Take 2

 War leaks through my fingers

Peace flows down the drain

Flowers bloom in my mind

Soil is in my veins

Nuclear family

Washing my skin off

Peeling my clothes back like petals. 

No radioactive waste in my goddamn house. 

You have in your suitcase

The same button I have. 

You can sign the same treaties

in the same flowery, sylvan script. 

-of peace

-of common interest

-of good intentions

but I know how you act when you're mad. 

You can rewrite history books

but I've seen it with my own eyes.

In the fields of Cornelia flowers I grew up in

And the soft wooly winter threading over the whispering hills

You sent me a bomb,

and you know that bombs kill. 

War is wet. It seeps and it stays.

Acid rain blurs words like 

Tearstains on a journal page.

People die. Peat peaks out of bogs

The massacre cannot all be blamed on the fog. 

(the land remembers)

I believe in revolution and I don't believe in lies. So when you say

"Revolution is a mother who eats her children" I know the old laws no longer apply. 

I travel light. 

I keep my phone on me. 

I don't want to hurt anyone in your half-hearted army. 

I can long for a revolution 

And run from this one. 

I want to live in a world 

Where I can still see the sun. 

Failed Haiku

Lost love like leftover snow
In serendipitously seesawing southern winter
The days should be warm enough to melt it
But the nights are just cold enough to keep it

True

we walk in
the room is glistening white
the purity of
teardrop diamond snowflakes in a
virgin russian forest, mosaic
laces, passed down for centuries
adorning the mahogany tables
weeping softly like
spanish moss.

"i've never been to a dinner party like this before" i say as you put one hand at the small of my back as your other pulls out my chair
like we're two swimming souls in some opera's covert balcony, surrounded in
dark velvet hush.
you slide a note to me,
I wonder why, since we can talk
Freely.

Then rush in the rustlings of Taffeta, satins, the Shuffling of
imported Italian leather shoes
Only now do I realize that the Note had been News
Everyone lets their Feathers fall like Swans in Pews.
It's time to bless the Feast
but you've already Eaten before,
So You Leave
The Screech Of Mahogany And Tile
<<my eyes search for your eyes
beseeching you to
stay a while>>

How Dare You Leave Me Here
Like A Perfect Gent
Your Polite Calligraphy Appearing To Tie Up
Every Loose End

***

I feel my chest breaking open
like a pomegranate.

Glistening, Slick, Garnet
(sounds like a rain-song hitting the floor)

At this Point, You're Almost to the Door.

If you Won't Stay, I at Least Want
You Sullied.

<<can't let you know I'm begging for more>>

Then I notice you're already red;

<< i wonder who stained you before>>

Lady Liberty Wakes Up

Squishes the tyrants with her

10 foot thumb

Sifts the refugees

Into her green hands

Puts them in

Cozy warm suburban homes

God likes this:

Puts versions of her

All across the world

In harsh channels and

Electrified borders

Now there aren’t hurricanes but

Hushed lullabies

Now there aren’t bombs but

Fresh-baked bread.

Now we’re not jaded

But wreathed in

Jasmine

Covering Up Your Side of the Couch with Pillows and Poems

I am all out of

Poetry for tonight

All I know is

I can’t take you with me.

Ascension Gold

You told me

“I hope you let go of your fear of missing out on everything”

Little boy.

I am a tumbleweed.

I will drive a car off a cliff

Just to prove that I can

Just to see what free-fall feels like

I am all seasons

The pain and loneliness of winter

The heat and sex of summer

The self-reflection of autumn

The reemerging blossoms of women, gulping for air in spring

I am a ballerina alone in the desert

I am a cat that can see ghosts

I am Cleopatra

I am Guy Fawkes

I will write all my poems in my own blood

I will learn every goddamn language on this planet

I will swim with the crocodiles in the Nile

I will swim with my demons on all the nights you aren’t here

I will slay a dictator myself

I will save all the children from hunger and pillaging

I will learn ancient Asian calligraphy

I will learn to captain a ship

I will learn to lead a salt march

I will let a lover tattoo over my heart in a 1960’s free-love kinda way

I will grow my own marijuana

And skateboard down the Canadian highway

-trailing my fingers along the asphalt

And swordfight

-leaving my marks on cheeks

And have a threesome

-leaving drinking a cupful or orgasm for breakfast

And be up there with

Simone de Beauvoir

 When I have come skidding to a halt

I will be curled up like a hermit crab on a beach

Awaiting my abduction to Venus

Whispering lovingly to myself:

I am mine. I am mine. I am mine.