He never saw a skin
so much like
cream he wanted teeth
within it, wanted
teeth
to test the hard-on feel of spongy,
silken female, and it hurt, the wanting
hurt.

Sometimes
when a sixteen year old's
bone begs for the dog,
all the world can see it,
such a swollen, silly shame
he has to

run
through mud
run
through snow

smash
at something good
and deep

for once.





African Queen

Ancient skull,
house of dusky flesh, high African bones
bear your story. Tide and time
tell
through creaking hull,
a genocide denied.

Long ago
rivers
of mahogany ones
flowed through hutted hives; gladness glistened
from their every part.

My forebears weren't burdened
by the strokes of God's own goodness.
Grabbed they
with such rush, to cage in oaken boat
your bound
and broken heart.

A thousand years to rage
will not be
nearly
long enough.





1000 Volts Of Angel

1.

There was a fellow struck by God
with such unspeakable force
that lightning came to swallow him
up whole,
but whole's a thing
he never was
again.

A roofer by profession
with a wife and baby child
had climbed the eaves,
a thing he knew
he'd done
two dozen times before.
He was
thirty six
years old.

So coldly
the gigantic eye decided
it was time
and as the Bible says:
"Did smite him."
Mightily.

Falling, as his life leapt off
the roof,
he lunged for anything
to save him from that plunge
toward death.
A tension wire
was all the margin given,
he grasped on.

And then it was that wrath ripped path
through flesh and bone:
both arms to elbows gone,
he fell forever.
While up above
two blackened hands
held wire.

Insuring that he'd understood
the Creator sent His messenger,
1000 volts of Angel,
through his mouth
and through his belly
to make jelly of his genitals.
His rectum served as fluted end
of horn that Gabriel blew that day.
Armless,
with his buttocks burned away,
he landed rocklike
in a yard, alive,
but barely.

He saved him
as His Instrument
that we might play.

2.

Later,
fitted up with hooks,
seated in a bed of sand
protecting all the raw of him,
he tried to thank the prosthetist
by shaking that man's hand
with
only
hope
extended.
He had more grace that day
than mustered Armstrong
on the moon.

I've strewn my days
with prayers for him.
They're falling soft as flowers,
falling
light as tears,
falling
in the way
I wish
he had.





Yet Another April

Edna St.Vincent Millay wrote a poem
about April
not being enough, and I know
just exactly what she means:

all
promise-

pretty in its way,
but shorter lived than mayflies.
Those too,
are waiting
in their wondrous wings
to dis
appoint.





Hospital Bed

Iron I am . A metal frame
I know your truest face.
Pain I've held, and blood
where ghosts take form.

Families fear my shape.
At death's approach
I hold the last
least glimpse of love.
Mother, daughter, son
wink out of life and out of grasp.
I hold your fears foursquare.
I am the last bed
the last bead
to pray upon.

Visions too I keep
that ring of joy.
Newborn limbs I've seen
that seem as slippery
as fish will, squidlike
wriggle from the womb
onto my vestured back.

I am an altar and a rack
on which extremes are
twofold strung. A sword I bear
within the sheets. I wring the night,
I wrap the sweet.





Between The Lines

Reading between the lines
is hazardous at best; because the
lines are drawn
so differently these days.

It used to be there were wide spaces
between longing and longing,
that I could easily slip inside,
surprise you with kiss or crotch rub
in that wide gap
of missing me.

Lately, there is hardly room
for a hard sigh to move through,
and I believe I'll hurt myself on lines
you've toed in dirt,
daring me
to come closer.





Blue Babies

Terrible sirens clawed my ears.
Even my husband did not
blink once
at their assault. He stared through hell
down through
his hanging hands, a tear
fell there.
What's one more drop
of water?

The gauze of gray that
trips me
usually, chokes me, stuffs my lungs
and knots around my legs so I can't walk
the room length freely
without dragging
all the weight
of all the putrid, dying planet
-pulled away that day
and free of it,
I listened for the sirens, so like angels then,
their screams perhaps of joy or of revenge
I did not care. I heard the
cleanest music
playing requiems
and bubbles rising one by one
then none
at all.

