Pieces Of A Star
Body lovely body. I love the word lovely. It feels like fingertips dripping off my chin and sparkling eyes that stare too long, that reveal too much passion and candor and how in the end he will betray me. I am a lion. I am the sea. Waves rippling out to unknown shores. Sending sailors on their way. Birthing whales and bearing sonar. I freeze. I flow. I rage. I am mistaken, mistook, misunderstood, not taken care of, like a garbage dump. Don't dump. I roll away. I get underneath and through things like something small and invisible. Not seen. Not captured or placed. Just moving this lovely body in undulations of cosmic rhythm. Star patterns. Stars exploding around me and in me. I scream. Blood curdling, what the fuck happened scream. Screams that pierce through time's veil and come out of my mother's mouth I don't know why. Screaming gets you free, makes people look and see. Power power power. Kick it. Throw arms. Spine exhausted. Flexible. Moving slower. Still moving. I used to think I hated my family. Maybe I just hate myself. What's the mirror? What's not the mirror? I punch through glass shattering like tiny nebulas come down to Earth for our amusement and enjoyment and revolution. What if the aliens are the stars and nothing more. Our own Sun enslaving our bodies and rhythms, our waking and dying. I love people more then I let on. The mass. There's just too many now. Shake it. Shake them off. I care about every ember and trace their dancing bodies on the way down. I can't save them I can't save. I don't save things anymore. No papers, cards, receipts, money, wishes, lucky pennies, seashells. Not in my pockets. I want to be clean. Porcelain white but not that white. Floor to ceiling windows. The kind birds fly into. Glasses with no scratches, dry brush, scrub gloves, car wash, lick the plate smash it gold ceramic flying, pieces of a star, pieces of my heart and family. The kind that get under and through things and you don't know they're there until you bleed like eyes staring too long and fingertips dripping off my lovely chin and body.
Sunken Ley Lines
The waves suck at my feet like a kitten fighting, learning to play. The water tumbles brown with sand kicked up and swirling but I don't care I dive into it. I can't see. I swim. I feel. I always have to be part of nature. I don't want to be a postcard. I don't like postcards or any cards. I throw them away. I don't want paper. I know, I'm a writer. I can write inscriptions in the sand and trace the edges of poems on tree bark. I can breathe in all the living breathing moving things and say a word, a line. I'll remember. You'll remember. We'll write together in the tumble of surf and sand and brown and black and white. We are bodies and paper and the fine print no one bothers to read. Let's read it. Lets write it. Lets make the rules. Lets break them. Lets swim and jump and dive and maybe drown. Maybe float. Maybe I'll lose something under the surface. Maybe I won't. Maybe I already have. I keep coming back to my old tail. Back when water was breath and spines were soft in the pattern of flexing and gliding. Back when the language of love was an Ocean and everything understood. I stand in a body and a place and time I dont understand. I don't know the Earth anymore and my heart aches to be submerged. My bones know the pathways, the sunken ley lines. The old cities, the mysteries, the methods, the stars. Down there. Reflected, reflecting waiting, aching. To be seen. To be touched. To be remembered. And written down again.
Pulse
There is no place to not fall here. Shredded bricks fly by my ears and whisper “I can not save you. You have to die. And you have to die alone.” My toenails dance on the backs of white elephants. There is a rhythm in the pink sky that could hold me in its sway if only I could remember. I look down and see black skeletons with big eyes making fire, making meal, making play. I wish I could be with them. A man walks toward me from far in the distant pink and as he takes each step another stone appears. He has a hat and a cane and says his name is Legba and he's hungry. He asks if I have any food and then grins too wide for me to smile with him. He points to the other corner of the sky and its night with a million stars. And the black space in between begins to gather and then gather around me and tie my hair and hold my waist and finger my toes like a baby. And She whispers, “You will never die.” And I feel safe in her arms. Like there is no place to not be held here. And I start to sing and sing so big so loud my body stretches out against the nothingness and touches each star. I sing so big and loud that I explode into a million pieces. Each one falling so far away. I cannot remember them all or reach any so I turn over my empty basket, close my eyes and die.
Skirt the Edges
There are some things you just know. Like they are carved into your bones and the record cant be read in space but only in the deep, underneath your skin and after the tendons end. Its a pulling, a tugging on skirts that never end, saris unraveling but never revealing. A Goddess not dishonored but veiled in dignity by divine plan. Lacy ferns unroll into a leopard canopy, umbrellas open and some fly up, breaking at the seams. Everything I know could shatter. It does shatter at his word and I have to stitch it back together. Quilting all the known things, the treasures of mind, experience, recommendation. The unknown things on the underside -- the ones you have to ask about, the forgotten phone calls, the corner pieces of shattered lips. I reach for a fistful of wonder from somebody's big pocket and trace the seams of all my questions back to the beginning. I finger the spines and the backs of sea stars that have been out of the water too long and I feel sorry for them too long before throwing them back across the endless sky. Earth's black cinder cauldron reaches up to catch the potency. We harvest fruit every chance we get, what else would we do with it? I close my eyes and exhale on the backs of sailboats that have waited too long too. And with my breath they're off into a dark night on a mystic journey, the one that doesn't really exist even though everyone talks about it. I pour my breasts into the footprint of whales to feel warm again and later to feel warm later when I'll forget, when this will be a blog post even though it should be a postcard. One person, one love, one connection that snakes into my deepest regrets and starts swallowing from the bottom up. From the feet. There is no magic in being done, only in peeling skin and nerve and skirts that never end.
