-the decade between-

I hid in bed with a man for one year
smoked two bowls a day
& used his carcase as a rag

our chemicals soaked
like dirty pots in the sink
addicted to yours
and yours to mine.
mine.

& i am the woman
& you are the lion
you with your warm spit
& me my soft skin
you with your fierce groans
I with my heated bones
together.
my youth at the mouth of your jaws

our plum love
that tried to span the decade between

but you are much older
and i am much new
so within your bed
i grew away from you

<3

Memory

weeping mother of Mary
inside of me
looming like a feral fetus
in my womb
when my belly blooms
who will you be to me?
a flesty green eyed
soft boned, reaching
and creasing ball of memory, hidden.
weeping mother of Mary
sleeping dorment inside of me
who will you be to me
when you finally awaken
who will you be?

blonde

purple

my skin has been so purple lately
plum flesh
full and
wider and wider with water.
and i am sweeter
than ripe pussy tasted
than lush eyes tearing
sweet.
with dirt earth and gritty wonder

but none is forever
sweet,
withered absence
sweet,
once was...
some days
laughter is a burden
i can not bare
memory is not a past i can bare to taste
some days
the sweet is just some old purple sent
crushed somewhere
on an old letter
and old book
some days i wake
in aged
ashy
mauve
cigarette trays and
stained wallpaper.
some nights
sleeping
with the grumbling trolleys
big steal whales
all night
up and down Girard ave
a vague aching
while i dream
for something...
other...

but today my skin is purple
plum flesh
has been lately

Sorrow is not a word in the park
love is not a bone in her body
voice is not a sound when he yells

and don't pretend to love me anger
you are a poor, poor liar
and emotions are not well suited as my words
but i can't stop speaking them anyways

and sorrow is not a word in the park
but it is everywhere else
and love is not a bone in her body
but mother is just a pile of bones
voice is not a sound when he yells
but I'm forced to hear him anyways

and none of us are young anymore
still i feel like a child
lost outside the park

empty bird who won't chirp
bright and red bird
not quite bright red
sits quietly in her tree
waiting to be free
from all the binocular eyes
that love to label
all the
bright red chirping birds

urban trees
reach and upward praying
pupil droplets
clutch like children to the branches

Dolorous is on her fix tonight
singing her chant cold clutching
her nickles

streetlight milk moons, light moans
through barred windows like
a seductive tramp, wicked
never allowing the night to sleep, weary
tirelessly tired

and we both lay like worms
still but living
wound together womb

I and you
32 midnight bus brews
small studio room
2r on 27th street
we
lending our peace to the pieces
tongues like plums mouthing
the last sacred things in the city

Beads

her words are small like babies
and his eyes
can not break away from her
beautiful protruding laughs

it is dark
it is shitty guitar
and moving fingers
it is the cheapest wine
for the cheapest mouths
it is her
the unobtainable virgin
her word are small like babies

And it is the night
that I can not name
it is holly and whithering
within it's self
the African drums
the bony trees
covering a dripping
Monet sky

And I am wearing her beads,
(the virgin girl's.
red
ish
lips.
and tiny screaming words.)
around my throat
and she has left for the evening

And the pretty things
rattle softly
on my clavicle

as I fuck a man
with small circular glasses
and breath that reeks of smoke
and he is moaning and stretching and convulsing
and picturing her rather than me

One Evening On Girard Ave...

The next morning...

Now That She Is Very Old

Her skin is all mapped out. It moves on her bones the way peals do on old fruit. She is motioning slightly and toying around her kitchen, the cats collecting like dust around her slippered feet.

Her face, once pretty, is now unremarkable. The beauty she held never came from her eyes or one feature in particular really. It was more a quality she held but did not own. It would often bless her in one moment and flee from her the next. It was not there when she hit us. Nor when she was kind to us after. It was never there around her men and it is not there now as she over feeds each cat.

I have only witnessed her beauty with in the most peculiar of moments. They are always unmistakable and sparse. Then, I only knew her when she was fair. He knew her when she was stunning. Perhaps the moments came and went more frequently then, when they first met. When she wore black eyeliner and big earrings. Maybe that's when he fell in love...in one of those moments.

I do not know or understand the woman who dwelt within those moments. That woman who ran up in the cold to the green front door. With her knitted hat and luminous face. With her middle aged creases that in that moment looked so perfectly placed.

...Whomever, she does not stop by any longer. I once tried to call that beautiful woman my mother. But she simply did not pass though often enough.

A Starchy Blue

In Love.

