Gentle & low

Truth hinted at

there’s a ghost in the machine

that’s me

she’s climbing out of her past, survived the worst

they hold up mirrors and shout

let it out, let it out

the she who is me

spread eagle, violate

who will she need to please to be free?

I watch her as I would a

lover who coming close is further apart

the darkness of hurt

a chocolate center to emptiness

her breasts are hard and warm like

lost thoughts in my hair

we weave a strangeness over one another

her fingers inside me and then

words perfumed in the air

promises were said and broken

the bed lays untouched and I would wish I’d been

so lucky

bruises act like kisses and kisses are too deep

your tongue goads my sleep

when I said no you took and ate

your fill, then with moonlight cutting

curtains blind in silver

I see the outline of sin and pleasure

how pain is curled in little leisure

the first strike, sharp lines, leather belt

hands around my neck and down my throat

marks left on marks, growing roses in darkness

you make a hand print of the child lost

blood in water, sheets and cries

who will clean the absolution and who will

witness the last time?

I gave you what I could, it wasn’t

full it wasn’t even good

that was all there was

empty roads, night time rain, ebony on asphalt

lay me down on thorns

paint me a picture of torment

here’s my proffer, my scorn

for not being able to keep a secret

pluck a pin, suck it in, there it sprouts

savage love, ruins the innocent

pain comes in snatches like dreaming

you relish the way I collapse after you’ve taken

this last suspense, rinse out, leave her ready

for the next punch, a wound so loud

her breath has vocals

I’ve been gone a long time now

only the sound of the past plays

on repeat

gentle and low

as violence ebbs her sharp tongue

licking the wounded with happy sorrow

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December

The bells of the church rung

He said it’s why he didn’t turn back

That and blossom in the thimbling trees so early

He believed in signs and symbols, so did I

Before I was grown and knew the torn things inside

He was the boy who learned on me

I gave what I could, but kept two things to myself

My secret was, I wanted a child

My sin was, letting him take you back

Standing fighting at the top of his marble stairwell

Smelling of his mother’s perfume and congealed cough sweets

I saw myself falling, pinwheel, before he cast me down

The imprint of his reedy hands, a daisy chain around pale throat

His child in my swelling belly, with eyes the color of regret

He said it was an accident, I felt his hate as I lost my balance

Jabbing me in the back with whisper and sharp intention

Get it out, get it out, get it out

He didn’t know the truth of us, my child and I

She wore silver bells around her neck

And in his mother’s sea blue bathroom of mirrors

I stood watching the rapture of your being, take me over

And in the night, your father tried to tear you gone

With his thrusts into me like a spear and a blunt knife

Still my child you held on

Staring through my eyes at me when we were alone

I could hear everyone’s comments before they spoke

If you have that man’s baby, you’ll be shunned

And alone was really alone. Still I thought

I am not a warrior, but I would fight for you, daughter

Quickening in me like a secret slipstream of language

I felt our connection, you were more than blood and sinew

I watched my burgeoning figure, as I removed my clothes

Thin and narrow, except where you were taking form

Stepping into the bathwater, I felt something cry and give way

And the bath became blood

Hot water on, with the door closed and locked

Your father saw water running on the tiles in the hall

All pink and gorgeous

He broke the door down and saw me sleeping in gore

All pink and gorgeous

In the hospital they whispered words of relief

She’s so young, so petite, it was a mercy and a blessing

Any more blood and she wouldn’t have made it

They didn’t see your father’s fingerprints or where

He cut you out with the slow deliberation of an absent butcher

The whoosh and hiss of hospital machinery

The soft whisper of pretty nurses shoes sliding on lino

Your father watching over me, the violence still marked on his face

When we got home, the taxi driver said; take care you goofy kids

Your father dosed me with pain killers and turned his raging back

