Frequency of Us

in

I don't know what I'm looking at anymore We try and try and try again

Some days we get better and somedays we get worse

The sky turns pink and we turn away

The rain falls and we call it a nuisance

The night settles and we go to bed

The morning comes and we waste it away

I don't know what I'm doing anymore

Distractions circumnavigate my head

Doubt settles in my bones

Something isn't right

Materialism Pollution Racism

Sugar Alcohol Gossip Magazines

Impatience Dishonesty Power Wars

I want to jump out of bed in the morning

Drink tea Walk in the rain Salute the sun

Kiss my loves Hold my littles Embrace myself

Write Read Move Learn Teach Love

I have a hunch there's more out there

We are like little ants on one sidewalk on one street

Unseeing past the horizon, unaware of the infinite

The country, the planet, the galaxy, the universe

Matter and energy

Vibrating on the frequency of us.

You've Never Felt For Me

in
Take me by the hands
Let us intertwine our
fingers Like our ugly
lives and Overlapping
toes Like the city we
love to memorize Up
here on the roof
Kiss me with everything
You've never felt for me
Then shove me over the
edge Let me spill across
the sidewalk Somersault
Into another dimension
You will be forgiven I will
be forsaken No one will
be alive to know What
happened But for you
And your uncrying heart
Please spare me from
Yourself My knees are
purple from begging
You who've molded
my theories Like putty
and Taken the sparkle
from my eyes To keep
in your pocket Where
it will live Even after
I'm dead and gone.

Dubai panorama. From the top of the world's tallest building.

Hypocrite

in

Errant words of wisdom mosey through my mindStrutting like rhinestones, sparkling but weak I kiss them hello with lips that will curse them Roused by sincere reverence that fades by tomorrow.

I am no hypocrite. I am someone with dreams Smooth and supple on the inside, pretty on the outside Lungs crimson with blood rather than charred with Smoke and fire and tumors stocked with poison.

The church says to confess and repent and be healed But God already knows every heart I've broken, so I tell them to go to hell, they say I'm going there soon I say we might be here already.

There's no escaping destiny when it's contained by Sagebrush and juniper trees, tumbleweeds and desert breezes Stale motel rooms where a companion costs extra Even the pizza man if he comes in and shuts the door.

God does not want me to heal, God wants me to Bruise and bleed so I can slip out of this body and Into another. Maybe my soul was not ripe enough for now Maybe this valley leads to a mountain with a view.

When I climb out from under my skin, the scars will stay Dissolving with the defiled flesh of a hypocrite A liar, a thief, a charlatan, a childless mother. Everything temporary like this body I never learned to love.

Everything to Lose

in

Written for Trifecta. The prompt is to use the third definition of "crack." There were no words in her mind, no being left to be, no imagination tugging at her lapels every time she laid down to sleep. Avery's talent had been siphoned away, like the bone marrow from a willing donor or the breath from a man who'd hung himself.

But Avery was neither willing nor suicidal. The sentences slipped out through the hole in her heart. Where everything important to her had once resided with vigor. The husband that disappeared, and the son with him, and finally the career as a writer. They called her promising. She abided by her dreams and built something from nothing. Until evil kidnapped her everything.

She sits in coffee shops and watches the people, the pages before her as blank as the first snowfall of winter lit by the dawn. They look so proud, climbing out of smooth shiny cars, faces pointing towards the sun like flaxen sunflowers. They beam at one another with nonfictional jubilation, they focus on their work when they sit, they curl their tongues and bite their lips and pucker their eyes. Life pours out of their crevices because they know they have everything. Avery wants to warn them, she wants to slip each of them a note.

If you have everything, then you have everything to lose.

She moves to Paris to write. Where cafe tables populate sidewalks and sidewalks meander into unmarked alleyways. Where children chain smoke and women with ripe round bellies drink glasses of wine. She buys opium from a street peddler with a chipped face and she smokes it over the electric stove in her rented white-walled studio. She hears words strung into run-on sentences. She presses her ear against a crack in the wall, but the voices aren't coming from the neighbor she's never seen.

The voices are coming from inside of her head.

Wanted

in

The days of his life
Pass
Each one like the last
Partly sunny
Chances for a storm
A cyclone
A tempest
To spin it up and away
Into neverland
Quicker than it came
Upon the thrumming
Of time
Illusory yet predestined
A dream from which
He will awaken
With some relief
Fused with grief
Because he will never
Know his zenith
Not under these
Conditions
Working backwards
Lost in the details
The crowds
The jealousy
Of what he thought
He always
Wanted.