Falling Through

Swallowing consumption. A thick woolly blackness. And then the fleshy virgin skin that is crowning out from ambiguity.

A shattered, emerald bottle blooming up from the pavement.

Or the painted woman with her carnival tattoos of love and loss. Walking amongst her grey giants and grey lovers. And all the fresh, greying scabs. All the men. And then the one who moved her. His eyes were a starchy blue. And she is like a cocked wiry bird. Cramped from it's cage. Her flight is kinked but lovely.

Or then there was that spot of blood on your mat. Let's face it. I was your only spot of red.

And I see us all walking within the thin space that lies between the lines of black newspaper print. And sometimes something will rip straight through the pulpy grey sheets. And this colorful unknown stabs through.

And suddenly there is more to life than we thought.

The Illusionist

See the thing is. I never like your pheromones.
Yes, for the sake of romantics, I did.
But truly, I didn't like your taste or the way your lips rapped around mine.
Your cum was salty. And when you messaged my back
it was like thumbing a dead piece of clay. It evoked nothing.
The truth is I loved you dearly. But I love what you gave to me most.

And I didn't feel proud of who I was and what you made me out to be.
I couldn't give myself away, completely, to perfection.
Because in it's presence I resorted to my lowest form of being
So, no, you never really did have all of me.
Thank you. For finally letting me go.
I will let go of you too, I think.

Although, there was this piece of perfection.
I envision it hidden amongst thousands of colored glass shards
blooming on the street.
And I know it's tossed in there somewhere.
But the more I look for it, the more of an illusion it becomes.
However, the more I let it go, it slowly becomes real again.
Because perfection doesn't exist when your trying to enjoy it.
It can only be experienced though hindsight.
And you can never ask for it back.

So today I let go of perfection
or it's idea, rather.
And can in turn let go of you.

Mother

I am singing up the street. I am pounding through a black artery. And I am pulsing blood. Vibration. Vibration. Vibration. I am beating through night.

And in Virginia they called it an Indian cold. Where the leaves are a million falling birds. And the wind is breaking over your face but there are pearls of sweat in the crease of your back. A heated chill.

And I am singing. And the words are clumsy between breaths,

"Call, call, call it off! Call, break my young heart! Maybe I woulda been something you'd be good at. And maybe you woulda been something I'd be good at. But now we'll never know. I wont be sad, but in case, I'll go there everyday. To make myself feel bad there's a chance I'll start to wonder, start to wonder if this was the thing to do."

And I am singing strait to you. And you are miles, seasons, lifetimes away. You can not hear. You can not hear me. But the tiny tin lanterns can. They wink.

And I am home now. A rosy face. The blood wants to escape. Everything is silent for long stretching moments. But I don't know know if the moments actually lived. Maybe the moments weren't there at all. Because she is here now. She is here with him. She is consuming and gestural and drunk. And I am invisible.

There is lace on the floor and I don't know why. There is lace. On the floor.

And she is laughing with him and then leads him up stairs. He is learning Greek. She loves the unique ones.

And there is lace on the floor and I don't why. There is lace. On the floor.

And I hear them fucking. Fucking. Fucking. So I think about the winking tin lanterns. Who liked my singing. And I want to run to them and kiss there flame. But instead I sleep.

And there is lace on the floor and I don't know why. There is lace. On the floor.

<3

Bee's For You

This was a peice at a gallery I went to last night. A bee hive with dozens of little bee's hanging.

Portraits

Drawing has been a really great way for me to shut off lately, it's something I can focus on and enjoy but I dont have to be good at it. I did this in pen and I like how it's not proportionate

if you had asked

your breath is beating in my ear. pigeon wings nesting.
you send your voice through a dark warm womb and you tell me,
"I am in love with you"

and I realise now. That you were never real.
but if you had asked, I would have surrendered to you every time.
I would have kept myself in your gilded cage
until my feathers fell like rusty leaves.
but at least I could have woken every morning next to you.
and I want you. to just take me.

and I realise now. That you were never real.
But if you had asked, I would have released every hidden orgasm strait
into your mouth. and you could chew them
and understand everything in me.
and I would make you laugh with my awkward humor
or let your cigarette smoke grey the fibers of our future love seats.

but I realise now. you were never real.
but I would have done it all. marry you.
get round and pink and have your children.
would make love to you after work
until you make those sweet moist sighs.
and piano keys and bony fingers that could play for you.
would you just ask me to play for you?

and if you had asked me, I would have bloomed beneath your body
and make my roots in your bed
and you could tickle my neck with your curious mouth in search of sweetness
as I laugh. laugh. laugh.
And I realise now. that you were never real.


