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ms. scarlet harlot bovary
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[31 Aug 2007|12:32pm] |
In the morning
When the cat, draped like sack
cloth on the radiator, slept
And the slight smell of hair hung
Crisply in the house, I walked
To your crib, kneeding
My knuckles, my palms.
I needed the dough
Of your small hands,
In my hands in place of the shards,
So came, cutting my feet on the broken glass,
Desperately minding silence, each step,
Each cut, hushed. But you heard,
Those ears always alive like a nervous bird
Catching every adumbration of the air,
And stood clasping the bars
To steady your delicate legs, upright.
And when I came in, you looked
Out, at me, and I looking out
At you,
From my crib of filth felt the need too
To be lifted.
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[31 Aug 2007|12:09pm] |
The Mistress
I served first the whore
Of my house, who came
That night in the same dress,
(A gift no doubt,
As mine was). The black
Velvet crushed at our breasts,
Twin, when we stood in each other’s eyes
Talking shallow things, I could see
My face: the age etched in
Venomous wrinkles that penetrated
My thoughts with poison. You saw
A goddess in the pools of my look,
A goddess warrior, an heiress
Of love, and smiled. Young turk.
At dinner I served you first,
The compliment of my bread,
Eat and be merry
I said, "Eat and be married to him
For all I damn care."
I bared my breasts, I spat
And a sudden thousand aders
Seized from my scalp, and spat
With me a sea so roiling it killed us all,
It carried the dishes
Out the door, it gathered the roses
In the garden away, it crushed Christ
Against the abyss, and settled to silence.
After, all I could hear was silence,
And the sound of him coming
Quietly in.
Untitled
We will loose this season
Soon, the cold will come
Crushing the starlings from
The inadequate breast of the eaves,
These the inherited mansions of ice.
And their gardens below will ceed
The flowers to melancholy
Brown grasses. The cricket
Crystallized to the street lamp,
Will make a sad memory of summer parties
When we listened to them sing,
Making love in the open air.
Even now, the strain is dying, dulling
In the premature dusk.
Untitled
Cunt, is a confrontation
Of nature and infection.
The monster there, in the dark
Crooks, curling it’s tail round
The rinds of rotten fruits and desolate
Skeletons of men has a face like Brooke Shields's
And smiles, perfect white pearls.
Cunt is a truth, is a translation,
Related across generations,
First from the holy
Hands of men, from God in the great mirage,
And so we do not question what.
We are Cunt, the daughters of frailty, the
heiresses of hysterical wombs and Tampax.
Oh sad little holocaust!
They sent our mothers, going back forever,
And us as young girl things, down
To salvation. We got pink lipstick
And our clits stitched, we got picture shows
Of generations stuck like pigs with apples in
On the gallows of the pit. We watched them burn
In a boiling sea of menarche, and were told
These are our children, and our blood burning.
And when it was done,
We were indoctrinated in repentance,
And excepted are aureole’s in silence,
Like so many Brooke Shields,
Smiling, perfect white pearls.
So many monsters.
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[25 Aug 2007|02:19am] |
since you left, three months back, forever.
the ache reduces me to a god,
grey in my world
temple of incompletion. the ache ruminates
deeper than the meat, in the basins
of my bone, boils and vaporizes
from my mouth. sighs,
all i speak in now,
obscure the clock, and the sun
in veils, in shrouds, oh god.
the hours are lovers, ensconced
in a single body, a sickly figure,
a pachederm. there is nothing beyond,
this hour. not even you.
untitled
the day is a lament
of your absence from it.
even the birds are pitful
choirs singing desperate hymnals to you.
even the clouds,
pews for the aching thousand
thoughts of worship that list
from my skin, from my eyes,
from the palms off my upturned,
empty hands. my hands, even
these are lament. impotent, they
droop from the wrists,
and seize figures of you in the cold air.
they agonize. even my hands weep.
