Pregnant

Rumble fish twist
and you're pregnant.

Strawberry chocolate Ice -
cream watermelon,
cigarettes.
Punching holes in the
cardboard wall at night,
I'd rather wait 'till morning
to hate you.

You can't have coffee,
you can't have alcohol,
you can't Spanish step,
what kind of mother are you?
Yet, Lucky Strike before
corrected smoky blend, after sex,
(what kind of mother are you?)

Rumble fish twist
and you're pregnant,
where good things might

Surgery Central

In surgery central
is a table – its
surface plastified
plywood – I have a
patient there.
Its name: three
thousand words, the
illness – can't speak of.
Anaemic starved narrow
like these lines of sort – but
this, chance;
that, my patient;
both, my doing.

My Kitchen

The most fragile of
kitchen utensils in
my array is
the scalpel, the body
attached quivers as
if a seraph was
disapprovingly glaring
from up above.

My hand, it smells of
cheap starlet lips and
croquet burns and
the tendon, strained
by living under. My
hand envies the
flashy, smothering
heat of the electric stove,
as it can be switched at will.
The scalpel can switch too,
not quite the same.

She is the scalpel. The
mother, the aunt, the
sister, the friend, the refuse
the tired, the starlet
and the lipstick, the
hand and the tendon,
the scalpel.

Dreary, Linda

crawls to the mouth of her
bathtub, listless, demand
stay where you are
gently, useless
all hidden things not
hers;
demanding, listless.

Two words festoon
the same cornersteps,
mostly painless.
A weight, stars to be
hold, breathless
crawls to the deep end of her
bathtub, coarse hair;
not mine.

You cannot ingratiate
marble, sparkless,
a monument to your day
useless, demanding.
In a sense a joy to behold
sparse, tasteless
washed in the froth of
your day;
listless.

You Do Not Need It

To you, who have chosen to
be an angel of nothing from now on,
I ask: get off the higher ground
and swallow down the need to fly
off the walls of Billings Senior High.

You do not need it.
Much easier to shrink down 'till
a current has more will than you
do, on your best day.
Begin by denying who you are,
continue by dodging the
strength that begs you to be,
end by scratching your head against
that wall you wanted so
badly to see pass you by.

It has seen millions like you, it will
see more millions like you, millions
upon millions, moonlight in shape of
bodies just like you.
Falling sons and daughters
I consent to your demise,
repealing all my
loving care for you;
You do not need it.

Anyway, June

If we could have back that
June that was ours years ago,
icicles to mouth, white yellow
parasols and those pretty ones
by the wash, minding
my business, or so I hoped.
I am tired of
“no exposure to sunlight
from 9 am to 8 pm”
I am tired of stretches
- pathetic sandhills, skysucking
weeds even more pathetic.
Give me back a June to live,
August had its share and
all other months are gone
anyway.

When You Disconnect

When you disconnect:
in the pillow morning, at
night, in the blotting
sunlight – you practice
a strangle strategy that
is a survival strategy
as well.

You are internet,
sconnected, your body is
growing problematic
yet your problem no longer.
Re-sconnected, it's yours
again.

The constraints,
3000 words
2 – hour runtime
do not concern you
do not feed synapses
do not do.

Out there, in the novel warmth
your body is crimson coral,
your heart is the world's clam.

An Hospital's Parking Lot

Virgo, Libra, Scorpio
it's a progressive descent.
The voice of the undertow
miles from the sea, spoken
by birches and planes
in the balmy,
sickness night.

Me, you, the autumn dressed
one and the prideful one,
none of us so evil but
it came anyway.
It comes
your way, no matter what,
whirring (softly spoken) in the
breath of all that hums,
that angelic dynamo
runs its course - not under
standing, not pretending to
understand.

Not wanting to understand,
farther yet from sickness:
it's a progressive ascent.
Scorpio, Libra, Virgo

Angelus

Angela is happy. God is
good and there is no
drama to take upon her
shoulders, beside friends
and/or what is good;
amid the jungle of her delicacies
(tucked in are family pictures, one
member often to be found)
drawers that bad thing sleeps tonight.

She has sutured yesterday
successfully, and the attentive
viewer can barely discern the
feeble limp – chips of words do
still come out wrong from
time to time – scratching the tiny
wound between her front teeth,
threatening disclosure and clawing
for disclosure, as Angela gasps feeble.

She has an array – lines of
magical invisible shelves
hanging over her shoulders
so to carry those, imparted,
who know that God is good
– it is tiring, having
to drill it in yourself
day after day.
Angela is happy. God is still
good, drama is blue – faced in a
distant corner and she's right
where she is supposed to be.

