earth

and brew my cups of magic there

as the irregularity of goodness atests

there is nothing worth waiting up all night for

not now you are broken, not now they are all

left, their footprints ash inside my mouth, a

late form of christening in Winter’s lament.

I miss you, the people whose faces I knew, part of me

part of nothing anymore, they are the last of my kind

what kind is that? When all was pinching and no more intact?

I am broken in ways, mosaic cannot even repair

there are chinks in my armor so raw, unpolished, without spit

sufficient to wipe the dread

they weep blood before I know they are there

no oil, nor prayer can save , no benediction

nor virgin kneeling in fecund earth with all the days

of her life ahead like fresh laundered sheets ready

for their slaying

those with eyes to the sky

they see not gods, I fear

but the winged parallel of our loss of mercy.

I am tired before I am awake

my eyes open to the sound of water

drowning is like the advent, it proceeds over a series of

days, as we attempt survival, urging ourselves to dress, button by

button, the tender details, crashing like hungry waves

against recalcient rock, what will bleed when it

is devoured? What will remain whole in spite?

Remembering your touch, electricity galvanizing

withered skin to longing, growing restless beneath

layers, your reach of me, the place no one finds

I dreamed of you, leaning over, a painting in motion,

your small hand

tethering me to the furnace of your eyes, a language

I couldn’t hold faith in, Je voulais tellement te croire

who is to say, you do not possess beneath your

candle light skin, the fur of ravenous wolves?

How to sustain faith? The thirsty plant, gaping curtain,

the light that gets through

falling on our faces as we watch dust particles

collect like lovers in ever shining quiet

whilst we grow old with the fatigue of loss,

its shroud a warmth against cold nights alone

thinking of the furvor of youth, its glossy coat

shaking off trouble like a lean legged hooker will

stand straight backed even in snow. Our tempest

for life, an appetite, whetting, scuttling blatently

down deserted roads, the roam of longing,

I tie my hair back, pinch my cheeks redder,

watch the violet play of day and night run

her unwashed glass through my eyes, leaving

a smudge of blood, a tinge of what’s to come,

the descend of love, as it bursts full and redolent

throbbing in our ears, like shells pressed tight

blocking out the stifle, hearing her thinning,

each year, a chink of life, apportioned into past

a transaction of dying in
silhouette, the boy swam

against the tide, his muscles straining, ever deepening

wade of escape, we all

keep to our tea stained hour

the rustling moment they were there and photographed

haltingly and aching behind inherited furniture

their eyes like mine, covered over with

old coin

sent to another realm, behind, stand behind

time and her exquisite fangs

drinking the lost salt of this land

her daughters

her sons

they grow weary of watching

and turning slow like dials

in dusk

their shape sharp

against the ochre

bleed of diminishing

sun

elongating until

their form is

altered ever

more.

The unseen world

At the corner of your mouth, where it curls in gentle distain, a little spiting mirth, lives the unseen world

In your eyes, polished obsidian run through with black onyx, lies the hearth of your internal combustion

As you breathe, I cannot fail to notice the lovely juxtaposition of your bones gleaming beneath apricot skin, as the buttons on your shirt atest, each breath yawning her fitful glimpse

I cannot help but wonder those stored bottles of delight, high upon your shelf, how your nipples would taste, the flowered breath of your heart of palm

And divining central, that pulsing mandala, reaching her fragrance into dreamworld, the color of aubergine and hibiscus bled in winter river as redwood is lost to time

My artichoke girl, wreathed in wild flowers, your body a temple for this supplicant, as light diminishes, your thirsty form grows spectral, a mango tree heavy in fruiting

From within, you glow with the hardy tempest of your nature, a pulsing, feckless creature, nimble in your art of deft possession

If I could starve for want of you, I believe I would. For no moment passes with satisfaction, unless in some way, you exist on its marble periphery

The very yoke of a day is cast by your presence. I could subsist on the rounding detour of your thighs for a hundred sleepless nights

Grow from your slumber the memories of your cries, curled in my ear, my lips, my reincarnation of our slippery motion to capture

When it is cold my hands seek your bright match to kindle animation, climbing from the solace of you, strengthened by remembered, evoked echo of intimacy

A song wound around my ribs as river reeds pull the charmed to their divine drowning and with last sip of air we relinquish control and let go

My love, your eyes bewitch my life blood, kindling the charred rejoinder of hope, a poppet to your sorcerery, emerging from deep forest

When dying comes for me, it’ll be your face I kiss, feverish and familiar, your preternatural smile haunting my passage, faithful ghost, mine

For some there is no method of separation, we are bound in crushed roses to one

In this place. In each other. A languid, yawning soft space between, the unseen world.

