something blue

Sometimes, when you fall in love,
you wake up on your unmade bed
& bare mattress,
curled up
& cold
on soft bags of clean laundry.
The pale morning light lingers.

The only scent in the room, is yours
& the beach,
which is where you'll drift to again.
The ocean & the sky are the same today.
Mermaid souls,
ebbing foam,
are clouds today:
sweet, white,
& quick to dissipate.

There's some joy to wading & swimming alone.
Summer is lovely.

There was something you forgot, as a child, about solitude.

The sky,
sleepy, and full,
of the occasional, distant, passing planes,
will always be your lover.
Sheets of paper,
bright and rectangular,
will always be your lover.

The bed,
which you have pushed against your window,
and have piled high
with pillows, will always be
the constant sandbox
for your girl body.

As a child, you did not think much, but you listened,
to the song
of the wind & cerulean,
and the rattling car drifting down your street,
past your house.

Your heart
knew the happiness of counting things that flew.
Your body
fit the square frame of your windows.
Little, round, black chimneys
of the houses across the street, were wonderful
on your tippy toes.

And now, you live elsewhere. 

misanthropy

Your sunned hair dangles,
O child of Pierus, against the drooping
of unmade sable sheets, like stained ribbons,
or the chafing sugar hem of perchance or rubs,
which grazes as it billows,
like stillborn grass beneath the bent, branching wind,
of January on the wintered skin
and a sleeping spine.

In the ill ebbing of veins,
hollowed intestines, & the silk-ridged flesh,
the waxpaper'd soul knows the taste
of salt and leaf-breath, and glossy insects,
Only in the warm gleam of hardened tree blood,
flourishing sweetness turned into a buried memory stone;
O Mnemosyne, your refractive scent, your mouth eludes
our self-regenerating, self-devouring cells.


There are girls, and boys,
who bathe & soap themselves: 
god-destroyers and gods,
masturbation-blessed, metal-wrapped iconoclasts,
with their halo-molassed lips, their seastorm eyes.
 
My stillness hides my pulsing to the loveliness,
to the breaths that go shallow-quick,
I dissolve against their blood-rosy cheeks, the satin jawbones,
but tracing the corded pathways 
of their opuses, movements,

O muses,
there are only bird shadows,
jackdaws and magpies in grey rain.