Poetry

Harvest

whispered secrets from mouth to mouth 
breathe life to skeletons bared
tear this flesh, this gleaming body bearing salt and seed, 
damp earth and drying hair

let me shower you in gold and silver, the glistening berries 
of my bountiful harvest
nevermore to ripen in shadow or left to festering rot;
fruits more than I once knew what to do with. 

silk tears as petals between teeth. 
what quiet flower still revealed – emerging sweet kernel 
that, once unlocked, two hearts bear open unbidden.

hard to believe, those who once were strangers 
now lay peeled, husks shed,
more revealed by the pulling of each gleaming thread.

Fragments

soft liquid glass, grow bloom,
run red and blue and green
waxy dew, it turns
back inside
and then, out –

I reach out with my remaining senses, unable to comprehend the looming emptiness of the open plain.
the burning grass, dry from long summers
that grow shorter – then are done, and
(like everyone we knew) become darkness – but perhaps there are stars?
it’s hard to tell. 

Emeralds

my eyes were emeralds; 
moss on the forest floor.
sunlight glinting on the ocean,
the color of a sea I’d never seen –
green as a stormy winters’ day 
on the east coast, you said.

you told me all these beautiful lies
and I believed you
like a child.

Maiden voyager

illustrious luminary, 
illuminated in lunar light, 
meet me, in my own bright
luminous luster.

elicit my quiet night
and listen as i, complicit,
invite you to traverse silken seas; 
find luscious end to lustful plight.

with your keen and flaming armament   
touch to ignite my failing filament –
claim your beautiful bounty – chart these waters 
and take what's yours. 

invade these flimsy limits, instill it, 
growing hungrier still, until (and with a gasp), 
you fill it, still, and watch it slowly (trembling) spill 
from this flesh illicit.

Her lover who wasn’t there

I searched outside my bed for my love,
And found she wasn’t there.
I fell for her not long before
I made her disappear.
Every night I look into the sky
To where the moon should be
I look up there to find my moon
But the stars are all I see.
Last night I looked into the sky
I looked up to find my star
And where she shone bright once before
She twinkled and shone no more.

The self-portrait

A portrait so serene
yet in each her eyes defy
to glimpse the child locked deep inside

Sixteen and sickly,
a serene

scene

unseen,

locked in a heart

so serpentine;

a self reflected in her subject,
a gallery of endless clones,
each a little different from the last, 
a twisted game of telephone.

(Oh, how brave, how fresh and clean)

Populate some brave new world
with rows on rows of endless selves,
wafer leaves shorn razor thin –
pale, translucent facsimile of a whole 
that’s mostly a work in progress 

(or so she tells collectors)

A new fire

It’s a heartbreak so slow and complete, one might surmise that you could almost hear each crack like melting ice, a glacier of pain - push here to break glass but this is an emergency of my own making. 

Every star that fell from your lying lips into my willing, eager mouth to illuminate me from inside, 
instead caught kindling and set my dusty chambers ablaze 
and it’s too late, I’m trapped in the inferno I begged to create,
and left behind this husk, stripped back to its base
(still lost and dreaming of your face)

But you’ve gone to start a new fire somewhere else.

Sing to me 

sing to me lover, 
sing me nothings, and I
won’t listen.

watch me lover
watch me descend, unbidden
in love with this man I made.

hear me lover
as I hear my words tumble from your tongue
heavy and silver.

feel me lover
as I cannot feel my toes grow numb
my lips crack, my nails peel
and my skin decay
until it’s much too late.

see me lover,
until the day I too can see
That this one I loved, who broke my heart
was not you
but me.

Samson

cut your stupid, beautiful hair 
please Samson, and with it shear 
this cord that binds me.
relinquish this power 
you have over me because 
even now though out of mind, my release 
shall know no peace from you.
your face still fills my thoughts and in my shame 
I wish my hands 
were yours, those hands 
that never again will touch this skin
that’s scrubbed pink and raw, shed 
like a reptile 
but I can’t tear you from inside of me 
and though I try to hate you 
I can’t convince my body
so that’s where, for now, will live your memory
until someone new 
pretends to love me.

Cliffs

I believed you were an artist
but the best of you was mine –
a person of words, indeed –
but you dashed my hope as breaking tides
on rocks of deafening silence.
turns out I liked you most 
when you were wearing my clothes
and we drank pink wine
as you wrote lazy songs about my eyes.
and while I stand waiting,
gazing from atop this ancient precipice
sometimes I think it would do me good 
if I could be a little angrier.