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| the ring is in the dish |
[27 Jun 2007|02:49pm] |
this morning, getting out of the shower, dan found the ring corey made me in high school on the high ledge of the shower door. i remember the day he gave it to me. we were just children then, but we said big words to each other. i love you. stay with me. and the ring- it was suppose to mean something back then- a promise i think, to keep saying big words to each other, and to stick around after that unbelievable day when high school would be over.
the metal is tarnished now, and the ring is too wide for my fingers. it spins and slides off of all but my thumb, where the knuckle catches it and holds on. i was shocked when dan handed it to me. this man that i love- really- this man i hope will be the last man, the one that brushes hair out of my eyes in the morning when i'm not so young and shiney. this man- my heart- handing me a promise someone made to me a long time ago. a promise i wore.
i slid the ring on and off of my fingers probably only a few moments, but i slipped away for years in to memories. corey was the first big thing. we fell for each other in junior high. i remember the dance. i remember how his arms were as sparsely haired as mine then, and how we stood almost eye to eye. we took each other's virginity when we were 16, in the spring i think. it was friday the thirteenth. the tv was on- a movie. we only had sex a few times after. i would cry, worrying about the ominous eyes of god on coreys back as he pressed inside of me. i thought about hell when he moved his hands between my legs, and was sure the sting and the blood spelled out a prophecy of worse things to come. i believed in an ugly god then, and i don't remember how much, if any of my worrying i ever told corey.
i think i did love him then- as much as a young thing can. he wrote i love you in christmas lights on the lawn once, and had them burn for me. they were brilliant. a bright white i think- like stars. his hair was blue on my fifteenth birthday. we had a spaghetti fight. we sledded. and i remembered- turning that ring over and slidding it down my thumb where it fastened- one afternoon we laid naked in the sun on his back deck. it was bright like the lights on the lawn that night. i wasn't worried about god then- just if i looked fat.
i don't remember when i took the ring off. i think maybe several times over these years i have found it, worn it, and pulled it away from me again. some day i must have washed his memory off in the shower and set the ring on the ledge, likely at the end of another affair, or at the some rocky pass in a relationship. i come back to the first big thing at moments like that. i will wear the memory it as a means of guiding myself from love or to love, or i will take the memory off- take myself off- that scared girl- that lover- that young thing, naked on the porch, worrying about her thighs- worrying about god's eyes.
i wore the ring this morning for a few minutes, but felt heavy and awkard against my finger. i want my hands free for dan. i want to feel him without the distraction of ghosts. even great ghosts that throw spaghetti and kiss slowly and have beautiful, beautiful eyes.
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[16 Jun 2007|12:58pm] |
Still Born in Photographs
In the Sacred Heart
Maternity ward, a camera flash illuminates
The tiny fingers, the tiny toes,
And bellies, so much like ripe plums
With the stems still on. These fruits,
Will be turned over in the hands of a memory,
Pristine in their impotence, flavorless
But bitter. Remember thy father,
Remember thy mother- her lip
Etched in a flash on a testemony
That is the only thing to bring home.
The basonet becomes a frame,
The cool blue quilt a page
For these figures, these ten little fingers,
Ten toes, that move only the heart.
-------------------------------
I drink yerba matte
Because I will not take the pills.
And run,
And run until my teeth ache,
And run,
Against the bulls. Because
I will not willow beneath the heft
Of a nameless gray,
Because I will not hang
Beside the papery bodies of my family,
Because I am fire and I believe
Perhaps in this cup, this run, this day
I will stand
Up.
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[16 Jun 2007|12:53pm] |
Midwestern Refugees
Nadiri works the fork sector
Of the line, in the utensil factory,
Down river of the city. Licoln rises
In the distant future outside
A small window in the break room,
Making promises. Nadiri listens
To the silohettes, and shares the cigarette
Air with others sisters, all of them
Kin now to the safety of Nebraska.
And when the whistle tugs
At her waist, and the girls go gaggling
Back to the line, pulling the cheap
Manadatory nets over the wild chocolate
Bristle of their hair,
They will turn forks over in their hands,
Remembering the road that led here.
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[16 Jun 2007|09:19am] |
Rummi
When man awakens
In the house of God
He melts; the body
Become yellow
Pools like butter in the Sun.
-------------------
In your hand
My heart foliates, snake
Shapes in the rock, sinous
Ridges ripple the granite,
Flesh in your palm.
My heart melds
To your long fingers
For a moment,
Tangles
In love, and is soft,
And is Molten,
And is forever a dove,
Caught, out of rock.
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[04 Jun 2007|08:27pm] |
I can't decide if I should continue on from "and this is visionary," of if it just gets redundant. I feel like the second, longer one says too much--- forces too much on the reader.
I have met visionaries:
Poet, Addict,
News Baron, media
Starlet. I have met
Myself in the mirror,
In the morning, pretending
The pallor is ancient and
The wear of the night, a testament
To the beautiful volatility of youth.
I have met the flavor of god
In the mouth of a pastor,
And another god and another
Like suckling pearls in the oyster
bays of many mouthes.
I have met truth in portrait:
Photograph, acryllic, canvas,
Poem, and media of blood.