<3

Halloween

This was my halloween costume for a crazy rave I went to in the city the other night. I was Pretty Woman in the very begining, before she ever gets into his car. :) I had an amazing time and danced for five hours. We left at 5 am. oh and I kept my jacket on the whole time.

Scrap Girl

My fingers are
old tin spoons
they have forgotten
how to touch

My eyes are
brown plastic buttons
one pops off
I stitch it back on
one pops off
I stitch it on wrong

My curves are
thin metal wires
I sit on the edge of a man's bed
his thumbs mold
the wire

"Kissing is an intimate thing,"
you say
"you can not kiss mechanically."

And my lips are
two pieces of scratchy twin
my tongue a patch of foil
and all I can feel as you kiss me
is the cold sting of aluminum

A Wink From The Insane

Insanity crawls into my life no matter where my bed happens to be.
The quiet but rabid ticks in my head. The instantaneous reflexes, the addictions.
chew nails, bite lip, suck my thumb when I'm lonely, buy a pack, ("We're having a special today." Okay buy two packs),
drink wine, play with scissors, find a boy, no, boy finds you. Twitch. Love the boy. Leave.

I am slightly odd girl. Who dresses how she likes. I am laugh a lot girl.
But insanity crawls and lingers no matter where I am. And inside my head is the constant ticking of madness.

Last night, I am in a new house. Uncles house for four days. I am pattering soles on wood.
Patter. Patter.
Heart is pattering against wood. Faster and faster.
The new guitar he got. He is playing the guitar. It is dismembering and the strings are moving like crippled children toward me. The strings, they enter through my ears and morph and tweak the electrical currents of my brain. I am going insane I feel. I am going insane. I can not breath.

Rain is contradicting everything inside the house. It is pounding on the roof to get in and trying to convert the things of this home into the things of rain. I hear it yelling and I don't want to fight it so I run outside. Black wetness. Consuming black wetness.
Now I cry. I cry in convulsions but there is no emotion beneath. It is scientific. It is reactionary like goosebumps when cold. My body shakes and the tears are boiling water running over the pot. Now I cry.
I feel insane. I miss my brother. I miss being touched by people. I have not been touched in so long. I miss the city.

"I feel insane"
Now, lightning explodes silently. There is light that blankets my whole plane of vision. It is soft but sharp. It is loud but silent. It is profound but accepted.

It is god. And he tells me that he is insane as well. I am still. It is cold and I go inside.

Insomniac, Sylvia Plath

The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole --
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments--the mizzling days
Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,
Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,
A garden of buggy rose that made him cry.
His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.
Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue --
How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!
Those sugary planets whose influence won for him
A life baptized in no-life for a while,
And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.
Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.
Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

His head is a little interior of grey mirrors.
Each gesture flees immediately down an alley
Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance
Drains like water out the hole at the far end.
He lives without privacy in a lidless room,
The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open
On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.
Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,
Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.
The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.

Jet

this is a song I wrote but I like the lyrics a lot too, it is for Ross.

we just moved
into a pulsation heart
made love at odd hours molding into art

and you always play
that strange plastic organ
moving your quiet soul
through its little keys

(chorus)
and we only cried once together
all the tiny bees
swarming in your tattooed arm
tiny tattooed bees
little plastic keys
you play

nights without a morning
we would pray for nights with out a morning
and jets will fly by and by
but you promise never mine

come and forget with me
drink cheap wine
whisper never mine never mine
my jet will never come

(bridge)
listen wander seek kiss
you've never made love like this
you ask for another way besides this
but i have nothing to offer

and we only cried once together
all the tiny bees
swarming in your tattooed arm
tiny tattooed bees
little plastic keys
you play

you are artful in your silence
skillful in your hidden pain
and cigarette breaks come frequently
but you always tasted sweet

always here we will meet
my head is resting here for good
always here we will meet
my head is resting here for good

and we only cried once together
all the tiny bees
swarming in your tattooed arm
tiny tattooed bees
little plastic keys
you play

oh please just say
my jet will never come
oh please just say
my jet will never come....

<3

Three Days In The Dirty South Side

"It is difficult to reconstruct the actions and feeling of a character surly afire with true love, for you never know whether he is expressing what he feels or what the rules of amorous discourse prescribed in his case--but then, for that matter, what do we know of the difference between passion felt and passion expressed. And who can say which has precedence?"
-Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before

There is a stoop in St. Louis that is cracked with heat. We are sitting and drinking french pressed coffee. His with unreasonable amounts of sugar, and mine black. He will talk of plants that grow better when you speak sweet to them. He will talk of how the water table is affected when I throw my dead cigarette to the dirt. He will talk about constellations and endless conspiracy theories and lost worlds and the teachings of Native Americans.