Never look back

Amidst worry, distraction, hunger, noise,

there is the brand, the scorch of you

sealing me in wax

pressing me to Florentine paper

sending me by leathered mail

with a longing as woven

as pulp that becomes a letter

writing out felted words

my throat cannot swallow.

The world is burning, in once-removed chaos

I find an unsteady peace, imagining us.

Everything is flammable, people smite each other

with little tools and heavy words

we forget our humanity often

we are caught with our pants down

jacking off to lies & hate in little jars

sometimes it seems the world would fair

better without our penchant for harm

but we subsist, in fragments, shards, pieces

of goodness separated and flung apart.

I should be considering the state of the planet

why it’s searing in October, why people

shoot someone for the color of their skin, how

evil can stand in White Houses and other

necessary questions …

but for this cupped moment, I am idle in my desire to save

not a lack of caring, but rather

the need to step outside the fray and

stand in the rain with you .

The rain here is warm, before we met

I did not know rain could be warm

I lived in a concrete trap with sad faced

buildings that many would give their eye

teeth for and I wished passionately, to escape

from

there was no softness in the city of my birth

no reduction of clamor

we spun like dervish on a wheel

forgetful of what mattered in the perpetual lean

to survive

I am here with you now, although

we are often not together, in my etched soul

you hold me every night and the candle

I placed in my window does not go out

for it burns eternal.

A song will reduce me to tears, driving wet

cheeked and aching for your touch, the surround

of your movement against me, a kiss that consumes

my cold center, turns me to the moon

shining and nude.

We are shimmering fish beneath dark water, finding our way

with our mouths, our fingers, the brail of need

containing sea pearls ready to sacrifice their shell

only you can lift me away from

the sorrows of the world and our many

pitted attempts to remedy what seems to be

our nature

only you can run yourself down my stomach

and opening me like a fan, find within, my

raw chorus

only you, with your pitch eyes and raven heart

can cause me to tumble, weightless over white cliffs

into our own private film

playing the days of our lives, for an empty house

the tick of our time, slowing now.

I should clean my teeth, brush my hair, push my

cuticles back and cross my legs in public, but for

the need to wear no hose, and driving 70mph down

empty streets, push you into me, finding

piano keys beneath our lilting surface.

By day I am a plain-faced woman with

ill-fitting bra and the marks of time sponged

on my face like imprints from a wild cat

who walked over me once, twice, forever

as you pull me from the world with your

electricity and I urge you

implore

to not

to never

look back.

The sum of us

Good Girls don’t write about sex

Overtly

They disguise their want in paralipsis

And allegory

Hoping the one they wrote it for

Reads in between watery lines

Just as we think we know and we don’t know

How to play a violin to life

What specific string to rub dulce, with bow and how?

To produce the exact sound

Of heaven

For we rely on machines purchased

In stores that wrap them in paper and

Blush behind their make-up

To soften the blow of loneliness

They even offer them in pink with ears.

I decided long ago to

Forgo batteries and think of you instead

With my flesh and my bones

Nothing more but those images in my head

Of you lying back unclothed

Ready for feasting

I’m long past apologizing

For my need at midday to think

About sex

Women do it too

Maybe not in the office bathroom with a magazine

Or tiny screen zooming in

But quieter, and softer, lying in the bath

Lights out, candles giving off waxy

Myth

The world is changed outside and we

No longer obey fluorescent lights

I dim ours and the moon in turn

Shies from long curtains

In dusk I see the curves of you

Reminding me, as if I needed reminder

Of why I think of you all the long day

And how and in what ways

For I don’t believe there will be a time

I’ll stop boiling my blood in imagining

And the moment we come together

Is ever more for waiting

It seems at times I wait, more than I actually find

Perhaps the rejoinder of fantasy is

We can inhabit it more, than what lies real

Yet as you undress, I know

Nothing I can conjure up, can compete

With the real feel of your skin against mine

The human touch of our hands enjoined

I may be called creative, but I could never

Describe those pleasured hours well

We are it seems, beyond all living illustration

For beauty when it is actual

Is not the plastic doll on the shelf

Nor her vibrating friend, who promises

To get you off so easily.

