Buzzing Poems

Out To Sea

It was, perhaps, the heat of the season,
a haze so casually obscuring
the oily vapors of a mirage rising
from that razor’s edge of the horizon,
eager to lure you into believing
well, almost anything.
As though faith is an apparition
best induced by miracles that happen at noon.
Grit of sand filling every pore
details how the surreptitious sea
erodes away reservations,
tracks how salt, licked clean
from skin goldened by wanton blush
tastes of the ocean of senses, the rush
of sea to shore, the ease of drowning
into pull of tide, the primal roar.
That night, washed up on your stretch
of beach I gave up a smile,
remembered how futile
the act of treading water was
in the powerful wake of waves.
Dashed against the rusting shipwreck
I was no less a ruin, thankfully wounded,
Bleeding brightest red.
.

They Say Today

.
They say today

That there is a universe

Where all poems go.

Now I want to

Write myself up in verse

And hurl me there.

.

Today I Knew

.
So today I knew,
when I held you at knifepoint
I was not defending myself
against the sting of your hand,
I was marking territory--
trying to make safe what I can.

Today I knew
not for my sake if ever
will I plunge the blade
but I would do it to buy passage
for our children to escape
your kind of love.

Today I knew
my swollen belly
was all that saved me
while upstairs, a wailing ensued
not because our son understood
but because he could see.

Today I knew
a knife is not alien to me.
My hand could close with deft
on the curve of its handle,
could balance its heft
not just with ease but also with rage.

So today I knew.
I knew with the speed that you belie
of my thinking, that you say I am unable
to hide from view. I knew, I knew.
Today I knew I have the courage
to one day see the blade through.

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Illiterate

.
Virtually penniless and free
I am not yet fully,
consciously me.

Perhaps in a week or two
I shall breathe more deeply
of you.

My desolation is like a nosebleed,
relatively painless
yet frightening.

I have not known given pain
or offered pleasure,
I haven't known you.

And so I am shallowly-breathing
nursing a nosebleed,
illiterate.
.

XXX

.

Observe

the sureness of women

plunging headlong into affairs.

How readily they

transform the sideways glance

into an act of intimacy,

how they brand themselves

lover by just one casual touch,

how their senses are tuned

fever pitch to yearning

when actually

by way of desire

there is nothing much.

.

Bringing You Home

.
Marveling at my bravery, I bring you home
peripatetic stranger whose very bones
move me to an exquisite inadequacy.

Helpless to stem the rush of sense
I venture, daring to smell your hand,
sniffing, cataloguing, storing—indiscriminate.

Preparing ammunition with which to shoot down
bleak days, to stuff gaping holes running to ragged edges
that invade me when you leave.

Too soon, I imagine you happy,
rehearse logic that will confound and
push you into the nearest corner space.

Recklessly, I move to touch your face
hoping to leave behind the searing imprint of cells
that will brand you lover, ruined, and mine.
.

Pretty Pardon

.
Late to realize, as always
it dawns on me only today
that you chose me.

Yes, scarred, bedraggled, and loose
in places, someone you barely knew—
you come to me.

This is, I think a reprieve.
My pretty pardon for wanton
self-destruction, a vicious sin.

Your eyes, clear glass
reflect tiny pieces of me,
wringing hands, lank hair.

It takes all me strength to even
begin hoping. Beautiful boy,
shiny and new—

I murmur prayers to keep you.

.

Healing Slow

.
In the sober wake
of your inconsiderate leaving
scab-tongued Viking,
life’s inane details intrude.
How, how rude
to rip aside the veils
of sickly-sweet solitude.

Though the sharp little nicks
have ceased bleeding
O whiplash darling—
my wounds are slow to heal
or conversely, to kill.
Pull back the edges,
the cuts are festering still.

Lately the darkest of sins
is settling for much, much less.
The short spells of emptiness
are passably filled.
Sincerity can be an act of will.
How, how divine
to gaily blunt the stab
and blindly toe the line.

In dim light
memory is most kind,
languishing, refined.
All I’ve kept of my wits
are glued willy-nilly, in bits.
How, how singularly vile
to be reduced to mere commodity
with hardly any thought to style.

.

Borrowed Child

.
(for Leezo)

She takes my hand freely
yet no doubt carelessly,
with no specific intention,
no appended condition.
Only that I give in willingly.

The simple gesture overwhelms,
I feel that it’s too soon for trust, child.
And yet calmly I cup
the tiny fingers that have clutched
at the womb of another.

My reserve unfelt,
she allows me this one chance
to cautiously rehearse for a future,
leading me politely to play,
“Excuse me, excuse me.”

Baldly, I feel my barrenness.
Fresh from the spate of many
witnessed births and irrationalities.
By hesitation I erode my ovaries
into nothing but helpless storage.

Little one, you pain me with promise.
.

China Doll

.
She is with child again,
This china doll who is my travel companion
Our limbs as thick, as strong,
Our lives equidistant, almost as long.

This fruition has happened before,
The presence of another life between us
A heartbeat out of synch, a new stirring
Another pulse at a run, throbbing.

I envy her burden, the thickened ankles
The sickness, the fertile bile
Her stretch of stomach, the loss of luster
The roots reaching downward, deeper.

One child, another coming
A repeat performance of the same play
She has gone through her encores, amid clapping
While I sit lost, waiting my turn in the wings.

I hold her hand, warm porcelain,
I see her blood, redder than mine, a waste
The arc of womb, the cradle of strangers
The coven of motherhood I cannot enter.

We dine at one table, one diet
For both the barren and the fertile
If I eat from her plate, famished,
Will my womb be likewise nourished?

I feed from her, if truth be spoken
She whose stumbling outline my path
China doll whose clay feet, gouging earth
Lead me to the circus of death and birth.

So I skipping forlorn by her side
Will, by watching, perhaps know better
What to do, where to go, how to be,
When that day comes, the fairies turn to me.

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