Tigermoms

Mother
what is this half-food rage
and half-girl , thick ploughing anger
that i feel?


what is this sadness in my fingers when i try to touch you
while you speak into a nonchalant part of the universe?

mother,
why does it hurt to remember anything about you
even when you are alive?

mother,
you kill and sing lullabies with the same obese grace
and stones in your acid voice

mother,
you drip in dreams with monstrous crying
and the un-scalping of my sane self
always, keening like a middle-aged trauma
to the daughter's soul.

mother, you were a child once
where did she go?

mother,
I have no one, but you
and I am alone I know
and even so
this day-death and night ritual of story-telling to myself
never aches less.

mother,
i need to protect myself from me
and you.
and father's blows
and his silent violence
now, serrated by diabetes and suicidal fantasies


mother,
i am dying and so are you
but there will be no heaven for us
not in this world or yours.


mother,
you should have killed me fast,
instead of this slow death
with your fast-speaking phone contacts
and late-night pounding on my door
to feed me some inconsistent fear

mother, you are an angel of Hindu myth
and the woman that the child in my mind fears
despite those degrees in psychology and
your immense youth that never prepared you
for the invasion of my soul upon your world.

mother, this weight i carry is so large and
vast with disease


mother, i'm afraid there is no cure
for my luck or birthmark or life
that you gave me
with the best of intentions
on my days wrapped in fevers
without you to smell and hold.

mother,
if i was garbage,
you should have named me so.

Eres

(dedicated to the object of a famous, unrequited obsession from L.A.)

Who are you?
made of sadness and animus.

a drug-induced desire
to be real and beautiful.
To be heard and touched
and felt and spoken through?
Like the screen apocalypses
of this century.

Who are you?
but a figment of image and sound
and deadly love on tumblr.
a public object of anonymous ardor
and suicidal sentiments of the gut

Who are you, really?
A dirty story with all your
limbs fitting sad girls in the right places?
A paper knight with the cure to
teenage death and body dysmorphia?

Who are you?
but small, trembling emails
and lesser known hands
wanting to touch your chest
or a memory

who are you?
Twin god
formed within Goddess Internet
and her womb of a tomb.

Who are you, my beloved?
But I, in another lifetime.
A creature without memory
but for your lips
that speak soft fire
across the numbers of time.

Salesmen

You open yourself
to the unkind,
(until you bleed,
legs wide apart)
the tapestries and
cathedrals of color,
of nausea and taste;
simultaneous Gods
eating the moon
from the phalanx of the living.

The living never accorded
beauty- only fruits and
costumes of mediocre clowns.

Punched together in a darkroom
of ribbons-
red, nervous,black handed,
bleeding daguerreotype and
Cleopatra's imagined ass.

Kneeling in Parisian boots and
Hollywood bibles upside down,
when their own throats are
injured with cigarettes
bought for cheap in a stolen
car (from a middle class
nightmare), from a middle-aged salesman
inside a television,
barking.

Kelam

The universe lay wet at your feet
Bleeding like hanging teeth
And red fire

You woke up.
Screamed.
Sighed
And dreamed of another day
Walking into yourself
Into the sun
Into the pavement


Jumping into other people
And each place that moved about
You,
Making you
Into you.


Balletic, you
Faint into the life
That is this.


Lips open
And eyes dying
Into a labyrinth of
Gazes


You fumed
And tasted
Yourself
Or something
Else
Elemental, pulsing
And cursing
Your mind
Into a quasar.


Into
The gospel of
An Unending
Organism,
That fights
And rips and eats and licks
Into the skin
Of an anonymous beast


Burnt into
Your pill,
Into your headless
Routine.
Into a soft, lucid death
That is slower than
the gaps between you
and that planet of reality.

You wake up.
You scream.
You dream.
And you die again
Into the womb
Late at night
Under your eyes.


dark mines
holding you by the throat
and your stomach
so still
with curious crying.

Black Current Grl

I've eaten pulsars 

for breakfast, Sir. 

I like being alive. 

I'm not the best girl,

But I've been called worse.

Maman

Mother,
I'm an intercity w(rec)k,
A currency of anger.
Lazy poet
Slave-girl to my own prison
Which you made with your late night interviews
And television jobs.
Mother,
Im a blood-red book destroyed by father,
his deadly-snake-psuedonymed plays.
And his salary from a young dream
Mother, I'm an ice-berg of thyroid neurosis.
Mother, you unholy icon,
I am like you in every nightmare,
Even awake.

Mother,
I'm a bitch because I was born.
Of you. Of you. Of you.

Homme

On your wrist
is this old, scarring fever
from a dream
and your sweat like a mad perfume.

lover, you were made from hair, sex and blood
but you are now a part of my cool afternoon, my bed, my mouth
Which fits perfectly into yours

you are only mortal,
but not, in this poem.
Not with my every lick fastened to your soul.