Some things are worth waiting for

Some people are necessary, chasing eternal

For even one night with you, would suffice

Against a hundred with someone else

I cannot replace what you do to my heart

Every time I see you turn a corner

And smile that crooked smile of yours

Eyes glinting, a little cocked half walk, half run

We meet in our dreams

We stay together when apart

It is the sum of us

We add up

Even as everything else

Does not

just out of reach

Even as I tie my shoes,

the distraction in my chest feels like you

has your taste on my lips, wetted with

unspoken remonstration

time can pass so fast, until years are bundled into telegraphs

yellowing with their swollen journey

still so few stand out, make themselves remarkable

just by their bloodied being

those who shine, one in a thousand, more, tops of heads

in a crowd, who gets the crown?

With everyone chiming for attention, I give it to you

even as you do not ask , such is my cinema of devotion

watching the replay in my mind, every turn

lifted wrists, precious movement, chiseled in memory

if you asked me I’d know exactly how you felt

even without touching, the xylophone of your small ribs

for I have spent hours sculpting your shape

these silhouettes and textures known by one

who watches ever observant, silent in her study of years

the first time, then now

landscapes apart, still, as if time has

claimed you a piece of her, nobody else

has a part, they are forgotten on periphery

ordinary to your owning

as long as I continue not to speak aloud

I can pretend it’s real

observing you, as you might a

longed for thing, just out

of reach

blinded to all else

a rapture without

name

The night I went out without shoes on

Wasn’t it a miracle?

Neither of us died trying to get to the meeting place

all the lights in the world seemed out that night

I had only known how to drive a few months

you were an old hat who routinely broke laws

with bottles wedged between your legs, a

cigarette burning ash down your fingers

there had always been a desire in me

for brokenness, as if I recognized in those

souls, something in myself

or a freedom in people who abandoned ettiquette

and discarding it, became suddenly free

I liked the wild, I liked women with untamed eyes

and dirty minds

the moon was full that night and we watched owls

gather themselves in flight and swoop

cloudy restaurant lights flickering in and out on the side

of the empty high way

I had watched films about a life like this

I said to you, films like Gas Food Lodgings or Paris Texas

where the greatest landscape was the tarmac

and the wide abundant merciless sky

where people sheltered in shadow and night creatures

crawled unseen and women met by closed restaurants

the flicker of their 24 hour advertising, sizzling against blackness

you were strange looking as if you had

deliberately tried to destroy yourself and I

forgot to wear shoes, my feet hot against still baked

soil, biting fiends flying in humid air, thick with ‘unspoken

entreaties

I wanted you to slam me there and then against

the unresisting brake of my car

leaving a bruise the size of texas clouds

I wanted to break apart like rocks with gem stones

inside, find something in both of us

bigger than the sky, deeper than weary darkness

but I was too young then and fear wrapped herself

like a blanket of stars and pulled me back

into the world, into doing what is right, into being careful

and sitting up straight when you eat at the table

all these years later, I still think

if we had set the car on automatic and just ridden

away

down that empty highway, into hushed, blooming night

we might have found the part of us

still lacking

every day we wake up

wash our face, comb our hair

and look too long in the mirror

searching for the lost parts

of our dark dreams

Heed

I resent

No, I am angry

It is my regret that

You steal my thoughts

every day

even as you do not really

exist

damn

you.

Is it my wield to wake and smell the coming

of Autumn, her combed wild intruding on Summer’s

last heady retreat

and with her, all the memories of us

tumbling like leaves of every color.

You are a shade of me I cannot forget, nor

am I able to extricate your taste from my soul

as if you were the darkest liquor and I, the thirsting

sinner.

We do not know one another, yet in this russet world

where people step out with reddened cheeks and think of

night as a place to venture deep and become lost in

the reflecting faces of glasses brought together

I recognize in you, someone I need.

It is foolish then, that you will never know this,

as time reveals a betrayal, thick in coming like smoke

from a burned pyre

I see you there, in the crowd of onlookers, your

shoulders thin in a cardigan, eyes dark against

flames, a smile on your face as if

without my saying you knew

it was my heart that burned with longing

and your hands

putting out the fire

with the coldness

of disregard.