Forever now the black the brink, the precipice,
a land of giant wounds and wrecks and mouths
that yawned with hunger, had a way of twisting
every day to screws to spikes to sharper
things that hovered, heavy, pointed down.
Hammered on my skull, raked gulleys
down my jagged back and pulled
my life apart, and told me
with sincerity
'Go on.'

Leathery wings like fear puts out
beat on and on, I felt the little
feet the little hands
the dirty bottoms-wiping, wiping, scouring
floor and sky for (God!), for God gone crazy
in this house, this teetered card deck
built
with shaky hands and crueler still,
the promises,
the empty box of promises: 'tomorrow'
and tomorrow more decay. The children mine,
submerged and safe,
all five escaped this creeping, vampire life
-a vampire
cannot
cross
the water-

blue they are
my bluebells
in the stream; like flowers
scream when plucked,
I heard my husband's one, long naked
noooooooooooooooo, I knew
the place I was, I was alone in
for forever- blue,
like me. Their faces
keep me company. The eyes
go wide with 'why'-I cannot say.
That was the day
is all.





Last Rites

Bundy paced his cell,
his heart kept constant
conversation.

The vigil keepers curbside
begged Jehovah and the state
to spare his life for even monsters
can be saved-(Jehovah crowed.)

He stopped to look just barely
at the stars that would be gone
but the world he knew was made
of doelike eyes and dark brown hair.

In worlds he'd known he'd hunted
long and heavy chestnut hair.
On nights like this, on nights
just calm and close enough like this.

The virgins he had slain
had lain in pools of hair congealing,
even now his groin would speak
but not repent.

A chair, a cot, a spare commode-
a clock. The clock was all.
Echoes of the blood beat in the clock
upon the stand. His hand was dry.
His brain was full.

Horrible, the scenes he saw
that clawed their way to heaven
but in thinking this, he caught
his own obscenity of smile.

The curbside lambs sang hymns,
entrusting God to watch their daughters
while the parents of the slaughtered
shone like righteous seraphim.
At dawn, the warden came-
a priest in tow.

Bundy wept his coldest tears,
then wondered, if in heaven
there be maidens
there be maidens
lovely maidens
with long hair.





Child Cries

A child cries.
Her bloated belly shocks us
from across the globe
over miles and miles of hate
that burn at borders men have made.

We draw
with yellow chalk
on paper maps, repeating
"Up to this line
the earth is mine."

Though God did not distinguish.
He had no maps
or chalk
or hate
when He set this earth spinning
at the beginning of the first light.
There was a plan then
and it was simple:
just God
and man
and love.
Above and below
the stage belonged to everyone
and wonder spun in space
and man was pure.

But
millenia pass.
Harassment begins.
We've improved Adam
by letting his babies cry
and letting his brothers die
on the other side
of a yellow line.

We have developed!
We've made plastic gods
and dressed them in tweed
and bleed greed on concrete skylines.
We enjoy the noise
and ADORE erosion
and maybe even the final explosion
we've all awaited.

Though, in the peace of the first dawn
the earth smelled of newness
and it was good.

And man was placed upon it
and in the purity of our birth
unaware
that we had just begun
our celebrated evolution

into beast.





Dry Season

Look at this now,
this old
rubber bag of
sag and sorrow.

Where are all the
juicy fruit
tastes of youth
that clapped without hands,
laughed
without lungs,
flew wingless
every
single
day
and night; were
effortless
as breath.

They are tumbled
into dust;
the dust that covers this
intrepid
barely
stepping surely,
worn out
sack of books becoming
what she reads,
not what she is.


The mirror shows my breasts
to be
not apples, pears
but paper, thin and dry
as blank
as the next poem
not yet
written.


Footnotes reference pain,
pain and remembrance-
dead as
Tutankhamen.





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