feeding the ro[o]t

screen door askew

an open maw cringed,

noisy birds banging wood.

its grey now.

the house in the orchard,

bones and stone.

her face is crumbled.

her innards fall across

my nervous fingers.

not so pretty; my

minimum wage hands,

bitten nails, frantic veins.

but she knows me,

her dirt sighs in,

nestles into my grooves.

torn jeans, fit right,

hug my midline scar'd,

grass stained memory.

black currant wild

with hollyhock droppings,

little lost planets, red faces.

i sit cross-legged in

grass level with my head.

lay back in the bounce.

watch the tips of

mighty pines tickle

the blue out of my sky.

prone between two little

old men stooped, skinned,

ashy layers of history[s].

their children rot into

their feet, sweet and

cloying; i remember this.

this is where i come

from. i stare at the sun.

its dead here too.

from a lost suitcase...

my mind reached out and snagged
the whip of blades in watery windmills

from a crown royal purple burp
and turned over the edge of sleep.
you woke in suede sighs,
when the whole of the sky cracked,
(or the ceiling fan was vibrating too much)
velvet pieces fell in separate nights, face was set still.
a portrait in waving panes,
the ripple beneath
the crater of your vision moved in a fit
of morning after fuckery coughing.
this is the last thing i heard before the fade.
and its a bloom of classical music
falling through the clutch of gusts
caress of liberation. no no no its not the same thing
as the persistent hiccupping pluck of a sixth string

a blue hued soundtrack;
my moods tripping daisies
with bruised hearts past,
and there comes my hand from the earth.
my parents walk
through the window of your eyes.
you deliver me the last rattle
in the chain of a dying continuim.
they raise up into the shadows of my steps
walking the wake in the wash
of trailing in the wind of apple blossom,
lilac blanket lining the cradle
of home lost
and so carefully found
in bare threads fluttering from tree limbs.
if i turn the sky my way,
it'll be that nostalgic tornado that carries
the final rythym of our tighten up away,
and it'll blow that tapestry all to hell

cold breeze making stuttered love
rides a watery current and tongues the panes
to glide up on sketcky lubrication.
wraps my arms poetic, or not.
the justice of a deep kiss laughs at the
injustice of the stain bedded into
rainbows on alabaster thighs,
the smiling tear tinting the colours angry

open your mouth.
let me climb in.
i want to etch the backs of your teeth with mine.
carve my intitials
in voodoo ink from talking snakes,
the bastards that ride my calves tight.
soak my toes, my soles,
into the salt sweet salvia river moving
that is your fancy tongue
run the whole of me into your frightened throat,
elixir borrowed from a gypsy cart
a thirst for the wine slamming the floor
of your tipsy gut.

i sit here,
wondering what it is i should be doing.
what i am not supposed to want.
if it never matters after the after
what fucking difference does indifference make?
everyone of us with sideways feet
fall through the cracks we stomped
into our gawdforsaken floors.
we are traversing the hungry gullet
of something emaciated but foolishly revered.
if there is a price
i dont want to be a regurgitated afterthought
spit out into the mix of minds
i need to keep me and my light
somewhere woven through the whole
i want to be the fucking meal that exhausts you, boy...

i am the foggy shadow pushing shapes out
against the wall of womb we roll around in.
smoke of minds tripping
and the spiral walking the jamb of cool morning,
when the sun cocks out the strongest wants
the cure of listening,
steps from the fat of my lip.

speed and heat of the last time
i heard the thump
the beat torn right through
the pause between hot shots of blood
its the electric in the air
riffing the shapes of your bone.

i want this.
i want the illusion,
i want the lie for a minute.
i want the smash and stick of it all.
i'm hungry.

these balls are only for show...

l hoist a bottle of amber
joy aloft in a drunken tilt
to eye level, pouring
his 3rd a shot.
the 2 ft between my
fingers wrapped around
the neck, his leather chest,
familiar cocky ass
smile, whispering a tip,
shrinks in sexual buzz

he leans in, hovers his
perfect mouth close enough
over my hand to feign a kiss.
he likes the way i hold
the neck, he whispers,
strong and sure,
but quiet. his full
courage is still
$10.03 away.

