good god
i am filled with lead
not the hot lead
you would expect
being slung around
by cagney or bogart
but the kind that
fills the blood
coagulates it like venom
presses down on the muscles
demands your eyes to close
and you you want to say
yes
Tag: poetry
tiresias speaks from hades (20170306)
what did oedipus see
after he pinned his eyes
in place in his skull
all
he banished himself
not because he was unfit to be king
not because he had brought a curse upon thebes
but now he could see light in every corner
under every stool
he could not bear the illumination
he was tempted to pull those pins free
but stayed his hand
if his eyes ever moved again
rolling in his sockets
their sudden freedom
would have blanketed him in darkness
and his sleep would have been peaceful
and his voice silent
silk (20170305)
i let the spiders under my skin
with the understanding
that there would be spinning
in my blood
yet
i did not anticipate
the delicate tattooing
of your face and your name
on the inside of my skin
invisible in daylight
but available under near darkness
marrow for pigment and sharpened
spinnerets for needles
the gentle humming put me to sleep
many nights and i dreamed
of ink and web and shattering glass
with the lights out but for
a single candle
you can read my skin
and find yourself
stitched in glittering filament
little seeds (20170304)
the cosmic farmer plants a seed
a small black hole in every sun
some will sprout in that plasma
we plant a seed of darkness too
in every beating human heart
no coincidence that blood is hot
nintendo (20170303)
click click
nintendo switch
no time for haiku
apocalypse (20170302)
he wandered for a year
among corpses and deserted buildings
one morning everyone had gone mad
and each body he found was
riddled with bullets
every cartridge emptied, every magazine spent
he hoped that, now,
since he really was the last man on earth
if he could find a woman,
he might finally get some action
but that seemed less likely
with each new sunset
animals avoided him
he thought, not out of fear
but out of some kind of pity
the supermarkets were still stocked
even though the fresh food had rotted
cans and boxes were plentiful
the food had expiration dates
years in advance
cereal bars and beef jerky
he never spotted another person
man or woman
and after a while
he stopped talking even to himself
he knew he’d never be able to bury the dead
not all of them
not even all of the ones
in his small hometown
guns were as plentiful as cans
of tuna and jars of peanut butter
but there wasn’t a single bullet left
words made of paper (20170301)
across your lifeline
a paper cut is
insignificant
until it becomes
septic
and then it
may as well be a
bullet fired by
a marksman under
ideal conditions
he’s taken the wind into account
as well as your stride
memento mori (20170228)
focus on the pain originating in your molar
floating heavenward like an angel
made of nerves wrapped around broken stained glass
up through your hard palate
lodging between your ear and jaw
wonder for ten seconds if it’s cancer or an abscess
then opt for tmj because you’re tired and you
need to sleep
this is a memento that death leaves in your crib
to remind you every single day that you are not
in fact, going to live forever
or maybe he colluded with the tooth fairy
when you lost your first tooth
touched that soft bloody spot
in your gums
you obsessively kept
your children’s teeth
even the dog’s
——
giggles and hits (20170227)
taking up pen, preparing a page
sober, serious–really quite sage–
i wrestled a wriggle
a jiggly smudge–no more than a giggle
struggling to make it behave
ultimately, i was the slave
discovering, to my chagrin
taming a word is a terrible sin
——
ancestor under the skin (20170226)
storing oxygen
in a pair of secondary organs
while swimming through my blood
it pulled itself forward on flippers
rough-hewn legs too slow
to evade an apex predator
but then
it broke through my skin
and had the new world to itself