Treacherous

I am the dark 
and slithering thing 
a hideous being 
most treacherous;
eldritch, twisted 
and duplicitous.
Sniveling and contemptuous,
I am monstrous and insidious. 
I am a black and crawling creature, 
disfigured and depraved.
If you could see this thing i am
You’d turn from me 
in shame

Venus/Venus

Bodies moulded as sculpture,
marble cool to the touch.
Radiate inner heat;
alight on contact. 

Fingers graze, stutter gently
and explore mapping curves, contours, 
and other geographical metaphors 
that escape me in this moment. 

You’re connecting dots 
that heretofore were stranded hamlets
and now it all makes sense. 
Here, in what I always assumed was simply
an imitation of an act that feels
nothing like this. 

Bodies moulded as sculpture,
marble cool to the touch.
Radiate inner heat;
alight on contact,
and ache on loss, 
to burn once more elsewhere.

A world of possibility

Shine your shoes
Straighten your tie
What opens up before you now, class
Is a world of possibility

Late nights, lost loves, 
And lace on the Lisbon breeze
Colds and flu and sandy beaches 
Disappointing sex 
And unripe peaches

Drunken cigarettes, overtime
Tears in the shower and burnt apple pie
A nest of woodpeckers, an unexpected child
Your last birthday
And a thousand misspent smiles

Listen up class, 
Slouch down in your seat
And take off your tie
What awaits you now
Is a world of possibility.

Mirrors

Beyond stained and silvered window
She’s looking back at me.
She’s bright, and she seems happy,
And finally, she’s free.
She is dirty, but she is poised 
and she is growing.
I am shrinking – but together 
We are glowing.
I reach for her, and she for me. 
We are connected, we are golden.
We press together, noses cold and
Never touching.

We are weeping but
The sadness we are feeling 
is beauty,
And she’s everything I want to be –
But I can’t tell what she’s thinking.
Through the distance in between us
Something’s spreading gradually –
I could never be that free
But, stand back to look in closer 
And I see that she is me.

Golden anklet bells ring prettily 
As she pulls away from me.
I still see her growing,
But now she sees me bleed
And the scream that echoes deep inside
Is heard by only me.

Los Feliz

I am here again
wandering the moors
of endless screens, 
pages and leaves. 
footsteps like ashes
on broken pavement
and a tumbled tourmaline
nestled into the elastic
at the top of my sock.

Taillights

I mark the passage of time by the falling leaves – each week darker, the next a little more, the hour unchanged, until once and then forever blackened.

A dark that starts with sorry but as ever ends with a gasp and a sob, your forgotten indiscretion perhaps begetting another plea – “don’t hurt my feelings” but what I mean is don’t hurt ME.

Here in my appointed sanctuary there is safety and there’s danger and when the prickling uninvited doubt sets in it’s the way you make me feel so right I fear to lose it all the more and so here we are – except I don’t know where here is, exactly.

And I’m afraid to ask – I like you, you say, when sorry’s long gone, but I think you mean you love me and that’s ok because I think I love you too. 

And each night when the taillights fade the darkness is once again much blacker than before.

Untitled

sweet nectar bead on darkened head
and then from swollen tip 
a taste - too sweet.
and after, you wept; couldn't find 
words to tell me why
but you can't hide from me. 
not here, naked, souls bared.
why are you crying? but I knew.

I am everyone I have ever loved

I am everyone I have ever loved,
their bodies
tumbling in that cold dread becoming one;
merging together and twisting with time
until they become as they never were,
in me.

You’ll miss her like you miss the sea

You’ll miss her like you miss the sea;
the sea that birthed you, 
as green as the island she tastes.
Translucent and luminescent
and majestic in her cruelty.

You were crafted by the biting gales that numb the ears 
that grown men adorn with baubles – 
the jewels befitting you.
You were milled in the wool of the isle herself –
glazed in ice and sleet. 

But you, for now, are a child again,
swimming naked as a teenager
in the November winds, you are invincible
and everything you’ve lost
for now, is yet to be.

You’ll feel the tiny pricking bites on your cheeks,
sprinkled by the cresting wave
and carried on the icy wind,
and you’ll remember you’re alive
because you’re a being of the sea.

Comet

Moving fast and slow
I spin on this great earth,
yet do not move at all. 

A comet
tears the night sky. 
Soars fast and slow.
There won’t be another like it 
for a hundred years, they said. 

Tonight I stand upright,
tilted on my axis
and wonder if the architects
gazed upon that same black sky
to spare a thought for me.