{You two are entirely too flattering! THANK YOU~ <3 }
April 27th, 2009;
TWO TIMES nature
IVY GROWING IN MY HAIR AND EARS
taint bees and bell-bugs, white and milky tears
OF POISON NATURE FLOWING OVER HIDES
between roots and catkins wind divides
MY POLLENS FROM MY RED-BREAST-YELLOW EYES
my tongue and sand-gnat toes like ant-built lies.
April 28th, 2009;
bruised
this bruise is my accessory.
it fits my skin and lectures me:
a yellow-brownish gathering
is pressing down within my skin.
a shadow of a darker place,
foreshadowing if on my face --
it tells of hot pans, let to fly,
but in your heart, i see the lie.
April 29th, 2009;
T.S. Eliot wrote cats
"frock, frock, frock by the ticking of the clock
with a peach i sit and wait as the hour swells too late."
it rained yesterday and the world swelled
and i swelled with it and i could tell
i'd need some reinforcement: cardboard
beneath my sun-flower clogs, linen uppers,
and the pink and blue flowers were my cover.
foil to the gloomy day i planned to skip
through the mist and gray that dipped
unendingly from the sky, my lips
that hid my puddled smile.
and the worms wriggled up from death + dirt,
from suffocation in their dense hurt.
i was so afraid. i was so afraid.
each winding pink + lighter pink path made
made me walk slower, step more carefully
(or not more carefully, but with more terror -- i shook)
until each curve of the cement: gravel, scatter-shaded
seemed another escape, fleeing my round toes,
not light-hearted, sun-footed, but yellow.
April 30th, 2009;
grand finale
how long have these alarm bells sounded
through Death's first kingdom?
each cell-page I turn, thinner than society,
with each bright author
(Thomas Hardy is a dear, though my smile
might be too alive for him to bear)
and each new poem
(with teacups or Tygers or gypsies)
calls me to action, calls me to passion.
if these genius minds, these stitched-up words
have hung on the loom, my window
for so long, then WHY
why, Jane Eyre, when you live,
why do you not inspire us to fly?
they call us, they call us,
with strategies baser than cancer-cell-phones,
and tell us to live and to dance to life,
but we put it off for later.
Coleridge's death-in-life
has surely rolled a fair game of dice again.
but I'll take, instead, the rat cellar
and get out of this wasteland.
