Crazy Quilt
Your quilt is made with
scraps of joy and hope,
pieced by women who intended
for you to be better off,
stitched like a crazy quilt,
seams wild and free,
quilted by today,
held tight with thick threads
binding the batting.
Your quilt is made with
scraps of joy and hope,
pieced by women who intended
for you to be better off,
stitched like a crazy quilt,
seams wild and free,
quilted by today,
held tight with thick threads
binding the batting.
I let you sedate me like a dog
To quiet me through the flight
I didn’t want to cry, watching how
The world spins from above it
And the cities become insignificant
I am transfixed by vanishing
I let myself numb into only a vague
Sense of being. The pills wash down
Easy with practice or when your
Hands are clamped over my mouth
And I settle into only a shape
Like the clouds morphed into faces
Dissolving into soft autumn rain
And I wonder calmly where I am
Being taken to. I let you choose
Dart-on-map and surrendered
To whatever future I’m now pinned to
I hope for somewhere slow and lonely
A place where I can stay like this
Without thinking, void of everything
That led me to daydreaming of
Islands and ghost towns
And benadryl bottles
In this kitchenette, so often occupied the last few years
here we find ourselves again. Drinking coffee, too hot,
powdered creamer, no sweetener. Small talk looms
large; big hugs get harder to come by. Anxiety screams
at me to “help”, offset the unwelcome-ness that
might/not
be all in my head.
Try sitting instead; reaching for your silence
across blue laminate round.
Sipping at scalding funeral coffee
and all I want to look at, is your hands
their grace, even in the fidget
dark veins trailing up beyond
white cuffs. I love their bearing
warmth from cup to mine.
Those hands, deliverer of so much more than that:
farrier-gentle forge and crucible.
Such generous shapers of future;
of life and light.
Women, often abused
Neglected, disregarded
Give to them
Git down on your knees
Pray to them
How did you get here anyway?
Forefathers didn’t preconceive you
A woman conceived you
Thanks to your mother
You can see hear smell taste
Today you can even talk and feel
Okay, sometimes…
You just don’t understand
So listen to that woman
Your wife, partner, friend
Or the local store clerk
Listen to them
Hear their needs
And above all
Respect them
last night,
i silently wept
again, after promising myself
that i wouldn’t
i touched myself,
& i thought
that i could feel you–
there was nothing,
is nothing,
i can do
to be able
to touch your slenderness,
slip my hand under
your fox-printed boxers,
watch you smile, laugh,
kiss me
i tried not to beg
as i fell asleep:
you don’t even have
to love me
1. If you could keep one thing in a jar on your desk, which would it be?
a) Fairy wings disguised as helicopter seeds
b) A fossilized worm sleeping on petrified wood
c) Cat whiskers
d) ____________
2. What would you want to find in a lover’s medicine cabinet?
a) Essence of Forest
b) Turquoise mermaid tears
c) Wolfsbane potion
d) All of this, and more
3.The three happiest days of your life (so far) have been:
a) _________
b) _________
c) _________
d) Only three?
4. Extra credit: Write a poem (no more than sixteen lines) about
Golf Party
There’s a drag queen golf announcer
Standing next to a disheveled dresser.
Someone in the shower
Is being abused by the water.
For someone else’s sins
Leaving no accord between futures of themselves and histories of a home once again.
A man stands on a coffee table
Reading aloud Whitman poems.
Around him rests beings purely existing
Finding that they must for those not yet living.
There’s commentary about revelations of pure identity.
For me, this seems like what sex should be.
Disease could never kill identity.
This is why we must shout.
Lust in some beings peripheral
Is something humanely intellectual
Espoused from coffee tables
Decrypted and unmolested
For those not yet living beings who will be accosted.
All of these queers are stretched forever in all directions
Because they must purify societies suggestions.
Now there is someone who finds existence in defiance
At a golf party for the humanely intelligent queers in residence.