he blows a slow
hot breath through
my grip,
fogs the thick glass,
stares sex and sweat
right though my skin.
he says, 'a woman like
you, has the kinda
balls a man could
learn to suck on.'

something wilder
and curious stirs, in
a clutch of fast wet heat.
and i wonder
what it would be like
to fuck him right
there under the
no smoking sign
in the dim shadows
between the speakers.

he says 'you've got a way,
that comes natural,
brewed long,
an exotic vintage
that needs to breathe
before you taste.'
and he's damn near
got me...whether
i know better or not,
is irrelevant.

deep breath,
raise my eyes,
stare through the tiny
40 proof sea, and say,
'you want that on your tab?'
but i pause around a smile,
keep my eyes on his
while he backs away.
we volley power in
heady silence.

he chuckles, i wink,
[because fuck me,
he's some kinda pretty]
he backs himself slow
into a low slung chair
and watches me. grins
around the lip of his glass,
smokey eyes have me
naked before my 
rag touches the pine.

5 bucks later he reaches out,
pushes his knuckle gently
into my pendant,
waiting on my flinch.
i lean into the pressure,
he says, 'jesus, where did you
come from? you're like a
fucking gypsy, with some
heavy deep secrets,
aren't you? can i have them?'

and i wobble the pour
he doesn't touch.
he notices,
and in a hush he moves
his finger to tuck a stray
curl behind my ear.
whispers something about
apology for whatever
nerve he hit,
about tomorrows & love.

i step back in a deliberate
careful glide, watch the
confusion working his jaw.
the question tighten
his smooth cheeks,
and finally the understanding
settle into his warm gaze;
before the last note
of that last word fell,
he had lost me.
'

killing puppies

it's so black tonight. walking is something like slicing though rancid ink. tinney smell picking my nose
non too delicate, giggling frantic photographs front and center. i don't like the way a scent can cut my
chute and upend me into a tub of 1979 blackcurrent bushes waiting on transplant.
yeah, i hear him breathing beneath the rustle.
its like a niggling whimper, a puppy breath cry, nuzzling my jaw, streaking little boogers over my chin.
the sweet warm puffs of pablum and mama milk stuck to their pretty prickly whiskers.
except rot comes to mind.
brain soup, grey matter patte, if you will. and my old man's got no fancy peppercorn crackers left
but there's a plastic rainbow disguised as a 2lb bag of smarties on the table beside the blackened
antique spoon; circa 1919, gramma sarah's finest. have you ever tried to pry vomit from your
gramma's velour chair, while part of said gift was still attached to the arm hair, hence the arm, from
where it came?
course you haven't.
it's almost as disturbing as assuming the man petrifying in his own filth is dead in your childhood
haven, while your baby bellows for a bubba behind you. almost. taking steely steps forward, finger
on his furry chin, thumb on his caked nose, crouching eye level to wear the puff of a rotten exhale,
then chewing on it in gagging relief and annoyance and guilt like a forkful of scalding hell,
when it wafts right down your closing throat, is worse.in the dark belly of this, my beloved season,
i close my eyes and murder a pups innocence as he morphs into a person, who is a child, who is a
dead man walking,who doesn't remember my name. what i wouldn't do for the moons light to curl
me ribbons of rescue right about now...

a daisy in the snow

sometimes the universe just hollers into the open spaces in your

being,rattles its massive banging pulse through the holes in your bones.