I saw the emploring milk leaching from my breasts for you to drink

And it was red

I felt the sting of your vanishing scraped dead from myself

My stomach still swelled with your ghostly outline

Your father moved in his wrath lain sleep and mounted me

I said; I’m hurt, it’s too soon, oh God!
But God refuses sinners and pearls

You were gone so you could not speak too

And your father dove into places raw, stitched and mourning

With his eyes closed he imagined nothing and saw nothing

With his fists closed he rose above me in darkness like a wraith

Not touching the spilt evidence of you

Not realizing he was slick with blood and tears bound in a girl

Till morning when he washed you off and with it, me

As I lay in the stained bed with my nightdress hitched around my wrung neck

Feeling the milk in my breasts, the wetness of your ever spending

Feeling the tether from you to me and back again neverending

Your father went on to conquer worlds with a rod

A rich man with the same long fingernails and sharp soul

He calls me once in a while

Tells me I’m still beautiful

And if I saw him, he would bring harm

So I keep us safe and I see no one

As we sit on the balcony and I imagine

You’d be tall and you’d be beautiful like climbing honeysuckle

Because you are my daughter

We raise our glasses to your December birthday and 27 years

And your father he cannot attend our moments together

He may hurt us again, he may seek to take you away

He stays in his apartment in the city and grows richer

On weekends he chooses whores that look like I did

When I was just a young girl

With hair down to my bottom and no breasts to speak of

He had me before I ever menstrated so we thought

You could not exist

It was true, you did not

Home from the hospital with a pad of loss between my legs

But that was a fall I can still feel in my displaced bones

Seeing the future with each tumble, seeing his fists open and close

Alone now and you have been dead 28 years almost

And I light a candle

For what I was not meant to have

Though I would have loved you so

And I do

You speak to me when I sit by myself and the night is quiet

You tell me not to be lonely though it is impossible

I smile at you because that’s what mothers do

Spare their children

Any pain

Fortune cookie

A girl who used to look forward to dinner and a movie

The simple pleasure of walking hand in hand with stillness and a harvest moon

was handed a poisoned fortune cookie

caught a virus, and that virus crawled into her stomach, like a ray gun

it changed the waves until, her stomach like arrythmia of the heart

was fitful and lurched

she was instantly sickened, from a person of health she turned

green

her body shut down and said

no, I don’t want to eat

dimly she remembered the days

she would lust and long for food

her appetite completely gone, the acidic growl of her stomach

held all dominion

she was slave to nausea 24/7

like a merciless dictator it left her no peace

even in the lingering hours of night

she woke bathed in sweat

her stomach somersaulting in wicked mirth

such a terrible feeling of imbalance and sickness

her hands gripped the sides of the toilet

she prayed until her head ached

for nothing could have prepared her

nothing assuaged the constant torture

every day of every day

she began to imagine

her death

fondly like a fantasy

and then when she realized what she was doing

she would cry until the crying

made her sicker and she had to stop

bottle all the anquish up

but there was nowhere to throw it, or store it or let it free

it built higher like a fortress

locking her out of life

days, weeks, months went by

she was captured between glass

unable to eat or drink without throwing up

or wishing she never had to try to chew, force food in green bilious mouth

perhaps it was punishment for a former life

where she was greedy and ate too much

or tormented the Fates with the heal of her shoe

it seemed definitely karmic punishment

just as her will to live, ran thin and irregular

sometimes imperceptable

like arrythmia pulses below the surface

that would not quiet or return to normal

disturbing former calm we take for granted

a girl who used to look forward to dinner

sits at a quayside cafe, drinking empty glasses

eating plates without food

staring at turbulent water rise and fall

waves crashing without sequence, into wet wood

holding back or pushing forward, who knows?

