Skullduggery

It's a shame the sort of skullduggery a woman will get up to when a man forgets to leave his boots across the back of her neck. Why, she might start thinking the fruit that grows around her own bones belongs to her, or some hysterical shit like that.

Leaders, lofty men of business and government, with your raw dicks and your melted eyes from hours spent watching women your grand-daughter's age on a screen, women with bodies but whose souls are cagily kept off-camera, beware of skullduggery when your wives show up and expect you to know who the fuck they are and to want them, even with all those clothes and no option to scroll ahead when they start yapping. 

Stuff their flighty stupid mouths with parchment dicks, laws borrowed from syphilitic lunatics who ruled back in better days. Stop skullduggery wherever you find it, beat it out of them with bibles, do it for America. Strut and make your fuckstick a factory, breathe deep the smoke and sparks of your industry, and be proud, gentlemen, of preserving what is right and good and lawful under God, eh-men. 
______

for "irony", HERE.

Mother's Day

I can't be bothered 
to birth this child
who howls and scratches all night long.

I can't be bothered
to take these pills
that do me no good and make it worse. 

My mouth says words learned by rote
to scatter like mothballs for smile-beaked neighbors.
Mail me cards of flowery joy
to instruct me how to masquerade.

I can't be bothered
to birth this child
who howls and scratches all night long.

I can't be calmed
from nervous disgust
at this body in mine, who will unmask me, given time.
_______

for this.

How Being Raised By A Narcissist Damages Your Life
 

 

Shards and Thorns

Everyone has come by a road of shards and thorns
to the warped mirror of our true reflection.

Where is the child,
the dawn's early light,
the bible or the hustle that was sure to pay off?

Everyone has come by a road of shards and thorns 
to the warped mirror of our own reflection. 

Many have died--
loved ones, enemies, combinations of both.
Many have died--
each new self carries the dead ones slung over a shoulder.

The unmarked blank of our beginnings
gives way to the selves and scars of who we have become. 
By a road of shards and thorns,
we arrive and find that every strange road has become us.
______

for this.

Aviary

I keep an aviary.
There are a thousand cages.
There are 999 doors.
There is one lock.

I lade tables with pies, sugar cubes, golden gewgaws,
but my birds want only old string, dead grass, rotten leaves.
They jam their homes to bursting with the stuff.

Birds, sing for me,
ease my heart,
and though you hate it, please symbolize
all the usual for me--freedom, beauty, delicacy--

But all you display is the patches on your shoulders
and a dull imbecility.
There are 999 doors, every one of them open!
Still, you just sit there in your trash of straw, trembling.
I should feed you my anger,
watch you incinerate, bewildered, an inch from the gaping exit. 

Birds, sing for me
ease my heart,
produce your automatic but lovely songs 
for the wretched one behind the iron and only lock for miles around. 
______

for this.

viper's lullaby

when worlds wash up against the back of your lips,
with their cargo of souls you've loved like specimens,

why must you always then speak, spilling 
your professed darlings over the edge in arranged terror,

pursued by the infected monsters of your
suffocating correction and the deluge of your improving touch?
______

for this.

You Like My Smile

You like my smile, I can tell
by the gliding bird your body becomes when you see it.
It's for real, but laying low behind it
is the goodbye hiding under my tongue for later.

I am a woman always quarreling with clocks--
they show too early or too late to suit me.
Mornings, I ache for the drowse and lamplight of evening.
Evenings, I wish the sun were just rising, nothing decided, everything unspoken.

Here is my smile, here is my heart.
Here is the sun, the moon, the mail, the years.
It's for real, but laying low behind it
is the goodbye I hide that will break our hearts, 
there from the beginning, the taint behind the smile you love. 
________

for this.

femme folle avec des fleurs

Out of the hospital AMA,

I buy a street vendor's yellow flowers just outside the subway. 

_______

AMA = "against medical advice"

for this.