they click and clack like dice minus a side. and the pull is a tide

calling into small hours between slumber and clarity. the brightness

of heaving fire hanging overhead stitch a dot to dot that your heart

traces in imaginary twine. a fraying thread from here to there. the

world webbed in points made, filed, forgotten. only a scar over the

atmosphere in faded grey stain remains; that sticky shit that whispers

across your eyelids when you try forward motion. i pull out the myriad

of pictures that line the inside of my skin. the wrench it of sounds like

mad crows descending fast, low in a darkened room. they perch on my

head, my shoulders, my arms, lay spindly claw over my toes, until the

weight of a feather is the cold in a stone.i tricked the moon into a

shadowy fullness tonight, stared at her long enough in her robe of

crescent, to coax her dark side to show itself in all its silent promise,

and she cackled. Autumn pushed a want into my mouth, chilled wind

scooping drops of lakefront to cool my neck. i could feel it finger my

loose hair into a lion i had fought to tame beneath memory. fucking

roar knocked me on my ass...pretty sure he had that damn goat roaming

his throat, pipe n'all...but for one unbelievable moment i watched

the background, where a shooting star sailed through my line of sight,

an owl released a trio of rippling howls behind me. the weighty night

shook me into it's belly. and i tripped circles up a slippery rise balancing

past and tomorrow. different faces, challenged choices, and timid affection

all laced in a neat bow of guilt. how are we the gentle one's left standing?

how is a clash of heat, steel, want & flesh a sentence that binds me to a dead

pocket of years? i have done no thing wrong. yet stumble on words i cannot

speak, songs i cannot sing any longer if the listener has anything resembling

a pulse. the box is filling and i want to stretch my limbs and kickout the sides,

bleed the darkness till it explodes violent color and light. i am afraid of my

own voice so say no thing at all. silence wrapped in pretty sentences...

ladders of letters that shake, and fall wherever your eyes wish them to lay.

rake your sight through my guts, if you want to...hell i'll even let you wipe

your shit stained feet in my wounds, go ahead, you can have 2003, if you so

choose. thing is you don't know shit about me, or mine, or that the reason i

hold no hand is because it gets fucking cold in the cemetery this time of year.

and you know, most folks sporting steel toed boots, wooly toques and a $14.99

black tube steel flashlight like a billy stick on their belts at 4am don't take

kindly to jean clad girls singing folk songs to ghosts, walking barefoot circles

through the stones they're keeping a peep on. & the owl sailed over the noisy

moon while the lion fed my shoes to the goat in his throat, all the while

the crows were laughing the wild gypsy memory home like a bullet for my

time, fuck a valentine, splintering messy through my roots up and out from

the underground...well fuck you. i want to watch the daisy grow,

and carry her unchained, for a change, to drink from a blue glass glow

pausing to say hello to morning sun, rather then chew her root while i

lay beneath the earth. together we will watch the leaves gem,

and slumber into now...until i forget everyfuckingthing i've ever known...

ollyollyoxenfree.

7 mins & a caffiene buzz'd notebook belch...

i keep thinking i should know what all the things that have led up until now should mean.

the chilled night i answered the phone, but perhaps more so the time i took to relish the
message left before hello. talk of an old painted man and a quietly graceful woman rocking on a breezy twilight porch with silver hair to rival the moon. chimes pinging the tale of a his and herstory.
the beginning, the stutter, the steps needed to make international miles melt, the pennies thrown at corporation to make it possible. the audience of real kin murmuring and cheering on an impossible but
necessary union in the background, knit to a family tree where the colors breathe like
dragons giggling smoke and ash, where no DNA made it so, and so made it strongest.
the very year that bore me, the few following that spit him, hundreds of miles or kilometers or whatever apart, depending on your perch on the compass.
had we roamed in petticoats and spurs, there never would have been a door...maybe.
maybe smoke signals would have lent scent to a passing hawk to deliver the ghost of charred maple
and birch, to circle his head and flood his eyes. the acrid sting climbing his nostrils and settling down for a nap in his senses.
in a simpler time we may have brushed that wisp aside like a persistent gnat. called it voodoo, witchcraft, and i and my auburn waves would have gladly laughed terribly in the mouth of sanitizing flame, tethered my wrists willingly because i know now, and knew than, the very best part of me transcends flesh and hue.
yes, i would have opened my jaws to the devils kiss and claimed his forked tongue between my teeth and oh, the merriment in my eyes would have branded into the souls of every god fearing spectator at this heretics glee....yes.
just to sleep in the knowledge that it is only ever time.
to burn for the boy whose ocean eyes could temper my ever angry flame.
perhaps he carved the window in the ether with the sharp wit pulled from the satchel of hope at his side,
perhaps i crafted the sill from dust of memory and hurts and the love of maybe tomorrow.
would it be that we both wove cosmos for a crystal net hung just so, to soften the inevitable fall. whether the intricate twinkle lit by gaslight flicker, or an amber electric hum, the story plays out the same;
not for this lifetime, but perhaps the next one...until then the devil takes his bow.

