A Few of My Own

Here are a few things I have right now. As with most poetry, they're always being worked on.

Treadmill

Black ice steps up to me, steps upon me,
marching, stamping up my spine with splintery feet,
like the outwardly-clean splinters they left inside her.

I’ve yet to lay back on the pillows for a man
but I can feel her, spread, humiliated,
because we’re frosty feathers in the same mattress,
jumped on, beaten, squashed down, like dirt clinging uncertainly to a boot
(that’s what they tell us).

That’s why I pound on the conveyer,
staring at the same granite-cold trees for thirty minutes,
watching Catmo stretch to my left.
I can’t have fingers of air and sunlight stroking my face:
they might become solid, tearing ribbed cotton and
probing me however they chose to,
like they did her.

Maybe if I was a boy I could amble down the street with my eyes shut,
instead of looking over my shoulder and feeling my leg muscles straining,
trying to get away from the possibility.

5 Views on the Battle

1.
"They're all pink in the middle,"
said the soy-haired, tooth-gnashing, self-titled demi-god.
But maybe when I lay unguarded, untouched, free
as a soft and lovely tomato stretching from a spidery vine,
with Boston beside me and Hubbardston inside,
I feel better for not having been cleaved.

2.
There's a city in my fingers and a silk suit agency
in my hopeful mouth and when I kissed you,
tasted you, explored you,
you recognized the sidewalks and leafed through Rolling Stone.
Now, condescending, you pinch a cute ass,
you preach on proper tit size,
you obey Adam just looking at a Trojan.
Women's dreams silhouette religion, in your pale, numb eyes:
ambiguous, failing, weak.
... No such thing.

3.
I opened your profile and decaying, jade-colored, beaten flesh
with blonde hair staring unsympathetically at me
raped women.com from my screen.
It was gone before I let it take me, but my hands are still drumming.
I've got two heroes:
Suzanne Somers ("If you've got it, bump it with a trumpet!")
and Marge Piercy ("The moon is always female..."),
and before that blonde was a corpse she had at least two,
and so did Mrs. Nicole Simpson.
And as a daughter, a sister, and a niece,
I think that she's raking her blonde crown raw everytime you say,
"Dead girls don't say no."

4.
I could hand this to you,
and maybe I will,
but there's a chain-link fence in front of your brain.
And once inside, if inside at all,
I don't think I'd fit through the alley.

5.
With your calloused fingers clawing into my lazy shoulders
and your stubble-lined mouth pulled down,
or how you'd use my hair as a wiry dark-blonde handle,
I could guess at this happening.
I'd smack you, and I'd bring you to tears
while my own ducts remained dry,
but how many others would?
Not everyone has the iron of a bitch.

Though my grandfather died alone,
with no vestige in his mind of who I am,
lying in that snowy hospital bed,
I see his crooked smile in my mind
and I feel like I'm lying in the sun.
Why should my eyes bleed their salt?
Salty tears can't pull him back to life.
They only remind me of a heart that beats no more.
But a smile on my lips and
eyes that shine with warm remembrance
witness a Finnish voice that fondly
recalls the fox in the pine grove,
and calloused hands that scoop
vanilla ice cream into a root beer float
that sits on the white mat before me.
Root beer floats never tempted me,
but when I join him again,
I'll gladly drink another.

Small Town Interests

I am from silky wisps of eiderdown
against a cobalt blue blanket of glistening glass,
and a floor of soft fingers of green
caressing my bare, calloused heels and ankles
as I speed across the field to the unfinished gazebo.

I am from a mild breeze and
a sun who laughs along with me,
in a place where silence is the
sound of insects playing a game of hide-and-seek,
ready for me to sing along with on my red woolen blanket.

I am from silver dew clinging to webs
created from a day of hard work,
and the circular reflection of a sky
filled with clouds sewn with sapphires
and splashed with purple magenta dye,
as people gather on the diamond
to watch colorful explosions of Independence.

I am from a place where oak trees are actors
on a stage of creamy blue sky,
and I sit on an unfinished porch to smile at every afternoon.

"Read 'em and weep, God!"
Three Aces on the butcher block table.
His stool scrapes the flowered linoleum.
"Damn it!" He winks and we laugh.
His water glass drained,
he picks up an air-cushion-finished Bicycle,
grumbles softly,
puts down the Queen of Hearts.
Fingers streaming, it's on the wood
with the other ladies at my left elbow.
"I'm out, God."
"You always win!" His jaw is set.
We've played past 500, but I tell Him to shuffle
while I fill up our glasses.

Screams of pain filter through the screen
but I realize they only sound like that
because the rainbow-water of the sprinkler
was colder than expected.
92 degrees, hazy, dragonflies and bumblebees on the lawn.
9-years-old, on the floor, watching "Salute Your Shorts."
Other kids are outside
but I can go out tomorrow.

Screams of horns filter through the glass
while the phone rings - it's Mike
and we're going to dinner tomorrow night.
92 degrees, hazy, no grass or water in sight
except for in the Monet prints on my white walls.
32-years-old, on the 17th story, drudging through papers.
I should have gone out yesterday.

Against Change

1.
Tires' voices rise higher into New Year's air.
Across Route 68, a truck flailed into trees.
Gramma didn't aim for that,
it was just there.
Mom started taking sick time to bring us to
Dr. Martel's Victorian office after that.

2.
A black and blue body, in furiated,
cursing, stabs my calf.
Screaming, I soar to Gramma's house,
always right down the hill.
Gentle hands, remembering Memorial patients,
smooth calamine lotion across the welt.
Twisted, gnarled, these hands can't
sign a check anymore.

3.
Telephone's voice splits the July air in two,
calling my body out to answer its needs.
By nine-twenty I'm crossing bug-infested woods
for an early summer lunch.
Gramma and I bake blueberry cake -
Grampa picked them yesterday
and she tells me not to eat the batter.
Macaroni soup is on the gas stove,
seeming to make the room itself boil.
Today I go and see her -
she's forgotten to eat again and I microwave Campbell's.

History Lesson

I am from brambles tearing at my legs
as I run from sorcerers, demons, and wolves
that shed their flashing, red eyes
and shift back into oaks and pines
when it's time for me to go back inside.
Dead leaves laugh under my shoes
as I climb the staircase to the witch's tower,
which my mom says is only a large gray rock.
"Have you finished your homework yet?" she says now.
I put the rough lines of a craggy wizard's face
away in my sketchbook and under my bed,
which is still a place where monsters lie,
and take out my history pages before she opens the door.
"Almost done."
The world, encompassed in that one forest
behind my champagne-colored house,
was a lot more interesting than the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.

thats alot i couldnt read em all