If You Had Lived To Watch Her Go

There stretches endless sea
through the imagination
under which the birds sing
the telephone wires hum
the grass grows green and tall
still with summer stubbornness
hoping to never be mowed.

There was a girl, once,
when you were in love with yourself.
There was a girl, once,
when most days
you needed drowning
needed to be creating
in the dream house
wistful as the glitz of the world
spun through you.

You cannot win a heart
with champagne and bouquets,
not even with your stark infatuation.
You know not
what is lost and what is left
nor what was never yours.

All you wanted was to shine.
You never shone brighter
than in her eyes, and mostly
you are ashamed
you didn’t know how to love her
and probably you never will.
You miss her and you haven’t changed
enough to stop drowning in
your irresistible imagination.

27 May 2013

[I’m not sure if this is about my life or because I watched The Great Gatsby (2013) again yesterday.]

The idea behind white
is the absence of color,
fresh snow without footsteps
(or uncut coke). The white
lamb of god led
to the slaughter.
Pallor, like ivory
(don’t think about species
nearly killed off)
like milk and eggs (don’t think
about factory farming)
white as a sheet (for the bride’s first
blood to prove her ownership
and the integrity of lineage) 
alright, white like orchids,
is that the slightest addition of color
makes it no longer white, pink
from just the slightest hint of red
or black with just the lightest hint of brown.

White is a construct. White
doesn’t exist. Germanic: white,
bright, blinding, blind, with eyes
milky white and unseeing
anything in the world but white.
White: the color that gets to be human.
White: the combination of the
visible spectrum of light –
but humans
are not made
of anything like light.
They are made of earth.

The first white paint
was chalk in cave paintings.
Go back in time and tell them
white is the color
of hospitals, scented
with sanitation, the color
of death, of ghosts,
of absence.
Stop them
before they invent
a shade for colorless,
for empty,
white.

[NaPoWriMo Day 28, Prompt: Color]

This Specific Restlessness 

Darling I want to see you burn.
Think not that I love you no longer –
that I would not see you live forever –
but there is something aching inside me
that hungers to watch the world burst to ash
before I have to surrender my own flesh and dirt
into an implacable grave, as the centuries forget me.

Darling I want to see you burn.
I feel your combustion as my pain,
smell the charring of flesh and your story
scattered pages to ash, to whirlwind, to nothing.
Inside the human soul gestates the sacred and profane
the urge to growth and vibrance and the urge to desiccate.
Darling I am no different. I love you and I want to see you burn.

[NaPoWriMo Day 25, I’m sorry I didn’t have it in me to write a ballad on top of my homework today]

Heartland

I lay against your body
made of mountains, and deep
reserves of strength
black oil and dark forests,
fires burning through your core
and I listen to your heart beat.

Deep beneath the tremble of roads
and the life across your surface
deep inside you, you digest
your children’s flesh
and return us home.
The gentle touch of grass
against my cheek,
I feel the wind across my back
and listen to you breathe.

No more the vast expanses
of earth and sky uninterrupted,
but instead these simple pieces
fit together in mosaic, of time
and breath and earth
until we have gathered enough
of your heart to ourselves
to keep going.

[NaPoWriMo Day 22, Prompt: Earth Day]

Meeting the Prince of Mischief

One fixed orbit around the gutter,
he muttered, because his mind
headed nowhere good.
Svelte as truffles the man walked in,
a swagger and dip to his willowy build,
(all their pieces squandered on goat cheese,
a pinch of salt over the shoulder
while his ghosts fetch their artillery).
They were at a dinner,
watched by the Cyclops eyes
of blinking cameras. Voyeur
like the camera, he suckled
quahogs from shells and nibbled
non-pareil, the corner bird.
His hands smelled like seaweed.
His lips tingled with after burn of cloves.
The room was filling with water,
sound garbled in his ears, and when
at last he made his way to the man,
watching the broad shoulders in dark grey,
he curled his hands in his pockets
and his breath gusted through his lips.
The figure drifted through his eyes,
like the bilious curtains in the rising flood
could keep him hidden. There was an ego-threat
involved in spinning his words, twirling
his bad ideas in public but he’d tie
those fragile wrists to a generator
and abscond with his dignity,
and whatever else he could take.
Twice the fool and once the dunderhead,
even the rodomontade of the rich and absurd
could hardly shield his wantonness,
upwind of an unwitting prey as though
he could expect to succeed. The mercurial
laugh, the grey eyes and personality to match,
and all the secrets this man still couldn’t
extract. Maybe it wasn’t about winning
anymore, just the unquenchable heat
in his blood and the feeling that he
had been offered something impossible,
miraculous, only to watch it snatched away,
dark gaze and a sparkler laugh, elusive
to the touch as smoke on the water,
the flooded ballroom and no one else
seemed to notice as it overtook him
and he could scarcely breach air
through a cowbird beak, small tongue
held open for absent sustenance.
Nothing had changed. He drew a breath,
try again, introduce himself, and silver eyes
fall on him, through him, pull towards
a gaping chasm he pretends not to notice
beneath his feet as the man’s hand
caresses his in a hand shake, simple greeting
and socialization is the point of parties
so it astounds him, the breadth of difficulty
as those perfect narrow lips sculpt around the words,
“Please allow me to introduce myself…”

[NaPoWriMo Day 20, Prompt: use words from a list]

Holding Out For a Hero

Seeking: King Arthur before the fall,
and before the French Romances.
Heroic posturing, professions of compassion,
and a kingdom to overthrow the empires,
to set the world at rights.
Send me Jesus before he found religion.
Send me the heroes as they were drawn
in tapestries, not what they became,
soiled by money and the whims of power.
Send me Lilith before the bitterness and loss
of one miscarriage after another made her womb
fit only for her own nightmares. Send me Lilith
when she begged God to be the champion of women.
Send me Joan of Arc before the Church found her.
Send me Barack Obama before he gleaned a taste for deceit.
Send me Captain America without his flag.
Send me Che Guevera as the radicals dreamed him,
not the brutal man who lived and breathed.