Bleached by the Moon

in

I am youngThough I look old More silver than brown Imprinted with non-linear Focus, non-stop worries Tattooed by UV rays And the stretching Of time, volumes of Blank books loaded With my affairs Collections of change I never saw coming Obligatory trauma Because easy costs Something I never Could find, now I am Quarantined like a Leper or a hermit Though it's not Contagions I seek To contain but risks I call blasphemy Selfish and ravenous For the youth I once Possessed in spades Bleached out by too Many super moons Emptied by too many Chances shriveled Like dead orchids No matter how much Water I drink in dreams Of a resurrection.

Climax

in

Perhaps we have reached the endForsaken by everything trustworthy Starved by our own prerogative Festering into odious spunk Never mind the shelf life lasts Forever. Our toes point behind us Our fingers point somewhere in The distance, an arabesque into The future, two uneven halves Divided with nothing left for the Now. We mow our grass though It never stops growing, we pay For superfluous insurance just To be safe. We spurn safety For money, we declare war on Life by spraying verdure with Poison, we hedge the present With gold and still moments captured By the lens, immortalized by the Screen, because we matter and Those smiles will someday climax And though we prepare for it, we Will never be ready for it, so what I pray is the point in trying?

Run

in

Run. Run far away andPlease do come back, not like A boomerang, like you. I want you rosaceous red Steeped in clouds and sweat, Brown like earth so deep it is Impossible to dig up. Tall like The volcano in the distance Reminding us of our inadequacy. Murderous like the abominable Snowman, not a monster nor a Storybook creation but a man Who kills foxes with his bare Hands and wrestles snarling bears When they've eaten his dog's Heart, leaving the rest to rot. I want the tears of people You've never touched to flow Leaving a trail of crumbs Blue dots in white snow indicating The road you've traveled, like Plastic bottles hanging off of Tree branches. I will always find you You will always find me. Once you've Felt their pain in your kidneys In every compartment of your spine You can return to me. Leave the Remains buried atop the volcano Where there's a view, where his Spirit will want to visit, where we Will want to visit, too. For we are Never far from the paradise we built It lives inside our beating hearts Like a ship in a bottle, filed away under "Secrets" until our brains turn off and we Exist in the context of bright light rather than Love and fear, God's yellow face, the dots Piercing the night sky: stars or airplanes Or alien dimensions.

photo-41

Somebody Got Shot

in

I told them to go: Daddy,Take her to her favorite place The library. Pick up the Thai food And come home, be safe.

They come home and I kiss them We eat together, then we watch Fantasia while I stretch and Daddy works. A normal evening.

Except for the police racing about Daddy wondered why, I said: Guns The last time I saw them speeding Without sirens, somebody got shot.

The neighborhood blog flashed a notice: A shooting at the corner, near the library At 6:45. My reasons for living crossed paths With a gunman, and I sent them.

I get on my knees, blessing my Angels, my worst fears curling and Charred, touched by the fires of hell While I pray for their mothers.

Addiction

in

It tugs on your lapels like aNeedy child needing you and only You, traveling through brain mass Finding new spaces to fill, breaking Your life into two neat pieces. One for the addiction, another for Everything else, everything that matters. You hold the pieces together with your knees, Careful not to move your hips, gambling on The outcome, the hit, the blow, the shot. You reel, you breathe differently, you feel The new space where the cracks have widened And the vapor rushes in like epoxy or Super glue, which always does a better job sewing Your fingers together than the fractures.

letting go

in

Written for Trifecta. She looks between her legs, white paper stained crimson. It wasn't supposed to happen this way.

Her body, round as Mother Earth, heaves, like the ship against the waves. She tries holding her breath, drowning herself in the murky density of the mind.

"I want to die!" she shouts when the pain subsides. But her voice comes out of the wrong end. It travels inward rather than out. She doesn't have much time until the next attack. Thought falls into the shadow of suffering. The core of her cramps.

"You're going to survive," a man says. The tightening squeezes the life out of her. She climbs into his words.

You... Will... Survive...

She lives inside of the words. Intellect dissolves and their essence cradles her in an Elysian cocoon. She knows she is dying.

"Let me go," she says. "Throw me to the sea." But the interlude doesn't last. Force demands freedom. The big boom, the beginning of the universe, travels through her body, splitting open her pelvis. She bares down, until she realizes she is about to break in two like a seashell.

"Push your hardest, then let it go. Push, let go. Push, let go."

Push... Let go...

The first time she opens up, she does not break, she widens. Heaven passes through the hole in her body.

Faceless arms hand her a tiny child, naked and disoriented. Blankets, a hat descends, gloved fingers point her nipple between miniature lips. She holds his squirming body against her own. She looks at the suckling chin, a chin she already knows well. She thinks of nothing, not of love or of pain, but of what she has learned about mothering.

The hardest part is letting go.

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