Two Hands
I think I need both hands for this. I usually only type with one but fast like a spider dancing across the keys -- but I think I need both hands for this. Two hands to hold on tight, white knuckling fragments, ideas, memories, dreams that I'm afraid I won't remember or get down. I think I need two hands to grip the edge of the kitchen table strewn with animal and goddess oracle cards. To grip the table, the other side of the mattress, the other side of my life, the last thirty-two years while life keeps fucking me up and trying to tell me in big and small ways that I can't really hold on to anything at all. I think I need two hands, two palms to open like a book, like an egg, like wings. To open and press the center of my palms to the sky and the sea and my heart and his. They'll open, slowly, finger by finger still alive still pulsing in the rhythm of blood not hard like a lock but soft like a key that could bend in your pocket..or your car..or your hand if you held it too tightly. I think I need both of my hands to feel the sun and the rain and the earth and pregnant bellies and sideburns and long braided hair and all those other things that somehow slip away.
Prasad
He throws bananas and they open themselves unpeeling devoured by the sky. I sit on my hands and sink my teeth sharpened by hunger into all the words I hear, and write and read. My skin shakes loose and off like a too big costume and all the space in between gasps in release. Iridescent bubbles float from the corners of my eyes to the satellites the ones you think are planets at first or brilliant stars. My significance gets lost in the overgrowth of tree roots knotting around temples and abandoned high schools. There are no signs or maps and mostly country roads. I don't want to be a highway. The street smells like the inside of my mouth depending on if I'm 15 and smoking cigarettes or 30 and swimming in waterfalls. I slide through ocean current, rip tides that pull my heaving breaking yearning heart through the surface of my skin, breaking ribs and bird bones. I grip like rubber with raised dots, handlebars, racquets, pens, steering wheels. We blow bubbles under the Ocean and take the express train, the one that goes under and through to Socialist party meetings and unknown latin jazz clubs. I left a book in his pocket, its the one with the teeth marks and the secret pages chewed up. I saw a man wearing his eye on the outside, painted on his eyelid singing bubbles into the night that become rain clouds and wash us all. The kind of rain I run out in and the drops turn to flower petals when they hit my face.
Mele
This scream dissolves into
a red liquid line,
running deft and sanguine
like subway cars
from my belly to my mouth.
And my whole life is its echo,
like the pause after cathedral bells
proclaiming their place in the sky.
Its not angry,
but here
and the sound bounces on my skin
and past my fingers into a future I'm grasping for
with only sonar to guide me.
I am a voodoo doll.
You can trace the places in my body
where I will go and love and hurt and bruise
easily though I am cut
from a cloth
that is tough like elephant skin.
I am a mountain
-- oh yes, I am a mountain.
The clouds are my blanket
and my wrinkles are my mother's sleeve.
I will hold the valley of your shadows and depths
and river of tears.
You will not hear my scream rising
like a red snake.
My face will flush
and you'll think its the sun come to kiss goodbye.
a red liquid line,
running deft and sanguine
like subway cars
from my belly to my mouth.
And my whole life is its echo,
like the pause after cathedral bells
proclaiming their place in the sky.
Its not angry,
but here
and the sound bounces on my skin
and past my fingers into a future I'm grasping for
with only sonar to guide me.
I am a voodoo doll.
You can trace the places in my body
where I will go and love and hurt and bruise
easily though I am cut
from a cloth
that is tough like elephant skin.
I am a mountain
-- oh yes, I am a mountain.
The clouds are my blanket
and my wrinkles are my mother's sleeve.
I will hold the valley of your shadows and depths
and river of tears.
You will not hear my scream rising
like a red snake.
My face will flush
and you'll think its the sun come to kiss goodbye.
The Lizard Queen
I am a green and golden lizard
shining in the sun,
pressed hard by the
heavy weight of
hot light
against my body
to the smooth rock that
sits like a sentinel
guarding the stream below.
I feel like sticking out my tongue and
hissing
not violently or sweetly
but in approval of being melted.
All the words I had are
dripping from my mouth into
the cool water below
and they become something else,
not fish
but little creatures you find in tide pools and
streams like this one.
I let my arms and legs
stretch towards the river,
pulling gently away from my spine,
the curve of my back
shaped and draped
over the big bodyguard of a rock.
He can hold me like a drunk
who has to be carried out and away
farther from themselves.
The air is a full ride,
full of swinging buzzing singing wings
but theres no traffic;
they are sewing me a blanket
made only of invisible seams
because anything else I couldn't bare.
If I open my eyes there are
ripples that soften out into a sea
of shining, liquid golden leaves
– they're dripping into the river too.
When I close them
my heart
beats so loud
I can hear through this heavy rock
– is it hollow?
And through the rushing force
of the water and the muddy earth
into the birthplace of
earthquakes and sea fire...
into the bones we buried
long ago of giants and giant reptiles.
I am extinct.
shining in the sun,
pressed hard by the
heavy weight of
hot light
against my body
to the smooth rock that
sits like a sentinel
guarding the stream below.
I feel like sticking out my tongue and
hissing
not violently or sweetly
but in approval of being melted.
All the words I had are
dripping from my mouth into
the cool water below
and they become something else,
not fish
but little creatures you find in tide pools and
streams like this one.
I let my arms and legs
stretch towards the river,
pulling gently away from my spine,
the curve of my back
shaped and draped
over the big bodyguard of a rock.
He can hold me like a drunk
who has to be carried out and away
farther from themselves.
The air is a full ride,
full of swinging buzzing singing wings
but theres no traffic;
they are sewing me a blanket
made only of invisible seams
because anything else I couldn't bare.
If I open my eyes there are
ripples that soften out into a sea
of shining, liquid golden leaves
– they're dripping into the river too.
When I close them
my heart
beats so loud
I can hear through this heavy rock
– is it hollow?
And through the rushing force
of the water and the muddy earth
into the birthplace of
earthquakes and sea fire...
into the bones we buried
long ago of giants and giant reptiles.
I am extinct.
