a wandering sheep

Little poppies, little hell flames, Do you do no harm? You flicker. I cannot touch you. I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns And it exhausts me to watch you Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth. A mouth just bloodied. Little bloody skirts! There are fumes I cannot touch. Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules? If I could bleed, or sleep! If my mouth could marry a hurt like that! Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule, Dulling and stilling. But colorless. Colorless.

I always have such need to merely talk to you. Even when I have nothing to talk about – with you I just seem to go right ahead and sort of invent it. I invent it for you. Because I never seem to run out of tenderness for you and because I need to feel you near. Excuse the bad writing and excuse the emotional overflow. What I mean to say, perhaps, is that, in a way, I am never empty of you; not for a moment, an instant, a single second.

God occupies me as a shapeless hunger.

night of jasmines, poignant—

If only I could find the poetry embedded in the DNA of everything, pluck the stardust out of our gene pool and examine galaxies in miniature that have taken up residence within our hearts and in our heads,  made in the image of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Forgotten Ghosts of all the stars and systems we left behind when we found life, the ones we drew up millennia ago and left to strew the skies in ancient maps reminding us that we were all borne from the same gaping maw of the unseen infinite, menacing and miraculous. I will fine-tune my eyes in the meantime until every unknown color comes into focus, colors either lost or forgotten to time and a slew of unnecessary mutations, as the kaleidoscope confusion clouding my perception of the world ultimately collides and collapses in and upon itself into a single image and the universe becomes whole again and is no longer a splintered memory whose fragments have allowed us only to keep forgetting, to keep yearning, to keep wondering what it is that we are missing, as if we knew once and have become so far removed in our knowing that we know-not, no, not any longer, and the cycle completes itself and repeats again ad infinitum. And upon the completion of the universe, maybe it will swallow me up alongside the multitudes of galaxies I live knowingly beside but may regrettably never come to see.

* i’m sitting for an interview to be the only streetlight on the corner of 15th and Lake

In the dark, a frantic effort to hold. Or be held– the luxury 

Jabbercoffee

I patch the holes in my chest with lucid company, filtering in a filmed transparency I don’t distinguish in need. I cut the corner of my lips to forge a smile but it’s lost behind my eyes to a truth I can’t fight and I’m struggling for breath in the night air because my walk home thickens to a clarity not even intoxication can forget. Tears write regret until sleep finds sanity beneath the dome of darkness, counting crosses on my pillow it’s another night before progress.

Now girls are often raised to see love only as giving. Women are praised for their love when that love is an act of giving. But to love is to give AND to take. Please love by giving, and by taking. Give and be given. If you are only giving and not taking, you’ll know. You’ll know from that small and true voice inside you that we females are so often socialized to silence. Don’t silence that voice. Dare to take.

“love shook my mind...” (found: Sappho and Plath)