2.27.21
GARFIELD
to hell with anemia
I’m building gardens through with the moon.
PANDORA
2.23.21
all that comes from counting your hens before they lay
are hospital rooms and overworked nursers. Chattering teeth too anemic to build blood back to bravery.
they’re scared of the landmines (i still hear them in my sleep), we’re all scared of the landmines (be careful how loud you pop that soda), my bridges didn’t burn you see, they collapsed.
well, one collapsed – my mother nearly died that day
they blew up the other, sent the schoolbus flying off it – I nearly died that day
so no I don’t like bridges
maybe that does make me a chicken, but I’m beginning to be okay with that.
and I know you wont ever be, so go ahead, stick to counting whats in your pen, and i mine
you, your hens,
me my sheep
2.19.20
GARFIELD
we’re speaking through the stories of archetypes
deaf histories with legends about legends with throats too raw to tell themselves.
So we cover the drywall Mardi Gras, knowing Ash Wednesday did more than confess on its knees for the preacher.
Who can blame her.
Name one person who wouldn’t suck off sanctity-pretend for a chance at sanctuary, and I’ll call you a liar.
Or maybe you haven’t war, my friend.
Instead we thank the secrete lovers with their potions and elixirs, or the ones with clock to the timer. Makeshifters turning garden nights to fantasy. A time where friends are just that, no doctors turning stethoscopes to your cadences, Hydras spawning heads in a loved one’s confidence, no tension lines between lovers old or new, instead, a night where accidental accents fit the story-line.
for that, I’m grateful.
SNAKE.SKIN
2.18.21
Another unexpected year
Not unexpected in the way unprecedented was unexpected.
Unexpected in the way mortality is a close friend, and death a well known acquaintance. In the way I add one more year to the the tally of a calendar long expired. One who promised to flat-line before it could see a third decade.
So if there’s anything I’ve learned from the baker’s dozen of this tic-toc is to live in lightness. Light enough to go unnoticed by the sandman and quick enough to dodge Azrael.
I only carry weight from the contracts of an agreeable memory. She trades old names and times for presence and fulfillment. Exchanges resentment for forgiveness and bitterness with hope.
I can’t imagine what it feels like to look ahead of yourself, and I’m not so sure I envy that. In a way — the uncertainty of survival has offered madness as a map I enthusiastically notate at every unmaned territory.
If I choose anything for my future is this:
Dead or alive, let my legacy be the one proves I grew strong
in the softest of ways.
FOOL.S.GOLD
2.6.21
spit my name from your woes, I don’t need another martyr.
I split bread with memory daily, we choose which oils will moisten the gluten in our past.
You ask me to balance a life you’ve forgotten to weigh against another. Pushing expectation against the grit of my own battles.
Even still I send medics to self-inflicted injuries. Watch them turn first aid kidts inwards after marching back home from out of policy cancellations.
Instead of seeing car rentals, you navigate your map to resentment and indignation.
Go then, go punch the ocean in the wave while I soothe the injuries you bristle at. My job applications, car rentals, and familiar moralities. I hope the fist you drive through the water finds more substance than the ones you drove through your spleen.
GARFIELD
2.12.21
the inspector came today.
He uncovered several cracks on the stucco, gaps on the windows, and shivering on the vinyl floor
among many other things
I’m not sure what encouraged him to eyeglass the un-dusted corners.
I think he may have found the masks I keep in my closet, or the ones I take off in my solitude. Maybe he liked the wings in my laughter, how they’re naked to strangers.
My mirror my have tipped him off to my timeline, too short to bother with ciphers of the mundane, or maybe it was the chimney — holding cradle to history; a decade of keep me warm by the fire, another spitting ashes from a California sky.
Maybe he knows all seven-hundred square feet of this building will be filled with home, I think he sees that in the bookshelves. All near dust-railed by book hinges. They don’t fail to rub their body against the bookshelf a few times a week. Hundreds of characters, thousands of pages, millions of words promised a place to be remembered.
Maybe he knows a short life is synonymous with defiance to impossibility.
Maybe he’s just a decent guy.
1.31.21
BOOT.S.TRAPS
The heaviest thing I’ve ever carried was the weight of dissatisfaction.
