A N O M A L Y

into my weeping sinner's heart:

I, sugar coil of cotton hairs

am dissolved, sticky, pulled apart.

² My mind and form are My God's yolk

to bleed the reds and blues and greys,

the threads on which I beg to choke

and gasp My God's unending praise.

³ My red lips part like raging seas,

crash, Jericho, by My God's hand,

with wailing songs and screams and pleas,

to rhythm of My God's command;

⁴ My God, with apt artistic care,

paints me bruised to bended knee,

and deftly counts the strands of hair

to sweetly grasp the breadth of me;

⁵ My tongue crafts psalms without an end:

By now it's near as comforting as the smell of sun-shot ice mixed with gasoline, vanilla, alcohol and spice.

My heat-slicked skin sticks to the mossy vines of yellow mane. as I Iug my purple suitcase down the stairs to catch the train.

My heartbeat ticks like pendulum, and each here has their own, waiting for cars to rumble close to buckle, halt and groan.

"Traveling?" a patron asks, "Traveling," I grin. Excitement burgeons in my neck as saccharine wind sweeps in.

In a roaring flash of ivory light my voice is shred and lost, crushed like pennies on the track by the grotesque ouroboros.

I board the train, await my stop, the A/C swarms like flies around my fellow passengers, my passengers and I.

My ticker counts the seconds, and the seconds, they do pass-- but soon we fumble to a stop, and my breath fogs the glass.

I stand and heave my suitcase toward the tired, hissing door, and thump over the threshold to the fetid concrete floor.

I lug my suitcase down the stairs and feel my heart thrum faster; my hair clings to my choking throat like sopping alabaster.

"Traveling?" a stranger pries, "Traveling," I ape. I pull my purple suitcase close as the train doors grind agape.

The train sputters in-- I board, and hum the same old sigh; maggots seize my passengers, my passengers and I.

I shamble back past the threshold and stare grimly at my shoes. Down the stairs I go again, to suffer the train's abuse.

"Traveling?" a tyrant girds, "Traveling," I groan, I turn to face the villain and I find myself alone.

I board the train and find again my seat, surrounded by gaunt hard ivory faces and crooked smiles wry.

Their chasmal eyes no longer home to maggot or to fly, just putrid rot, my passengers, my passengers and I.

I, teary, bid them all farewell, as the train patiently drones, toward dust and cigarettes and sweat, a traveler's colognes.

It spits me out like chewing gum and brays, crescendoing; careens into the mouth again, "Next stop--!" still echoing.

I haul my suitcase up the stairs, though fire tugs the strands of each muscle, bone, and organ, the work rosins my hands.

He told me he liked the taste of my teeth, and that the flavor of my tongue was strawberry sweet— my fingertips and hips were embedded with seeds, and even my thighs bruised strawberry pink. I choked on the tender warm strawberry flesh as the juice trickled down my throat and my chest, clung to my lungs, gasped aspirating breaths, on the sickly-sweet syrup that the crisp fruit had left.

gasping grip on slumber slip to blood perched on my lip-- the droplets drew from nose down through my twisting gut ado.

a bleached blockade of paper made dyed only pinkish shade, though picture plain adorned the pane of glass with visage stain.

you won’t forget the voice; but i did. it’s a raspy throaty memory snuffed long ago with an unfortunate accident and a deletion of a final voicemail, a lie.

you won’t forget the skin; yet i have. it’s a scaly, worn out recollection since burned and buried by the sun, by the fire, by the furnace, until encased in cold oak.

you won’t forget the eyes; still they’re gone. invisible green dashes on a blurry redacted face-- i can’t recall when they twinkled like the summer sky we used to lie beneath.

i was only a witness to a passing moment, and if you called me to the stand i could not and would not testify that i knew for sure he was alive.

ten years gone, but a lifetime rots forgotten by an imperfect child too afraid to let go of her fathers’ hand to exhume him in her own memories.

first, i woke up, curious, happy but unsure—

the world was sick and moaning; perhaps twas the allure.

i can summon no other friendly witness to the stand

to testify as to why i agreed to take life’s hand.

(who allowed a child to marry

when she was not yet born?)

second, i woke up, and i found the illness there had grown,

the trace of foreign seed down my throat sown—

i screamed but was strangled by the stranger’s plant,

my testimony a mosaic of moments i cannot recant.

(who allowed a boy to pluck out

what was not his herb to eat?)

third, i woke up, but it didn’t seem to break the dream,

as every moment after had that same enchanting sheen—

no i can’t see the difference twixt then and now and soon;

perhaps i wouldn’t have to if i’d stayed within the womb.

(who permits this girl to carry

recited like a sonnet with shakespearean finesse were dresses and blood rituals concocted to impress. they were conjured up in steeples with a sunday morning prayer— like religion, brought to worship by something never there.

that love was cast out like a net and drowned within the sea to drag to shore the one on which you’d feast eternally-- salt crystallizes to the ropes, ‘til love feels more like theft, and yet, one summer i forced the sea to mourn my ship bereft.

i laid myself upon the sand and found that warmth was golden; surely that would be the gold that love was bought and sold in! but were not angels clothed in white, and was not fresh spring beryl? the sea itself wears sapphire cloaks—! my rosy love faced peril.

i drifted off on amber sands, and dreamt in ultraviolets, wove gamma rays poached from the stars through irises like eyelets. i stole alpha waves from seas of space and ruled them as a tyrant— tamed them with depravity into colors shrill, vibrant.

ii. i exist to destroy, to salt the burning farms of tyrannical oligarchs and their amusing gore.

                                               iii.                   do not pity my role,       or gift tears that you stole,      from another’s empty bowl                 for your glutted soul.

iv. i accept it with joy, greet it with open arms-- let my saliva be fire sparks and my silence a roar.

let the dead men chant as they raise themselves to life:

     i. i was not born a toy,

     ii. i exist to destroy,

     iii. do not pity my role,

     iv. i accept it with joy.

we reach with our tongues for grip on another, and, too, fill our lungs through gaps in our slanted rungs.

but ire like a cordon, off, solitary, mind a cruel warden, sets aflame the jail garden.

poison, on my chapped wine lips,

but i passed you southbound yesterday

and felt the furies’ snips.

at some point we both left the house,

and never we returned,

forgot to turn the light bulbs out,

they consumed themselves and burned.

they teach how to mourn family,

and how to bury lovers,

but how do you bury whats not dead?

competing pupils for the prize

until they pecked my iris dead

and laid their eggs inside my head.

my body learned its tune through trial–

with thumbtacks over ivory mile,

but now my fingers dance the keys

along the lines carved long ago–

i trace the letters’ arteries,

dates marking my course of disease

on the face of such an earth;

i’ve carried my headstone since birth–

marble capillaries inked

with blood from free will gone extinct.

i cannot scorn nativity,

and yet a devil beckons me–

sweet fables: Astra inclinant,

dig you hollow with a spoon,

swallow down your flesh and bones,

and taunt you for such fickle moans.

break their claws and rivalries,

hack weapons of their ivories–

feast on all the ribs you crack;

deeper, deeper, digging still, yet never deep enough; i can hear the voices calling, shrill, sputter, wheeze, and cough.

i bludgeoned it with shovels, and choked it out with string, used blades to peel apart the skin but i just can’t kill the thing.

every time i look at them, i see me looking back, their million eyes, they follow me like hungry wolves of pack.

     throw down thine self      and swallow!

philanthropic undertows dragging deeper drowning children;