[x]

Exhume and InhaleI have tasted God, he tasted of sweet wine
and sandalwood, the deep forest you lay down

in the moss and twigs, scattered like finger-bones,
your spine ripped out, curved like a bow.

I couldn't find your heart, trembling
against the opened cage of your ribs,

under the gently speaking rustle,
leaves unfurling, the dance of sunlight

slinking between your vertebrae:
piccolo skims and birchskin shaves.

I fled. Your right shoulder blade beckoned still,
unfolding like the slow feathers of a wing,

your wrist flung out, palm
up, gasped my name,

but I could not stay, only
strained your skin with oleander tea,

drifted, drifted with the t

the answerI am failing again and again,
not upwards, but along the dark,

the tracks the trains skim over,
bullets of light and a high, sweet whistle.

I am coming home to you,
don't ever forget that,

the door will always open when you run,
full-tilt towards hope.

they'll get it right this timeImpossible demands, like hold
still and stop throwing up and

don't cry.

It can't be a hallucination when
everyone's screaming,

the pretty doctor's hair in her eyes, the nurses'
finger-bruises laddering my skin,

the wet pillow.

How sometimes the only power
is crying, noisy-soft, the waves of blood

gurgling sickly from lips
until someone decides, stop,

enough.

The army retreats and a quiet woman
spends the next hour wiping blood

off my shaking body.

The next day in the ambulance
to the next hospital, bigger and better,

dried red flakes sift from my hair
and I am afraid.

AlterI stopped dreaming the color of my wedding dress
years ago

the picket fence around a small square home

the soft surety of a kiss
every evening. One morning it was

one leg in the left and one leg
in the right

you know? Things change. These days
I dream simpler: Waking up

laying next to another warm body, at least
a little in love.

The Great DepressionAs if there were a moral distinction
between up and down,

as if politics did not infect poetry
with their many-armed lives,

cancerous and brief,
constant change.

As if the people who lost their homes
or lives to the Great Depression

saw it coming, knew before it was on them,
in a commercial with Clint Eastwood's

smooth voice promising hope to the masses,
undermining panic.

As if the poet could be heard, the old reading
from a yellowed page,

the young standing up tentatively
to be counted.

ZebraHer dress flows like a lazy river
when the thaw is done with the complaints
and the woods shrug their heavy shoulders.
She got it at that antique mall by the sea,
I remember. We were talking
of ice cream and whale bones.
It looked like a skeleton on the rack
but it space queened her.

Five dollars
or something.
Nobody cares. I was
looking for video games
from the 80s.
Black caps going
"CK - Christ is King."
"A family that prays together
stays together."
She wore dirty trainers
and she could have worn
anything.

She is still standing on that lawn,
looking like a takeoff.
I am still in that chair
thinking I could fly.

when she cut out her voiceShe is lost and the monster is coming. Her head tilts and jerks like a bird balancing lightly on the bladed grass.

There is a ringing phone in her hands and it confuses her so much her chest aches and she begins to rock, tracing the blue buttons as if they might speak. Press down. A voice.

This she knows. This voice is strong and limber inside her whiplash of a body.

So thirsty, she whispers. I got lost.

She tunes in and out. The cadence of a voice who knows that to keep talking, on and on, means life to the listener who is trying to blend the music of voice and whispering corn blades and that far off discord that means danger.

Later she

things you don't tell in group therapyI open an artery in my arm.

Not where you would expect, but where the nurses,
tired and annoyed, finally find a place close to the surface of my arm,
where my heart beats, lightly, on the outside of the bend in my elbow.

I do not know what to expect or even that it will work, but
I am scrambling to grab a t-shirt as blood swells like a
rising tide, flooding the white pillowcases crimson,

slipping down the inside of my thighs like
I have only just become
a woman.

I dive into my body.

If I can see it, I will understand. I will know
some secret of breaking and healing.