click; some sentences

hopped wooden fences.
dodged the crazy fucking bull.
we were walking through field grasses.
( I found antlers, weilded them well )
the whip was brutal but i liked the sting, can't say shit like that out loud though.
apples under foot smelt almost like rotted flesh before it falls from the bone.
no blood ties left to hone.
we tripped light over remains of more than just a day or afternoon or even the echo of a thought.
northern lights walking.
wild horses talk talking.
no clothes no shame no memory even of what that should have been.
sleepwalking with eyes open.
those berries weren't for eating, purple prose born in innocent fingers, because why not?
its easy when you don't know.
i called thunder.
i rode lightening.
i sang both.
i lasso'd Mary's moon before George ever had the thought..

'buffalo girls won't you come out tonight, won't you come out tonight...and dance by the light of the moon.'
the moon lied sweets.
when i was tripping under gnarled branches, the beam slapped me.
blossoms browned and curled into wet earth.
my feet sucked in enough to dip into hell, fortold;
pretty things writhe.
ugly things speak.
daddy's move out.
mama's drink and dance in the green kitchen.
the woodstove pumps pockets of heat.
stones wrapped in newspaper warm cold beds.
oatmeal is stickyeasyyesteryearhappy.
(don't eat that anymore)
school buses make me sleepy.
puppies smell good.
i know some things.
i know some things.
click....
rewind...

bury me

my nails

are ripped

my fingers

are bleeding

from clawing

at the frozen

pregnant earth

i wish

so fucking hard

to move your bones aside

[just a little]

so i could

lie down

too

watching the retreat

And so the day walked in uneasy steps.

Prints glaring around the protected, where no protection came.
The voices quieted.
The bells idle, hung like cannon’s in my oxygen.
No hands to hold, no murmur to coax the child to the light.
Solitary.
The same.
I ween the need.
Break the fast of toture, though the bounty is rotted through.
Writhe unexpected under hurt, new.
Torn husk down the midline,
I see,
I bleed the blue beat.
The muscle tender fastest, 39 minutes after a 6 year roar.
And so the day, this day, delivered;
Armour sucked into this skin a little more...

fear

This body is failing this mind,

finally, reaching past this plane.
Stretched pulling every nerve to shrieking
think out think wide just think
Dress in wind and rain and lasso
That owl watching;
This night, right here in this second, stop….
keep pace the flutter of his fast heart
sink into wisdom of a jeweled eye
climb under the wing, rest...
…and the tendons recoil.
Snap back...... ‘you won’t make it out…’
tangled fistfuls come away,
of this woman,
(more proof of life)
tentatively lowered level
to full wet breast
under that blast of hot stream;
Naked in a dim shower,
Dark masses shocking the pale of my palm's…
Tender belly,
Aching eyes,
Mangled womb,
Misfit limb….
The slither of auburn winds away down
Curved thigh,
Bend of knee,
Walks down my taut calf,
Whispers across my toes…
Like an elusive lover my crowning glory
Touches and goes…
Snap back....'you won't make it out....'
Shut it down, suck it up.
....from a little yellow bottle of good enough for now...
Not yet.
Not yet…

naked

I’m stitching a dress.



Words for a neckline, hung about my breast. My shoulders bare and feathered by beaded notes hung from my lobes.


Skirt crackling, swinging around my ankles, framing my bare feet in pages torn from a book half written.


Thread of whisper tacked through, blue and bright like star fire.


The twist of prose rustling soft over my stomach, laying a kiss on my hip.


I walk under endless indigo at twilight.


