Her hands, ink fast fingers, sweep-curl of words are graceful beats and flow and thumping glide, a slide guitar wrapped around syllables wood-block foot tapping lips wrapping a breathless harp, notes leaping out a five story window and catching on a blues woman’s voice, heartbeat of Chicago, of the Delta, places I will never know, skin I have never been in but for moments with her words– Bessie, Aretha, Etta, […]
On the day Whitney Houston died, you texted with teary-eyed poor grammar, the first thing you did when you found out was to go to bought her greatest hits. Ears deaf to most sounds: the vibrations and pitches she could hit, belt— you could hear. And I think that’s why I can remember you naming The Bodyguard your favorite movie. When you were laid up in your final days, dad […]
“I remember feeling ashamed, for some reason. I was ashamed of my parents. I couldn’t face some of my friends at school anymore, because I desperately wanted to have the classic, you know, typical family.” – Kurt Cobain When you tell our children about Nirvana don’t begin with the shotgun shell, his box-shaped heart. Tell them about his childhood. Tell them about ADD, divorce, bipolar disorder. Tell them […]
This poem is a Google Adwords ad intruding into the sidebar of your heart. It’s a 1-800-LAWYERS commercial making you money off your personal injury. It’s a brutal, bloody UFC bout weak in its ground game but knows its Jiu-Jitsu and it’s got you on the mat, begging you to tap out. This poem is FUBAR, a SNAFU waiting to happen. It’s the tear gas America uses against its own […]
“I find science analytical, pretentious and superficial–largely because it does not address itself to dreams, chance, laughter, feelings, or paradox–in other words, all the things I love the most.” –Luis Buñuel If I’m not mistaken, those guys in orange jumpsuits lean on their shovels and light cigarettes when they ought to be digging my grave. That blowing smoke and confidential talk— Women are all the same.— our brains bathed […]
Lie awake at night in the cool surf between the greyness of sharks and the dream of teeth dropping like petals in the pinkness of Spring. Each night the house Witch chased me from basement to attic, Lion bit a big hole in my little leg, my Dark-Mare galloped on; I flew, pedal to the air, my gored knee rattling like my son’s baby teeth, tic-tacs boxed in my pocket, […]
The machines in the frigid ICU were silent. The IVs were stopped and so was her heart. No respiration moved the sheet pulled over her face, But the brain was still functioning, although weakly. She was like a meteor that had fallen from space Into the frosty night of the Arizona desert, her outer Shell cold around a still warm but steadily chilling core. She thought, so this is the […]
Approximation The grandfather points out the witch at the market who comes to buy mushrooms and stare at postcards. She touches the sand dollar wind chimes, retracting her hand as the dry bodies musically crash. She strokes the sharp scales of fish lain in shaved ice, tries to discern the words caught in their gills. She has forgotten the art of existence, the […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 