Aesthetics

I expected better.
A roar of stars
pushed
rough
against my dead sea.
A great wave opened up
to swallow the world
with no remorse
with complete consumptive joy.
Christmas lights
24/7
this nothing
can not escape
what should be
what becomes
car crashes
maniacal, glimmering
teeth
stuck in the mud
raised from the blackness
marking well that landscape
The Cheshire Cat dancing
suffocating
with a smile.

Virus (in progress)

How do I love thee?
Like the wind
My dreamy words
I can't rescind
But such confession obfuscates
The way our minds truly relate.

How do you love?
Just for a time
You told me
To keep that in mind
Before I'm ravaged with disease
And our souls take just what they please.

Do you love me?
It's hard to say
Though my belief
Should bend this way
It feels as though a quickening
could take us both beneath the sea...

Do I love thee?
It's hard to say
It's not the first
I've felt this way
So I will just come up for air
Before I kiss you with despair.

Nothing

What a joy
I've achieved through nothing
You could call it a black out
Or a white out
or a thoughtless existence
a disappearance
without an ounce of flesh to hold me down
without the energy of music, love, or fury
without a ghost to call my own.
Where you bury me, my memory,
nothing will grow.
I won't even notice.
Neither will you.
No name on a stone
No markings of remembrance
a heroine's memory.
Sometimes the thought gives me peace
a garden without you
a garden without a me
a landscape of dirt.
a landscape of nothing.
Build what you want here
if you even notice it.
You have my blessing
for what it's worth.

Dreaming

I curl up like a shell
play possum to the world
before I rise.
I enjoy the possibility
of strange and impossible creatures.
Is it safe to touch them?
Do they have common colorings?
Green, gold, brown, black
is its short greasy fur.
No, not common at all...
Does it have teeth
with which it can bite me?
I say no
and so it is.
It opens its tight, dark little mouth,
one I couldn't even see before
and licks me like a dog.
It is ignorant
benign
harmless.
It is my friend.
I say so.

I wake up
but I do not rise.
I play possum to the world
dead as a seashell
invisible as markings
silent in sand, so warm
but still dead
to the possibility
of strange
and impossible
creatures.

Politics

I heard you this weekend
your voice chattering from another table
You were from another country, clearly.
You sounded so civil this time.
A mind to match the voice.
Lovely, delicate,
intelligent.

I couldn't make out what you were saying,
but it sounded agreeable.

Just 4 weeks ago you were screaming at me
it was a drive-by, literally
from your car window
a cry from the bowels of humanity.
You didn't care for what I did that day
in traffic,
but mostly you didn't care
for my humanity.
The kind implied by the bold stenciled letters
of an outdated bumper sticker.
The fatness of your voice
echoed for a second or two,
its power waning as you fled.

I must admit both times
you left an impression.
I remember when I didn't care about you
and you were something to ignore.
Life was lighter then.
When I couldn't hear the thunder
and I couldn't read the dark subtext
behind your beauty
behind your mirror
behind your closet door,
Dorian Gray.

Creation

Too many voices out of turn -
It's time to call a meeting.

Now listen to my story.

We all know about the First Man
and how He was given powers
to create me out of nothing
but a piece of what was holding Him together
His lungs, His kidneys, His heart.
He was told to sacrifice
a part of Himself
for someone to talk to.

Implausible. Except for that last bit
about the sacrifice. We've all been there, right?
I can deal with a good metaphor.
The rest of it?
dismissed.

So allegedly everything is fine.
As long as I have my Creator around.
I mean, everyone needs a God, right?
And so does He.

But as it turns out
my God is not all that exciting.
In fact a little boring.
His speech is limited, His mind is not....
curious.
And He doesn't really want to listen to me.
He only wants to talk to his Daddy.
They speak behind my back.
They act
as if I am not to be trusted.
And perhaps I am not.
I get....curious.

And I love my God.
I feel like we should be
one.
But our interests have divided.

We argue.
He tells me that He can not be wrong
that He does not make mistakes.
But He made me.
And I am wrong.

I want to create.

I can still feel it to this day, the craving
of hostilities, needs, the juices
of every fruit imaginable
mashed into this bowl
and then wiped clean
only to start again
and then to start another.

Creation.
Imagine if that power should be given to me.
I still feel it to this day
so many years later
I have held creatures in my captivity
and called them my own.
They believed me.
I craved the connection.
So did they.
There must be something to that.
I have been here forever,
hollow, surviving through moments of
histrionic pleasure
mixing all of the ingredients
furiously
together
to no end.

There is no God here.

Society

Memories deepen
as wounds are opened
and histories are cited
and promises of futures more certain,
more prudent,
are made.

(There is nothing
that I can say here
that will change your mind.)

Past is past. You and your kind
have made an art of apologies.
I still haven't forgiven myself
for playing the victim.

There is a tiny death,
a ghost to permeate each cell
a cancer that consumes every limb
every time I hear you speak
your truth to me.
You remind me
of what a fool I am.
You remind me
of how easily I fall.
I analyse the color of your eyes,
the meaning of the look you gave me,
the meaning behind your brutal honesty
the contradiction of your apologies...
as I try to make sense of your world,
it becomes broken into a soulless assembly
of blocks and pixelation
and text fortified
by scientific evidence.
Seduced by the brain, but broken at heart,
you remind me
that I am a woman.

(Personally,
there is nothing you can say here
that can change my mind.
I still pretend that the world
can change more than its infrastructure.
That this endless bowl of fruit
will never rot my teeth,
that this pain
has a fertile, illogical end, grinning
from ear to ear.)

You

a place where dreams die
and these words are carved out, bright
tiny stars, starved
for attention
the critic's head
not tempered by the dying
consciousness, yet
not tethered to the brutal detail
of your dreams
floating
vapor trails
icing lashes
of your eyes
crushing this hope
with luscious isolation.
You know, I'll never know
your love
of disconnect.

Goodnight.