This space in time where I am humbled on a dark rise cloaked in my worth.


Ride comets and walk sightless, the sound of parchment leading me home. Leading me back to good.


My hair is wild around my face, and I taste my condition as it whips over my lips.


I found you huddled under wooden boxes of chaos.


I watched you lift the lid in ginger gestures, flip to a memory and catch a smoky breath.


We breathe out the dust of novels sleeping until we ravish someone else’s divinity.


I want to lie down just one night without the screech of demon's ringing.


I want to be naked as I came, before quill pricked finger, before sound.


I am only a woman, in a dress.

I am only a woman living in a sentence.

I am only a woman...


I can’t breathe…

time

I could see you, you know.

All of a sudden.

The hollowed drop

of your words reaching,

fell over me in a steady rain.



The sound of wooden stairs

clambering to just be human,

out into weather,

whether ready,

or not….



So in the hearing,

in the watchful

minutes where you

danced sitting crossed legged,

I began to see the open.



…The awing nature of you…

…Lessons for me.



There is a Babylon,

you haven’t named yet.

Claim waiting on the tip

of your pen, heavy in breast pocket…

Flag of bloom resting for ‘until’



I count stars, points of light

telling me our story.

Heaping ancient memory

to remind, time is a noun,

in these short hours…

Owl&Moon

He walks fast.

Head down hands deep in pocket, watching steps.

One. Two. Three.

He is always going somewhere, most often when his body is stilled.

He lives faster, but pauses under bloom of wine and rose’s, till the scent’s wear him like Sunday afternoon’s in a childhood home.

There is musicality in the snap of bent brown wheatgrass under foot. There is promise in shoots of new green reaching for sun.

He hums to the tune of that river babbling around rock and mud, beneath an upside down bridge; he feels all of it climbing through his soles, counts breaths, cherishes heartbeats.

And in hollow nights there is room enough to fill up empty places with sound and laughter, silence and listening. Church bells run the rim of waking, of slumber, the weight of his in-between and it is a gift.

When he speaks, it is cannon fire.

Shocks sparks across my vision and for a moment, I am suspended in primal knowledge. My ears bend, eyes flood.

Just. that. pure.

One more drop I did not know I thirsted for until his lips bore the fruit.

We have weathered 3 seasons, where a quickening plum plume bled over, at the dizzying contact chasing years of seclusion. Where love so exquisitely exploded, while it so beautifully punished.

And so we sleep…

A now. like. this.

Make’s tomorrow, just tomorrow.

Just now. Just here, in dream...

Ruffle of strong breast pushes out the warble’d pitch to fall over us. It usher’s a hush. It’s a wonder.

Nocturnal hunter in nooks high above ever watchful, tests of hunger between woman and creature; we are the same in this lucid dreamscape planet built in farmland and washed wavered in shades of grapes; amber, beige and scarlet’s…shaped within an evening and borne into the night where swimming pools are fat globes of glass; I fan out my fingers, stretch my arm’s wide, the tips of his almost kiss the tips of mine…we walk that way, poised for flight, eyes on the sky, blending into night’s whisper.

…I am an owl, he is the moon.

Majestic in silver waves laughing.

We hunt solace; find comfort in endurance, the gift of growing up, yet again.

And he weaves me stories in a single beam, in ancient heartbeat.

In silences.

In a crooked grin.

He sings out a melody in celestial notes every time his stunning thoughts flash. I eye the rise of land before us, and watch autumn turn, winter blanket, spring lend clarity after the ache, the bind, of ice. I glance back, and our foot prints are still there, if hidden for a time...and my fingers link with the glow, and I am soothed....

The cache of my deepest secrets, breathes easier with his touch woven through the whole of it. A healing thread that binds the blood and bone, love and hate; the cloth now warms in the knowing, stitched clean through his[my] soft acceptance...

…and there his wounds are the mirror that reflect my startling truth; he would break me in a 1000 ways, yet still, would be the calm to piece me whole again.