My head is facing away as he speaks, looking out on a torn and baking Dirty South Side. Hot tears roll quietly on my face, falling to meet even hotter air. Maybe he knows I cry but can offer nothing. He speaks and speaks and speaks of meaningless facts. I am broken after more than a year of loving this man. I do not get angry any more.

I have never heard it from him. But I know he loves me somewhere. Somewhere under those mad blue eyes that have seen a mother and brother beaten. A father gone and whithered and angry. Somehow I think that maybe he can hear me crying next to him on the cracked stoop. Somehow I think maybe he knows that he loves me but doesn't know how to show it. He gives me what he can. A home in St. Louis for a few days. Black nights of enveloping, moving sex. And rare moments of utter fragility and silence, where his eyes look strait through into my soul. It is through these moments and others that I have managed to gather shards of him and paste together something that looks kind of like a unique love for me.
But I will never hear the words from his lips.

A black man hauls his two small children by the hand across the street. Their bodies are almost illusive as the heat radiates off them. He mumbles,
"Dirty south side....dirty south side....we're all just getting by in the dirty south side."
I smile slightly and say to myself...
What do I know of the difference between passion felt and passion expressed. And who can say which has precedence?"

We're all just getting by yeah?



<3

Sexless Hands

my hands
are like bony
lifeless children
to me

they are of me
yet perch awkwardly
and dispassionately

at night often
i beg them
to ignite a warmth
through a dim
but yearning place

however
in having no passion
themselves
they attempt briefly,
fail
and then continue to
linger around
a fidget

Artful

i am arched in full position
waiting to be swelling
with pretentious color
and artful pain
and blood so holly
spittle from my wrists
a map of cracking veins
broken open
a mellow dramatic blood water
substance without
paper. homeless word babies
cry, wasted in
bags of blow, in weeping nights,
flirtatious horror binges
in raw salted cum, swallow cum
with sweet assassination

please
linger on chewed lips
pulse.
electricity through my
fried emotion
momentary l
ife

no. dead girl
substance with out paper
homeless word babies cry
mother quakes of sex
screams are passed
through dirty blood
dirty blood

and "you're a dirty girl"
he yells
cutting off
shutting off
i am a paper body
deconstructing
pulp blood and bones
littered comic strip strips
i speak in muted color shreds
as you kiss my
paper body
yelling dirty girl
dirty girl

and that artful pain
is not quite that.

Revival

I have been writing mostly songs of late
but here is a poem that forced it's way out of me

bemused hearts with rabid root
feed from dirt and memory
with time an anchor
to the soil
emotion with tiny choirs
men who cut me at the knee
with words so beautiful
and pulling

I recall a time of innocence
before the coke and blow jobs
and pain was simple
and uninhibited
before I'd kissed a boy
and felt the numbness
before the street corners chilled
our drugged blood
musing us on

and yet I found amongst
the turmoil
an afternoon of
unthreatened pleasure
and tangled wetness
that clung to you

and your hands
that wilted to plastic organ
keys
I loved to sit and listen
sit and listen

and here there is a blooming pain
gasping in the wake of you
for you revised an
old innocence

the memory of
sprinkled glass
and Turkish royals
and morning smells
are as real now
as the moment in which I
found them
and perhaps more so

and sometimes I wish
you had just kept that
soul piece letter I wrote
yet most other times
I am glad you
blindly
discarded her

for you never could believe,completely
that I loved you like
you loved me

soon after

i stood
wash
in water
but mouth on ear
whispers

"ask for it............

ask for it"

and submission coddles
resistant

and the body
a stoic masterpiece
wilts blankly
to necessity

and a voice
i fear was my own

"please."

Far From Folly

fiddle
finger finger
on your plastic organ

yesterday in the sun
pause
I remember it's steady
profound tune
weep

flowering filth
blooms from every fold
I seek baptism
in the city fountain
and her stone
mouth is unleashing
and she is steady fury
wash
fold the body
into submission

and I have seen eyes
like the head
of the tempest
and lies
that hold bones together
and hungry
hungry
mouths
and I know now
everyone battles
what is no longer there

and I always see your fingers
and always hear your tune

and the fountain
is breaking the dusk
open in her hands
and she is cocking her head
to your steady tune
and my wailing
is causing a silent response

so we all
just wash
and fold our bodies
into submission
-r

fountain that I bathed
in and that inspired
this poem