What Erin Won't Say

What Erin won't say
because I'd make me break:

“Nothingness is good
but nothingness is deaf
yet not quite the same
as dead – her big incorpo
ration is pulling straws
together, somewhere by
the acute angle of a bed
and bedroom, inches from
a ledge and her incubators,
children she lined up
like in a boring movie
where an apple won't
mean an apple ever,
like the straws that tie
men's hands together
in time and in crime,
Erin was nothing but a
doubt, waiting to become
a wrecked interstate fault.”

Modena II

There is a condom that
is not a condom – it sets
sail at the slightest gale -
over my city's phallus,
drilling God's heavens,
soaking water and erect.
When did my Second Mother
get one, tho? I have been far from
her womb (that one is true)
much too long, and without
my funny motions it's all
twistles and tangles to her.

Feminism, unconsciously, has
done its work upon the
chauvinist forms of my city – and
it was a man, no less – except
if you walked by the pavements
and arches, you'd know
my city never began to be
a man in the first place.

The Brittle Tool

An howling blast shatters
the windowpanes of my
decrepit, infimous nest
when I hold in my hand,
tremulous, that siphon of hate
so violent and grave – reed
that cuts my dry lips in
caverns and chasms of lunar
proportions, fingernails that
must splinter at every second,
an alliteration for you:
castana chiara scolopendra
I express therefore I am
not a thing, a liquid with
no orgasm behind it to speak of.

The Datura that Grows in My Backyard

Her seat is by the north
eastern windowpane – my
favourite, where the morning
bitter aftertaste and chill don't
hurt nearly as bad – and a glass of
milk balancing her weary head,
eyes already closing in.
It works for some, old
fables told me; I will have
lonely peace for a while.

I have penned twentysix pages
since then – below average, no sides
and no development whatsoever, my
hand really could use a muse, or
a Cassandra at least – yet still
there she is, fast asleep, dreaming
of me being in her dreams.
But rose coloured is all that matters
to me, so I don't want to know that.

The Harrow

I.

Curled upon a framed hill, by an oily shore
not to know, not to explore, the trapped
into their heirloom desperation, upon me
the depth creatures of loss scuttle furtive
digesting rust and oxide of centuries old.
I not understand the gravity of my actions, I,
I am thoroughly flayed by the fiery current,
channeller of that which is irretrievable;
harrow down the steel frame slopes
presaged by the small, heartless Morningstar
all across, to its scalding polar opposite.
I want nothing more than be not,
farewell to this brief nightmare
shaking and grinding at its own loss.

II.

This twilight saved in a red shoebox
just for me, how precious!
Precious, just for me. Only to me.
I do wish nightmares to never end,
as they are a sign that dreaming is still
working its harrow within me, that I can
birth both my elation and my depression;
there is a whole universe that does
not include beauty, yet can only be
understood as its eventual expression.

The Familiar - A Trattoria in Modena

Ludovico Muratori, you bastard
- five years of torture many have suffered
in your name, misused and abused -
both your inordinate historiographical
bacchanalia and your unwavering faith in accruing
the redundant find pleasurable abandon in the
museum of intellectual cramps and
Italian – too Italian – that
these four restaurant walls are.

I do not know if you might really speak
of buon gusto or perfect Italian poetry; after
all it took us centuries to reach spiritual
advancements such as too much cream in our
tortellini, too much grease in our ragu', too many
picky children for too desperate yet caring parents
seating by the corner under that ugly, ugly pink goat.

Still, you would surely cherish, though perhaps
not applaud, the good hands – rubberband laden -
in which you left your future children, evenly
divided between those who struggle to fill the plate,
and those who fight to empty it.

(Another quick one from Robin Behn's - was supposed to mimick a Ginsberg poem. Orly?)

Playing Tubes

Nodes cramp despondent,
then crumble in flecks as
the pressure falters

twin sickly
white brass tubes
hold no longer and mourn

quiver ever so slightly
- in the face of hypocrisy –
chisel my bones down
to the marrow

pale flesh
that, may it be blessed,
remains sensitive yet
well out of sight

Temple of Chaos

Nightly suspension turns
electrified, in that realm
of intangible undercurrents
- cloud enveloped arcoiris
and the summit barely
there, tangential to
deep space lightstream -
that is the Temple of Chaos.

Sudden becomes matter;
no presence but that of
the aspiring time-traveller is,
in that fractured formless
within the Temple of Chaos.

Fuse

I do not know why
writers loves the word
melt so much,
it rolls under the tongue
like so much overblown whale
carcass, cooking in the sun
of a sixteen year old
falling down on herself
for no reason
at all.

Anthology

Rather, a withered
exocorpses collection;
a more practical tool,
no urge for needles
and pins to hold
quiet what's still.