Tuesday, October 27, 2015

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.


Sunday, October 11, 2015

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.


Thursday, October 8, 2015

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.