You steal my thoughts every day

as if, possessed of confidence that all should

fall at your knees, you hold the world and its

caprices in your little flowering hand

sometimes I want to ask; How did you become

so fat on yourself? Who gave you that belief

you were worthy? And bitterness might add;

I am better than this, better than you,

not someone used to, or wanting to remain

subject. Inhaling your sugar pill …

Instead I say nothing and spells

boil off like alcohol leaving nothing but

clear water, I plunge into and try to

forget the nagging impulse to find ways of altering

your hooded intractability.

I live in the crossword puzzle of your

eyes, the bewitchment of your fruiting mouth

as you open your lips and speak, drowned

out by time and distance

I think nevertheless

I hear.

You steal my thoughts

every day

I once wore self-belief like a rosary

around my wrists and counted every

subject. You took on the role as if

those clothes had been yours all

along and I had been carved from

the wood of your ancestors tree

some type of mango tree or

something as bright and hungering

as your skin when sunlight bathes

your full cheeks and I forget how

to swallow. Our fates are written

in secret alcoves we may never find

the chapter, until it is upon us and

falling in line, we play out our part

in this incantation you master me

because you feel nothing and no

words I possess will fill that

empty place and fetch from it

an urge to dive with me

into the wet of my angry tears

perhaps this is karma

it could however,

be just, a passing cruelty

like so many other things

forgotten by those, who do not stop

long enough, to

pay heed.

This dance is for the dead

Would that you would stay

would that you were ever mine

would that you knew how

you strip and stir those tender passions

sterile of any other life

I am blackened with desire for you

I am white with inordinate stifle

see the end of the bottle how it glistens?