My arm heats like a furnace and I start to get shocks
to my s

white trash weekendscasual sex on Fridays,
slipping out the front while he fumbles
the lock at the back,

I wasn't meant to be your love,
one and only, white dreams,

yes I'm barefoot at the mini-mart again,
no, I didn't wear a bra and those shorts you thought
were only for you, but it was so hot out and

he let me lean on his SUV, my toes play with
his rims, the music pounding around us,

yeah, I bought a beer and sat on the porch and
didn't answer when he called,

but baby, for 5 minutes

he loved me more than you have in a
lifetime

endingNora,

I understand now

why you held your secret alone.

Death is huge and grasping,
it rocks you, catches the end

of your laugh, turns it inside out.

Death is always secret and always
alone, though

your cello wept with your raging grief
and my words tear themselves

from my throat.

But I know now, you must learn to forgive yourself
your own simple, ugly,

inexplicable human
death,

and let go of dignity
to find peace.

SchizophreniaI heard the meaning in that song,
played the record backwards,

hid the poem I wrote, instead
I write Post-It notes:

1. Songs Have No Meaning

I capitalize a lot to keep on track,
hang number one over my desk,

2. Balance Your Checkbook: You Probably Overdrafted

Next to the keyboard in case I care to look,

3. I love you

On my headboard, I like to wake up
to that one, on a need-to-know basis,

4. Emergency Phone Numbers

By the quiet phone I leave a list of people I might
or might not call.

5. Death Is Not A New Beginning

Bitlet 09 - PoliticsWhen I speak of Carolina, cicadas sing in my memory
and I want to shout so you, little sister, might understand
the way a creature smaller than my hand can stand
with its brethren and shake my arrogance, how each
of their voices alone are just the sliver of a whisper -
but singing together they become thunder.

a love poem to rainy evenings in townThere is such poetry, such inexplicably
mournful urban-dark beauty, in the round
glowing nimbus of a streetlight dangling
from an arching sweep of metal
against grey skies heavy with dusk,
the soft yellow luminance turning the
raindrops into glimmering starlight-
they shift and change like gossamer
curtains; I will never not love the smell of rain
on concrete, exhaust fumes, the sound of
school shoes on soggy-grit footpaths;
I accept the handfuls of icy wind slapping
my cold-numb face with a smile and a wince
in one, oh lord, bless the winter, bless
this steel-coloured town

Lies I Tell Us After Hours #1I can't live without you
is a lie. I can. You will

die and leave me
here, persisting

all truth of the sentence.

Happy Birthday"This evening, Michelle and I will do what I know every parent in America will do, which is hug our children a little tighter, and we'll tell them that we love them, and we'll remind each other how deeply we love one another. But there are families in Connecticut who cannot do that tonight..." ~ Barack Obama

Next year I will wrap you presents
and you will not understand the need for bows,
but will reach towards them for days
in anticipation.

I will fret my wardrobe decision: do I dress you
for photographs or in a pattern that will hide
your smudgy fingerprints? Or maybe the floral one
your grandmother, your father's mother,
will su

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swim until you can't see land

by =sunshinegypsy, Oct 28, 2012, 9:10:02 PM
Literature / Poetry / Human Nature / Free Verse

The doctor says two weeks, maybe
less and for a moment I think the nurse will cry,
but the morphine is flooding my veins and

I ask if I can go home,

though there is nothing for me
in the place where I sometimes sleep.

I am high and trying to explain
to the man I love that I think I would like to die
in Mexico - I am laughing

so I don't cry.

Maybe this is home, his calm voice,
patiently talking me out of fear,

again and again and
I think about saying thank you,
but there are no words -

I love you
suddenly small and frail,
like my body, arched in the waiting dark,

knowing

I will wait for you
forever.

swim until you can't see landby =sunshinegypsy

Literature / Poetry / Human Nature / Free Verse

Dip a toe in the ocean. Oh how it hardens and it numbs.
The rest of me is a version of man, built to collapse into crumbs.
And if I hadn't come down to the coast to disappear
I may have died in a land-slide of rocks and hopes and fears.

So swim until you can't see land.
Swim until you can't see land.

- Frightened Rabbit