one day either the sea will admit defeat, or erode everything

and that is how I will be free, she says

to carefree birds overhead, yet to be struck down

they know not their good fortune

Simply forward

How early morning light

Discovers a new pucker, a fine line

The crepe of hands unwrung from fear

Too many years I was hostage to you

Terror

Thinking age would only color more vivid

That anxious sickness, a trembling nerve

Raw to this unforgiving gallivant

Pills can only gloss over the root

Purple and bruised

It is not enough to look away

You will meet in unguarded moment

Yourself

Bilious with trepidation of this gift of life

We have 

Glass blowers of naught and much

Configured our trajectories

To eliminate handling this butchers theatre

We poise through fingers held before our eyes

Seeing segments and no practice of

Wholeness

Given to calm souls

Seeking just enough

I do not know how

To carve peace

Like a white horse out of chalky cliffs side

To stand as marker 

When the sea gathers her cockled skirts and rises

Over our heads

**

As a child I wet the bed

In roacharch patterns

One was a tiger

The other a shooting star 

And as I stood craning my neck to see 

The tiger clamped onto my small foot and dragged me beneath

Where only fear and marbles lay

Without direction or elucidate

My nightgown became a map bleached of purpose, bleating surrender

My hands grew like midnight iris, long and stray

Unable to capture magnification

**

We learn our hobble

We embrace killer 

Of playtime

Sketching devil’s from unknowns

Casting deep nets with myriad holes

Surely nothing alive

Shall follow our wake

As Persephone

It is in the silt at the bottom we stay

Conned by shadows into believing

The fur lined pockets of nightmares

** 

With this lantern

Pressed against a desire to scream

Abandon effort, rebuke change

For how foolish we feel

Naked again, starting over like blind mice

For how scared the taste

Of difference

So long appeased by secluded ideal

Poisoning thatched way

As we think we know, we undo

The signs and wonder

Glimmering in transit, should we observe

It is 

Never too late

To learn 

The effort of 

Fighting against

Fear

She only survives when

In our desperate cast we 

Feed her habit 

**

I turn 

Away

Lowering my hands from my face

Seeing without mask 

The fullness of being afraid

Staying steadfast

One foot in front of the other

Forms

Links of intention

A necklace

Keeping us together

Though wind and rain comes

We seek the hour when it will be

True

Unmade of nerved past

A natural walk 

Simply forward

Pesadilla

Dreams

when they turn ugly

are the more familiar landscape

and taste real in their message

though I drive them out

like wolves from the lambs gate must

be refused

prophecy or fear demands

we turn the taste of metal in our mouths

wondering which alchemy

holds the pick

to let us out of this clink

wrists accustomed to confine

sometimes I climb inside the nightmare

looking for signs and meaning

did one mind really create this world?

why am I so talented at weaving

the wrong perspective and

so weak in my try out for cheer?

was it the day I was left alone

to forage and forget how to be

one of you

or in wandering too far from the path

did I eat poison and lapse into a sleep

from which I am still part?

is this real or

do the hands of my foes

restraining wakefulness

feel the heavier and familiar both?

for we learn to grind our own grain

the sounds the pain

separate the chaff from the seed

who is and who is not

trust the mask

trust the god

trust the cat who sphinx like will

scratch and spit

they say women have no sisterhood

and circumcision can rent our heat

they veil us and shave us bald

we stand in our sagging against the merit

and scald

I recall once hearing a woman berated

for not sucking deep enough

without needing to see

I felt her knees ache, her back bend

her neck like a wilted flower

given out of obligation not affection

it taught me

to suck long and hard

in hope I could

remove the stopper holding us down

bursting we’d climb

out of our bottle

genii’s in rags

what would the world do if

men became pregnant and jin

held the whip?

what would the world do

if women no longer tore at each other

with blackened nails?

what would the world do

if I learned the way home

and nightmares were left to fringe

the lonely woods beyond

where crows pecked the gloat

exulting in their horror

what would I do

if I woke up whole

and climbing out of a sun filled bed

went downstairs to breakfast

and there you were

your arms out, your knives dull

sitting at the table set for all of us

And burn their house down

Her legs were her best feature

so they told her

pinching her bum as she climbed shag carpeted stairs

hauling more baggage than they’d ever have

oh and your throat of course

chuckle, chuckle isn’t that funny?

deep throat, get it?

no … not really

too polite to declare (curtsy)

but what if you did? Respond as you would if

truth led you by the mouth, clip, clop

neigh brey shake your tail paw the ground with hoof

sore and gaping and verbose in mauve and yellow

like a gypsy sacked from her tent

runs like a red brand through black and white trees

will she end up raped by the side of the road?

eventually selling herself by the truck-load

with eyes glazed over from too many mouthfuls

there’s only so much you can take

a tipping point lives inside everyone

like a secret metronome

ticking away, ticking down, ticking sideways, an itch never relieved

until earth and sod and mud and weeds land heavy and wet

on wood (four coffin bearers, bow their heads)

she hears them making a fuss downstairs

(the sound track is The Moody Blues)

who will go first?

me! first is best! the little one says

he’s got a big mouth that one and a small …

well no surprise there (audience laugh)

yeah but you can warm her up for me!

the one who enjoys pain reveals

when do I get a turn? says the last one

who is always too fast too soon too distracted to …

see her staring at the ceiling counting down

tick toc tick toc goes her life blood

here the vein here the slice here the fall

blue is the marigold dipped in the ocean

why does she bled so? When did she stop being closed?

She was never really shut, she was open all hours

flung wide by the longing of the sky to see her enact a star

spread white and glowing she longed for black skies to swallow whole

every last molecule

there’s blood in the bathroom! they all cry (exit stage left)

where could she have gone?

how did she survive the loss of so much blood? The little one said

roll over roll over so they all rolled over and one fell out

there were two in the bed and the next one said …

you see her now

she’s that motion in the corner of your eye, a cataract in full bloom

dropping by the highway like a midnight flower

speeding cars track her fade but they cannot see for their faces are made

of metal and plastic and rubber and gasoline

and she is made of earth

and she is gone to earth

and she is in the earth

away from the three little pigs

who kindle themselves into a fury

and burn their house

down though it is made

of brick