With promise and her velvet touch she

summons,

turn to me, burn with me, set me alight

leave me wrecked on your shore, blistering

this is why I breathe, to end in your gaze

this is why I ache, to imagine just a glance

this is why I die, to lose you without ever

having

there’s the rest and there’s one girl

she’s a woman, she’s rage, she’s not gentle

she can’t be caged or capitulated

the stroke of her fingers on metal

she’s tearing you up with her untouchable ways

ruining others, for they seem tame

comparison is the enemy of the weak

she laughs at your charade, your belief

she’ll ever want a thing from you, nothing

further could be true, she’s so far removed

reach for her, she’ll bite you in half

try to be tender, she’ll laugh in your face

howling another’s name just for sport

indifference is her game, she’ll toss you

aside before she’s arrived with your petty

longings and your wounded heart

she’s little and she’s huge, she’s magnification

and cruelty and searing everlasting beauty

I imagine lying next to her and it’s a joke

the nearest I could get would be a parallel universe

made of pins and needles, volcanoes and tsunami

your beauty is a storm of urges unspent

my secrets just flowers of passion unsung

feeling your way in the dark is your favorite dance

you’re roaring in your sleep and breaking the sound barrier

you compete for breakfast and throw the weak over

for the sharks

there’s nothing between us except everything

even if I were not myself, I could not be close to you

you abhor connection, you loathe obsession

fearless you parody their love of you

with mocking abandon like a ballerina

needing no shoes

you write songs with the pen of a bloody mad woman

you tattoo desire into my chest with sharp knives

thrown from a mountain

all the while not knowing what you do

for I do not exist and neither does time

it can harp and beat for a hundred years and I wouldn’t run out

of want, just the means, just the methods

just one time, just in a dream, just fantasize

shut your eyes, turn off the light, stand still, run

your voice over broken connection

nimble fingers strumming a line

from another time, one where you give me

one moment, I stand behind you, watching

the shape of your conquer

chaos in the surge of everything

anger, rage, beauty, madness

you can move someone without touching

you can devastate someone without speaking

no injury and it hurts worse than breaking

egotism in a glass vase to be shattered

where we go, nobody will know

children of night, children of satiation

I heard you sing in the past when I didn’t know

names and places, people and feelings

I was a dead thing dancing to numb haunt

you stepped toward me and I saw you

a dervish in halo, a god within a devil

nothing else, the crowd cleared, it was only you

so sure, so dark eyed, with your torture

curling me around your laugh like a rocket

I burned and drank it down and the flames

made me golden

plug me in, I spin on electric want without power

you stop and start, you shout, you demand

you scream at the complacency and kick the rulers

I am a dead star above your night, I am

the person you were before you were born

I inhabit your meaning like a false note

there is only nothing and nothing comes with

a voice until you speak

into my freeway, driving at 100 mph on

drowning streets, they cry for your attention, you

giggle in irreverence

no fault of yours the whole world adores

someone who cannot be won, or succumb

to usual rules, to anyone’s need, it’s always been

about you, about you, about you

i’m happy here, stretched on your rack

beginning to enjoy poison and its benefits

for we make aches out of wants and wants

never cut too deep, they die as they are

absorbed into daylight, scars making scars

you are the eternal night you pull me in

I struggle against your tide, you want to drown me

with your sharp loveliness

it’s your control, it’s what you know

you have the bravado of a broken angel

words leave me struck through with arrows

secrets are best left buried

dig me up, let me whisper, I would say

it’s always ever been you

say it once and I drop to my knees

I was told it was wrong to worship

I was told it was wrong to believe in

perfection or need

you open your red mouth

i’m watching, I’m writhing

how are you still moving? Didn’t you

die? Didn’t you stop breathing?

Turning in betrayal, you can

only betray when it matters

nothing matters to girls made of stone

they sing to the siren and the siren

blesses them

this dance is for the dead

desire so long it’s bent double

it hurts to enter the temple

you burn me every time you don’t notice

but that’s your way

that’s who you have always been

untouchable

untouchable

untouchable

 

Unfettered liberate

There’s a place in me

despite it all

where contentment lies

fragile

a guttural home

of solace and loathing both

for joy

not found where others

locate easement and meaning

you will not discover me

spearing a whale or

circumferencing your fattened

demand to chain my needs

for more than this routine of

sorrow.

Indeed it will be likely,

on Tuesday you find me

supping with strangers

libation undulating in my wine

blotting out focus

lighting humor’s wick

on Thursday just as likely

the ledge and its cold

grey slate, quivering beneath

my teetering weight

as I rinse myself beneath falling rain

and the impulse to let go.

This is the clatter of a discontent soul

made such from before recollection

no excuse, no explanation,

sometimes in mendacity

surviving without living, only

able to get that far, past and future

not present tense, as if vaporized

an empty window with no view

the back handed slap

a ruined chemise in your teeth

for whom of us really knows?

How discontent works into the marrow

the trickery of sorrow leaching

satisfaction as silent hemorrhage

I could point to bad habits

reeking of gluttony and a switch of

madness or else

modern world’s awareness

calcifying our retinas with

24/7 neon lights

nudegirlsnudegirlsnudegirls

I peal my sins off one by one

leaning into you with regrets bosom

and suffocate the very spit from your lip

until you are blue and unmoving adjective

like my fucking heart.

Maybe it is the torrent of rejections

piled like sawed off limbs

miniaturized in pill boxes

for Ash Wednesday’s cross

I may expect too much out of poor, dear life

rickety wooden hope almost burnt to a char

but what fancy isn’t ecstatic joy?

Indulge me, or write me off as

vagabond hedonist, but never

was a math class or week sitting at

office desk, an ounce the pleasured

meaning found between your oiled legs

and that as they say

is the naked truth.

you can condemn me a coarse, vacuous being

malcontent and ululate, and you’d probably be right

especially on Friday nights

when displeasures wick burns low and

all hallowed souls gather to

seal their profligate covenant

to dance flung mad beneath kilowatt moonshine

arms outstretched in varied postures

of abandon and short half-life glee

sticky with fevered imprint, they

shuck off adornments and expectations

grown over with moss

and when it comes to lapsing daylight

dive nude and fluid like seals

into the sea’s very throat and its briny acceptance

of traitors and rebels and girls with

too many bed fellows

where all but the sheer furtive birth of freedom

glimpsing off unencumbered skin

chewing the skies

with effervescent glow, is sate

as if mermaids were beseeching

tender men and women of houses

and diaries, book weights, lapsed vibrators and bottled ointments

leave your rules and your sadist alarm clocks

set for 6am

abandon the car you upgrade every three years

before it’s lost its new smell

to impress neighbors who give you no heed

retreat, retreat, retreat

past scraped plates of burnt lasagna

fox tails, lube and licked spoons

to this emptied isle of underwater

solace and lay your wretched superlative

disappointment in our laps

that we may render you

lost

and because of that

unfettered liberate,

eternally

blushingly

free