And who am I?
I am a child of justice and the revolution,
weaned from mother’s milk with myths of old,
the conches of the Mahabharata echoing in my head,
the heart of the feminist movement and the eyes
to see its failures. I am the child they were meant to inspire,
but I found my heroes existed only in my head, and their bodies
had been twisted to serve empires of consumption,
persistent Aryan ideals and the subjugation of women
that they were meant to fight.
I am here as a call to arms for the children
who will take their places.
To everyone who is fuelled by hope and anger,
so furious it rattles through your bones,
eating dissatisfaction with this world like gruel,
but still with a gleam of light in your eyes, rally
around the one last cry for a revolution
to make our pockets fit for generosity
our hands fit for building,
and our hearts ready for peace.


[NaPoWriMo Day 19, Prompt: a personal ad]

Blackberries down the road in the neighbors’ field
burst flavor sharper than even their thorns.
Around this tremulous secret, lips are sealed.
The head rejoices silence while the stomach churns.

What makes a secret so hard to keep?
The words unreleased eat and writhe like worms.
The mother’s lazy and the father is cheap.
At their table, food and anger, the stomach churns.

[NaPoWriMo Day 15, Prompt: Pantun, rhymed quatrains (abab), with 8-12 syllables per line]

God Complex

When you are young
at each moment
you could do, could be
anything.

I haven’t been young in a thousand years.
(Plenty would say I didn’t grow up.)
All the lives I’ve lived
and selves I’ve been
(but never a ginger)
stretch out behind me
and the answer,
what I have to do, somehow
doesn’t get easier.

This is who I am,
who I’ve been.
I’m not playing god,
well kind of,
but not exactly and
there were no gods anyway
except inside people’s heads
which is the most
important place of all,
but the point is,
I haven’t been young
in a thousand years
and sometimes I make
the hard decisions
so humans won’t have to.
It’s always their choice
but offer someone all of time and space…
what will they do?
Rule one: the Doctor lies.
Rule two: whatever it needs to be
to keep people safe
and the universe running
(even after I am gone)
and the adventure alive.
But most of all the people,
their faces preserved in memory
like a photograph, ready
to live.
(I can’t forget the broken ones.)

[NaPoWriMo Day 14, Prompt: Persona Superhero/Supervillain, The Doctor Season 6]

AN: I don’t feel like I’m nearly qualified for this, but it’s now 12:30 and I can’t think of any ways to make it better. In any case, I’ve been (finally) catching up on Doctor Who, and so this was what clicked with the prompt. The cool part is I started this during The Girl Who Waited and partially predicted some of the coming character arc. 

I am a well-kept secret.

I am a well-kept secret
gift-wrapped – take it! – I insist.
(If you don’t tell you can keep it)

The one you don’t admit
you liked or that you missed,
I am a well-kept secret

with quiet heart and muffled step,
organ squeezed through clumsy fist;
(If you don’t tell you can keep it)

I am a taste, a smell you couldn’t quit.
You know that you can’t reminisce.
I am a well-kept secret.

Guilty now when you submit
how darkened pleasure feels the best.
(If you don’t tell you can keep it)

If you wind me up I’ll dance across the desk.
Push my buttons and I’ll sing you a kiss.
I am a well-kept secret.
(If you don’t tell you can keep it)

11 April 2013

Bogart

I am afraid they won’t adore me.
I am afraid who I am or what I do
will lack aesthetic appeal,
a failure to be objectively good.
I am afraid of the raw meat of fear
and the anchor weight of every “should.”
I am afraid of living on the streets.
I am afraid of letting anxiety stifle me.

I am afraid of uneven line breaks.
I am afraid of getting HIV,
of settling. Sometimes I am afraid
of life. I am afraid of growing ugly,
old, or fat, living with chronic pain,
or having nothing to eat.
I am afraid of the uncertainty.
I am afraid of people laughing at me.

But unless my dream is to invent
a reanimation virus, and it isn’t,
learning to live without a safety net
and ask for what I really want
probably cannot be the end
of the world. Today I haunt
myself with a hundred burdens
but no reason to smile. Doesn’t seem fair.
Smile anyway.

[NaPoWriMo Day 8, Prompt: Ottava Rima]

Aquifer

You pushed off into the water.
You pushed against the water.
You pressed your flippers back and forth.
The water pushed behind you.

The underwater underbrush
scratched your kicking legs.
The backwash in your throat choked you.
This was a glorious day.

The sun flew high, high and bright.
The world opened large and cheerful.
The cold water cradled you.
The river called you home.

You were empty in the literal sense.
You passed your first growth spurt.
You were still wider around the middle
than your friends have ever been.

You cleaned out your insides
of the black shadows.
This water is spring water.
This river starts in the earth’s bowels.

You are cleaner than you have ever been.
You are empty and clear as the water.
This is a glorious day. You are a ripe twelve.
You think you are happy. Is this how it started?

[NaPoWriMo Day 7, Prompt: Rhetoric]