...Without the shock of him, I would never have known me.

love

We are writhing in a fit of edgier darkness, where the fingers of doubt and ‘should have been’ pierce like diamond tipped talons into a life less than grand already; cloak hardest to shake.

But we do.
We steel our mettle, shucking chains.
Knowing that the payoff of shiny souls collecting pre dawn’s dew kisses in our tarnished silver dents, waits. Solid; still beneath wise trees and bird talk; they know something primal that we have forgotten in the rush of wanting to be doing.
I think on this, on our kind; the same because we are altered.
I want a cigarette; need has never mattered.
I want to curl my lips around cylindrical heat and suffocate myself in slow huffs, while fingering flame. There’s something heated about the poisonous suck and crawl into my pink lungs. Violation, welcome, of inner organ tender; it’s intimate like an orgasm’s ripple; little deaths.
Still writhing.
I’ll take your hand, if you...no. I’ll take yours regardless.
Keep you breathing when enlightenment settles. Feel you shape shift your reality and know your other faces, without looking.
We’ll keep on.
Crawling out of back mind gutters we peer into pretty things that reflect in windows of grand houses we’ll never roam.
How do we keep forgetting the distortion? That of the glass kingdom that they built; it shatters as easily as the one’s we imagine. Foundations sunk in dead ground, where filth seeps into the water, pollutes desire, negates anything they may believe they deserve.
Know, love, that their material devastation is a door blasted wide for us; we, who dwell amid the warmth of mismatched cases of first editions and the sepia and satisfying crack of well-worn bindings and parchment. Who make hardest love to naked pages waiting on assault; welcoming the wrench, we dance for wind chime blasts, and children’s laughter.
We who whisper to makeshift god’s who need no title of god. Share our divinity in strange notes falling after one another; musicality is prayer where no prayer is futile; the beats ring back.
Because in these truest leanest lives, the autumn whispers, the winter envelopes, the sky splits only for those who beg to be cleansed, not clean; and understand the beauty in the difference.
Yes, those slivered shiny fragments of our ‘betters’ undoing, press songs in these gentle ears with each warbled whirl. We will wrap and string those cutting splinters in twine, suede and laces from shoes that gathered time & tale with every step. [Not wasted.] Hang them in moonlit windows.
Split our melancholy with the pirouette of space and longing blinking in the streetlight captured. An amber tinted rainbow that I can settle into your palm. It spins on, with each word we mutter, each laugh we bellow, every rant we blow, under the echo of unhindered love/hate sweat out, waking the dust from another room…
We are dirty, we are righteous as we welcome the trip to get ‘there,‘ we are bloodied, we are cunts in purest honesty, and love and fuck and die harder for it.
Mirrored hallways winding to elusive wrinkles that mimic a home, dazzling in sparse candlelight; but the silver is scratched and the slashes mark our faces ugly when we stare. So turn your head a while and just look up.
There gushes a riot of folding color spilling into our sight.


   The sky is calling.


Climb the bridge with me, and tip your pretty face and sing back bold till we shatter the ozone into a 1000 portals, where we can reach into the highs that trail a wet tongue up our lobes at 4am.
I can see/feel/sink down into the cavity where patient, some kind of other entity superior to love treads on the sorest of wounds, raw under the rush of flesh, of good enough. It settles in for the long haul. Sleeps hunkered through the swells frantic tides, content to rock there on those wet rises, rather than to bail.
Woven through lives worth living, strings and rhythm reverberate a melody that clasps the shadowed rot in the walls of our sore breasts.
Peel back the layers one meaty strip at a time...
...I don’t mind the mess.
My fingers can press through blood and muscle as well as any sharp dressed mindfucker, soul sucker can; the difference is in the touch.
Cradle, or plunder; I’ll craft you a lullaby and lay you down in better, with my hands stained in our undoing. Tattoo’d by the solemn pain of worth that comes of holding on tighter, when fear comes knocking. And we'll let it in for once.
Respect it for it’s jaundiced warning, then stake it to a stardust tapestry on wavy walls with a quill, fine tip, and frame the contortion....


....just another little death, rippling out, wild....