That blundering authoritarian has a way of spoiling the bite off a Georgia Peach.
Thankfully, in my years, be it by wisdom or reconciliation; I’ve learned to keep the keys of expectation in the junk drawer. Same way I make the bed instead of hanging up on my therapist, or cherish the growth spurts of mourning when I taste melancholy on the spoon of lips once scooping innocence and wonder.
We’re aging now. There’s a new generation mocking our skinny jeans and undercuts. Hangovers are daylong companions and his dick is more whiskey than phallus.
I’ve grown a gardens in paces everyone condoned barren. Instead of writing eulogies to crops fallen, I choose to wrap my tongue around the fruit of the thriving. Plums and dill pay no mind to the chard too charred.
1.15.21
MIRROR
we’re tempting vice while flirting with contingent
today, three is company while four is a crowd
and she crowds my friends mind with fire and gasoline.
I watch her spit venom in the psyche, turning attributes into demons replaying the same song until the lyrics scar away the light in their eyes.
She wants you to be meat from the canyon. Please, don’t let her sear the purity from your air.
1.1.21
DREAMS
I’ll slap the bitch that dares pinch me
I’m sleeping with Majia
coyote comforters shifting orange to yellow. they play pillow, blanket, and heaven with our whims. Speaking of whims; who knows where those went. One followed ecstasy in through the window, another seduced immediacy into a threesome with fulfillment. The brave of the bunch woke the spiders from their holes and wove time into irrelevance.
Here, you help me count the seconds till a new calendar crowns it’s sleepy little head through the birth-channel on the shoulder of global anticipation. We cry out an exhale only after holding our breath through the year year tinted in asphyxiation. Hues of ice trucks, bleach, ventilators, and loneliness. Days spent fearing sterile-white hospital rooms constructed of walls who swore they “don’t see color.”
so we make sure our underwear isn’t just yellowed with piss we fling at defiance.
we leave our cum-stains in the places that can’t be washed out. We know these moments are as precious and rare as the alchemy used to turn moans into a second skin. This, this energy we created, the one felt with every slow, satisfied movement – it brews coffee with hazy eyes and knowing smiles. Nothing else is asked of the mouth. Not now, not after it’s known your body the way yours knows mine. Who needs words when two hearts learn a new chamber?
I don’t know why I love like this. I think part of it is the way you love the ocean.
You say it feels like going home. How it holds your body without needing to make reason of it. How you punch the waves knowing you’re no match for the tide.
I envy that.
You struggle to define the product of the foundation there. I scower pieces of rubble in my timeline to fit a mosaic of belonging here . When my tongue licks the back teeth of bi-dialect, when my name can’t fit in tight monolingual jaws, when memories turn childhood homes into moving boxes, when my body kicks my legs from under me; I find home in the checklist of things I hold constant.
Imagination, dream, or hope. Sometimes I like to listen to my lungs inside my body
they sound like outer space, I am meteor shower, a supernova, a sulfur flare – something too bright to be ignored or wished upon.
I dream like this, traveling from universe to universe, holding the tether I anchored the outline of our sleeping bodies on my pointer finger. That way, when the sun calls my at new-day’s time, I know the path back home.
So, thank you for letting me sleep in. Sweet, wide eyed, fire-sure lover.
12.20.20
GARFIELD
premonition or manifestation
I doubt anyone would care to know
today we’re lunacy, and Kismet snuck a ride with La Luna.
Nothing hides here, we give sense to the absurd; painting Grey Gardens color untamed. Ankle length skirts and headscarfs turn wind sails coveting a little skin, “come here, come out now, the water is warm, the game is fun, and drinks are complimentary.”
so it does – tuna cans and stale bread pumpkin the afternoon into night, skin playing up the ankles, knees, thighs. Hair curls Halloweening with lipstick. lipstick and tits. They glue to eyes to keep eyelashes company.
this isn’t just challenging reality, this is playing hopscotch with possibility. Skipping that stone beyond chalk-lines and hitting the back of restrictions’ head. Tell them, tell the they lungs can breath when there’s purr in your lap, and wizards deserve black cats as much as witches do.
like butter. bread, sex, and butters.