strategy
the black
and white
image
I sent you
I changed
back to color
once sending
was through
The only connection is lost
But we never really connected anyway
Our mother has told you
Lies about me, I’m sure
She isn’t a good person
She’s fragile and bitter
With constant thoughts of herself
I hope you are okay, and not sad
I hope addiction doesn’t wander back in
Please continue to kick its ass
But I worry with her in your life
That woman will drive anyone to sacrifice
And laugh as you are scarred
She’s not really rooting for you
But now I cant even text you
My family prefers an Old English letter
For their departures
I never fit in
Because my handwriting is Primary at best
I’d rather them just call
I’m always expecting letters
And sometimes I hope for them
But my god, I hope you are alive
How the river carries light, at night
elongates shadows violet, chartreuse, champagne,
a golden flame shaped by the bridge’s brick pier.
Reflections quiver wavy at the edges, overlap
to create new colors trembled by the current,
disrupted by passing vessels
until they re-form
shimmery prisms.
Some hanta-riddled pellet fell
or so i thought
a pill bug maybe
filliped from my pocket
pip or pill bug
putrid pellet plucked—
i pressed my pen’s matte pate
exposed of a marmalade’s tone
or a marigold’s lickerish hue
the sun still stickily sweetens
smooshed ‘twixt tempered pane
and a squirrel’s chest
pressed its saccharine pate upon the pellet
pip or pill bug maybe, maybe
a weed’s wry petal charred
roast artichoke green or a murky olive
straddling now my pen’s orange pate
mere threadbare lengths from flickering fingers—
nitrile, maybe Mylar
cinching spindly wrists,
red grooves betwixt
lanugo parted somberly
as sickened citrus stocks succumb
and collapse among canker’s cross,
necrotic busses; caustic peroxide gnawing
pink and puckered flesh to shrieking rime incensed
like glaucous dandruff stinging scalps erupt in,
picked and scored, or, more so, erode to
prickling plumes that ransack supple shafts of
starshine, farrows of niggling vermin blearing
much as constellations scar a sky akin,
above ocherous street lamps,
more to obsidian denim than sequined satin
some may say it whilom was ‘fore erstwhile fires sprawled,
like dusty tussocks clot and loiter ‘long burnished linoleum’s curling coolth—!
this astringent promise flesh inflamed,
raw worries wrinkle, chew, and chafe;
that swears at a langouring lordship’s
pale and shaven peplum’s hem unstitched,
from wizening gleams of a horse-hide halter’s creases,
gromets gouged from blood-lacquered buskins,
knots among groped and splintered flax
some’d sworn once stoked Germanic roses
dark and thick as pulses’ viscous cruxes;
from a fine ivoried crow’s nest
storms, redundant as laces loosen,
wheedled to be but a coracle creeping—
‘Swears! by a marbled god
or some stuffed Quagga lost upon trumps
and waves of hearts and cups, or
silvered slugs deaf, puddingheaded buckshot
flaccidly flees from, swearing, “Bundling
boards, by G-d, ‘ll be back in spades
come cold October’s end!”
—bemused amid the mortise cuts.
Why giving a beggar a light illumines
prickling probes and opprobrious inquiries,
throbbing mortality’s meekly measured inseam,
steals its broken breaths some many miles shy
of old Ararat’s peak or the Bedouin shanty
Yeats once sniffed at—flickering fingers froze
before but a tender hunk of darkened pigweed.
Just scrub strange skin from disinfected thews
and shimmering tendons bubbles buff and disabuse
in pop and peal, debriding pure and pearl-licked bone
of dingy dross no polished stone should gather;
hypnotic moire of mottled fingers’ fat
a candle’s fuming blossom flenses,
shell-frail shale some stammering shoreline’s
skirmishes cud, foment, and cripple;
suppuration froth incensed from bayed, rare, reticent,
superstitious sands our Aloads’ shaper smeared:
such extravagant monsters stretched from sullied stone
i’ll scrape from waning nails i’m here afeard of nibbling
for a wile, ‘fore erstwhile flickering fires sprawl
to boil these greasy seas and oceans clear as inviolate Mylar.
The first thirty minutes
of the session with my therapist
were spent figuring out
why she couldn’t hear me
in her headphones.
The second half
I just stared at a wall
in my 350 sq foot apartment
and showed her my new plants.
I asked her to research kink
before we meet next.
“Don’t yuck my yum.”
Everything is too much.
I just want to let it hurt
and get fucked until I can remember
how to cry in therapy.
Thump. Ding. Chimes, tremors
trigger more endorphin floods.
Violence as a drug.
what is sunshine
if not the fallacy of darkness
illuminated and exposed
radiant in golden tones
a reflection of what once was
shine down brightly on me
express to me the reasons
why any of it is
take my utter dullness
evade my coldness
yielding the finality of it all
-for my kids
You’ve been through active shooter drills
since kindergarten. Heard the president
brag about grabbing women’s genitals,
make fun of disabilities and when our soldiers
are captured war prisoners. Seen whale bellies
full of plastic, so many Black folks killed
on the livestream, boats of refugees gone
down in the Mediterranean. Children stolen
on our own soil and locked in cages.
Malala shot in the head for wanting to go to school.
Standing Rock with tanks rolling in. How I cried
after Pulse and Sandy Hook.
You’ve been to marches, Nazis condemning
your sign, been to Pride and had preachers damning you
for a rainbow. I’ve tried to let you see the truth
in manageable bites. I know these bites bite hard.
I want to say it’s not supposed to be like this.
But humans are as humans do. One will shoot
a man in the gut. Someone else will press their own hand
to the wound. One will walk across a desert for help. Another
will lock her in prison when she arrives. Build it. Tear
it down. Build it back. Blow it up. Sift the rubble
for survivors. Doctor them back to health. Rock their kids
through the night terrors. Send the drones back in just as soon
as they learn how to sleep again.
I want to say it’s not supposed to
be like this, but maybe it is.
We are the horror and the triumph and the horror again.
Remember back to when you were really little?
How I taught you not to hit other people?
That it’s important to be kind, and share, and help?
Yeah. The grown ups still don’t get it.
We believe Mr. McAtee
died of a single gunshot wound
We have not recovered
one whole bullet
We have recovered
fragments
We are trying to identify
the nature
of the fragments