I have met truth a thousand times
Delineated in self help tracts
And in the tracks on lank arms.
And this is visionary.
-------------------------------------
I have met visionaries:
Poet, Addict, News Baron,
Media starlette. I have met
Myself in the mirror, in the morning,
Pretending the pallor is ancient
And the wear of the night a testement
To the beautiful volatility of youth.
I have met the pretense of god in the mouth
Of a pastor, who claims to know him
Better. I have met the portrait of the truth
A thousand times drawn in self help
Tracts and in the tracks of lank arm.
And this is visionary. We are all
Visionary. The drum-drunk dancer careening
Around a desert fire, the meticulous surgeon
Orchestrating a new arch of nerve, the ponchey cat
Comatose in dream, the new mother in agony
Of life, the capitalist at the helm
Of a rich genius, the suicide
Rattling from himself, a last exhale,
All visionary, but the child
sees nothing but color and light
and is the only clear eye.
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[04 Jun 2007|08:06pm] |
What growth! A city
Rises from a city beneath;
The marrow of another age
Become the meat of this.
Kings build the thrones
That empires sit, and grow
Gardens of metal and flowering
Glass that reach for each other,
That tangle and become the new Eden.
What miracle! The compass and the nail
Inspire the blood of a boys
And the awe That will become
The hammer and the rise
Of newness. Never mind
How the shadow increases;
How the cool promenade deepens;
The engineer, the people, reduce
To ants, to salt, to myth of streets
We cannot see anymore. Never mind
The gashes of alleys, where ghosts
Play dice, and piss at the foundation.
The echelons are all the light
Of the sun, the city is a beacon.
The world is on fire in Heaven,
And we are a million kings.
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[04 Jun 2007|07:35pm] |
I lost something in Rwanda.
In the water. In the muddy
grooves of their tires.
The rebels.
I lost something in their pockets,
Down the barrel of the guns. I can hear
The ping of dropping: tin on pavement,
The ring. I can hear it
Rattle off the windows, and shiver
The ceiling. At night,
The Midwestern escape holds
A wide hand against the abyss
Beneath my feet. Holds me up.
Out of the abyss, out of the water,
And the muddy groove of my country,
The gash that rebells against forgetting. I am
A woman still, that much not lost.
I am a woman, only, naked and balmed
In sweat that will not wash
Even under the cold scour of snow.
I cannot wash off Africa, cannot detergent
The old clothes which are too weary
To withstand a good rinse. I am not
The sweat, not the country, not
The cloth but these I wear- these wear
Me. And I am at the market asking for casava
the produce boy whose blush is a pallor.
I am frying plaintains I do not eat,
I am silent within the smell. Hold me. Let me
Go. Trinkets, my body, let me go
And be the ghosts you are, be the lost
You are. Please,the trill of the guns
Is the sparrow's morning
Alarm, and war in the scandal of racoons,
upturning the night on the lid of a dumpster.
I have lost something in Rwanda,
But it has not lost me. The blood follows,
The ache of a ruptured love, of
His head easing out on to grasses. I cannot misplace
The heaps, bloody ditches of flith,
The circling menace, the prick
Of my last
Child on the bayonet of war. And the moon
Over refuge is a hollow
In the hand of a darker peace.
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[11 May 2007|07:52pm] |
(hey pidgeon...i like you.)
we're not sleeping.
we are
speaking
until morning
crushes the last shadows in the corners
of the city. in this one,
you are a nation
i trace the borders of. everything therein
contained that is enough
to sustain me, i think.
maybe
i could walk in you
and you through me. just walk softly.
just kiss
enough
to sustain me
in this corner of the city,
when we aren't sleeping,
when we aren't sleeping
when we
are speaking
secrets, stories,
vowels and in expressions
from our married mouths
until the morning
crushes the shadows, and
our hearts.
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[26 Apr 2007|01:48pm] |
Untitled
shoe gazing once
you said you saw
the aspen stand
up from your left
busted flat, the green salute:
the memory of another
place, not this house in south texas,
or the last,
gray city block that broke
the seams. you were
gondry first. but
La Science des Reves made it possible
for us all to be
big-
ger than the banality
of every theatre. at the deli
afterward we were all gondry
and you,
were eating a sandwhich
made of mountains, like your mother
might sew. every monday
was always this way, but never
so much so as now that
what you see,
(certainly, that canoe caught
in the forest is mine
too) from the screen
clarified the vista
of the trailors,
every west texas, and every gray
city block too. all that dreamy
banality, really
is a dream isn’t?...
yes.
we are in utah, we are
walking beneath aspens.
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[22 Apr 2007|08:19pm] |
The Loss
What comes is brown first.
The bloody veils
Of mucus color mud my pale
Thighs. My thighs yesterday,
flesh and bone, now
Like inlets to a vast sea
Refusing its bounds. The waves
Of cramp that sweep, sweep away
My breath,
My
Voice
The hours. Gone,
Forever in a flush, a daughter,
Perhaps, a son, now
Horrible flesh,
Only,
A husk. I will worship.
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[16 Apr 2007|05:49pm] |
It is always already
Happening:
the crocus bloom renders obsolete
the painful winter and this
curdles the flesh of people on the streets
when they are already gone to bed
in summer, beneath coronas of rust
and ruddy leaf. the dream is over.
it is already always in motion:
the dance and the last step also, the first
echoing from the pivot, toe point
of a ballerina god. already the dark
intermingles with the lightest hours
of our spring. the shade depletes the green
in places, chides us. today is over and tomorrow
a pulse in the evanescent moment. it is always,
already. it is
happening.
Untitled
the naked artists stands in the open
gallery space, screaming for soil, the smell
of the lost, feeling. in a room of artificial black cloud
seekers view constructs of a new god,
working from the cumulus trash and spools
of electrical tape. this is nature
in the modern age: a garden of plasticity
overflows from coffee pots of sod in the light
of six tiny, combustible suns. this is eden
reduced to a revelation of detritus and wads of gum
he says this is the great empire:
a massive television
streaming porno and deodorant ads
flashes intermittently electric shocks of the flag,
bloody flag looming over the brave, they say
are, the proud, and the free in plastic cuffs.
our hands on the screen are in plastic cuffs.
and our eyes
are shackled to the man, naked and foetal
in a polychemical eden, in the city
of our profits, in the spotlight of
greatness.
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[12 Apr 2007|01:37pm] |
On The Diagnosis of Your Cancer
the car struck head on.
the cancer
sublimed in the spinal cord on the screen
as you watched the bloom
ruin. the car struck,
and the heart, impenetrable, realized itself:
only meat. an orchard of corrupted nerves,
and dendritel shoots of blood
on the pavement bloomed and burst
in the same instant, in you.
the car,
the impact,
the earth itself revolving
in violent pirouette
blurred the hours. your face
reflected on the screen was
not your’s. a word and the façade
balded. the sudden gust that blew you
from your cells showed it only a skull,
a roost of pigeons, quivering
against the encroaching dusk.
and quivering, your body:
sad flesh husk, dissolving around you. dissolved,
your life compressed beneath the crush
of the car;
the sublime flower
in your spine;
the car
the car
the car;
your life
death
came head on,
came in a flower.
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[11 Apr 2007|07:04pm] |
The fodder of empire is corpses
And empire, a corpse standing
Belligerently atop petrified laurels
On a throne of bay reduced
To ash in the vice grip of expended gods.
We know.
In halls we walk the artifacts of other kings,
More man than god: the centurion
And marmoreal Caesars, dry bone of giants, blood
Jewels of Inca- only husks of meaning.
These catalogued properties of the new Alexandria,
These graves and dead explained in portent epitaph,
Unread despite the rape of lascivious eyes
Instruct only the desire of glory greater than.
Tourists of the ruin read nothing of their Parthenon,
Hear none of the dead but their victorious howls,
Understand the augury of vultures and bloodied fountains
As science or nothing. The vice grip of god
Descending is only our shadow cast on the sun.
What we know by wrote:
The expendable sun and the sable
Of sons in the violent dusk that is
(We know now)
Always come to expunge the light where there was dawn and day
We do not know at all. The hallows of history
That weather beneath the ceaseless pageant
Of unfeeling feet are sick shrines to power.
The ghosts of embarrassed kings, glorified
As young lords, cutting their teeth on gold and fresh bone
Of chattel lands, writhe in agony of another fall,
Seeming perpetual. We ride the dragon
That will turn to us for meat when plunder exhausts,
Will grow gaseous on our fool gasps and die.
We know
Nothing of what we know by wrote. Empire is growth
Of death from death, and death itself grown
Mad with profit. It feeds on coins and blood,
Grows pregnant with rich carrions, and the earth itself consumed;
Will birth the death, finally of itself
In a cold dusk, impoverished
Even of light.
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[01 Apr 2007|03:17pm] |
everything convinces you of cancer.
the early aches that turn you out of bed
to pace. the evening sweats
that scare spumes from the flesh.
the sudden blur;
the room reduced
when someone speaks too quickly,
when the news reports casualties and industry reports
chinese revolution. the turn
of your stomach without signal
soured. the moan of pores,
the moan that eshews calm, so sought.
you are sure it is cancer, the monster come
from the closets of your bone to reveal hells.
you are sure it is
cancer. it is cancer. it is cancer.
what else?
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| i lounge and i look i lounge and i look for my own true love to return |
[01 Apr 2007|03:16pm] |
you said we make a beautiful pair
of handicapped doves.
my head, packed with cotton and sod from the old house:
hospital of my child madness and lonely growth up,
is almost too big to share the room with.
Your animal heart knaws the furniture, drinks and roars
in the early morning so that the neighbors hate us.
I found garbage in the mail slot, and someone wrote dikes!
on our door in nail polish, but
we are a beautiful pair,
handicapped as we are.
In the morning, in the muggy bedroom
where we barely breathe, we are beautiful
beasts in the shared maw of our dreams.
in the hard, iron waters, we absolve each other
in ivory soap, emerge everyday clean in each other's hands.
we are beautiful dikes. what more?
what less would god make of us than this:
imperfect distillations of love
in flesh imperfect, and life in perfect
balance with our hearts that grow
more perfect
on our handicaps and light.
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[31 Mar 2007|07:12pm] |
Che
fired:
nine bullets through the humid flesh,
cut the blood from the voice
of birds that were his revolution.
cut his soul in nine places. and the hands
of the jungle silence spread trembling apart
for his death. he was only a man.
asphyxiated of blood. he died (only a man)
on the packed dirt floor of a martyr’s barn (only).
after, a priest made silent benedictions on his head,
clean prayers from dirty hands traced last graces
on the face of an atheist, whose milky eyes sank
then from light, sank behind yellow corona of lid.
only a man, coward, you see?
they made him a death prop, a trophy, a proof.
on a narrow bed set him up to shoot again.
cameras burst violently so that for moments
this dead with pangs of light glowed.
this is the face of-
but he lived too much, burned through the black
and white photographs of nations'
papers. so, they cut also his hands, to name him by;
to call him dead (only a man). cut beneath
the unmalleable fist, through the damp bone,
softening. only a man, coward, see?
they held his hands in their hands, his name.
this is the death of-
but tongues turned to dry root, like bone
petrified in gaping mouths and the people
stirred beneath balconies. they could not speak
him dead, could not name him
(only a man). so, they buried him
in the secret dirt, and shot the flowers that grew
wildly from his rind. this is the grave of
only a man they hid for fear of a name;
for fear of the man alive. But the Young
and the Believing felt his beacon in the dirt,
found the skeletal totem of his revolution,
and carried it from shadowed cloisters
on their backs out of the stillness
to the cities, to the stage of nations
to be seen, alive. Viva!
The Unconquerable Idea
Viva! The hot bloods of Birth
of Peasants, of Flowers that will not be shot!
Viva! Viva! Viva! shoot,
coward! you kill only yourself.
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[08 Mar 2007|06:22pm] |
Woman Found Cleaning House,
Her Husband Dead on the Floor.
When they found her, she danced
pacing rounds like tides
rushing forward, receeding
over unfelt shores. Carpet that was
was not anymore, except in mats
uprooted and snarled in the vacuum,
littered across the irredeemable floors,
bloodied and besought
in the motions of her dancing. The floors
could never be clean.
her toes retreated, heels receeded
to bone and blood that muddied more
what she polished. The floor could never be clean
When they found her lakes fed from vein tributaries
yawned sea-wide and swept on to the lawn as they opened
the door. It’s there, It’s there! The burnt out eye
felt them first, his face lit in places, his body
burned and cut on the floor barraded
their tardiness. Where were you
in the profuse season of my bruise?
When fists rutted and uprooted
My skins? They found her aching
over the dissaray with towel and sponge, vaccum
running in place over the burnt frays of rug.
They found her
in mania, scratching for absolution
in crusting blood. He always liked
the house clean. He demanded.
Where were you when-
They took her home to jail, minding the bruise
bangles that rung her wrists, ashamed
of the new cuffs that upbraided
them more. Where were you?
When they found her, she was dancing;
pacing steps in circuit of her agony,
how many times? The floor irreedemable,
the bures of dug how deep? How long
the light capasized in the moribund purple
of love's seizure? The tears
the tears the tears!
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