O, Dylan!
From where is your darkness derived?
Who put the steel in your honey brown eyes?
What tragic spirit crawled into your head?
Life, you’ve got Life! You want to be dead.

O, Dylan!
Sweet darling, I laughed when you danced!
Joy at the sight of you taking a chance!
Step out of your sadness, that rough shield of yours,
and into a world that is offering more
than the cloak that you’re drenched in, perpetual black!
You cringe at the light, the night beckons you back,
and swallows you up ‘til you’re gone from my grip.
Love, the way Love lets my thin fingers slip!

I wanted you mine, now I just want you free
to laugh
and let yourself be. 
 

Mama moon you’ve swung me high,
and you have knocked me low.
Stricken me with wild fits
of giddiness and woe.

In nakedness and on my back
I lay like you at night;
as I have seen you in full bloom
and coveted the light.

I am tottering at the edge of something. The whole world stacking up inside me. I can feel it stirring in my stomach. I can sense it dwelling in my ducts. Swelling. Welling. Is it a curse to be a body so full of other bodies? A mind so plagued with other minds? It makes me weak. It makes me tired. It makes me kind. 

I stripped and skinny dipped
down into your eyes
the night you left me.

Cold, cold, murky waters,
deep black sockets. 

Your hands were in your pockets.
I rose trembling on your shore.

I am confused about being a human.

Make me a sandstorm,
a streetlamp,
a sidewalk.

Something,
anything,
nothing.  

I put myself here,
I pry myself out.
Pull me out!
I’m within.
I’m without.  

I am confused about being a body.
Make me a savior,
a songstress,
a song.

O, Stars,
Stars, make me something!
Something or anything,
nothing at all.  

I have lost my charm 
to a set of
arms loosely curled
at my waist
in a foreign
place. 

I told the truth
like a fool.
O, you didn’t
even pull or
flick at these walls.
They flimsily fall! 

mystery, mark me, or i’ll lose again

It was November the last time you touched me. It was November and the leaves had done their changing. Winter was calling, coaxing them to curl, beckoning brown where Autumn had lit them. In my head you are still at the foot of my bed. One lightbulb humming golden on our skin. This is how memory moves. You are long and you are pale but I remember you pink. So you are pink.  You are a poison. Do you remember me laying on the floor that night?  I watched you from below. All was light. We laugh harder when we don’t call it love. That, or it was the drugs. Was it the pills that kept the care from crushing me flat when trembling you told me the truth? It is what kept me from crying when you like a lion slunk in hungry eyeing and eager and empty and fierce crashing down on me came down to feast on your prey. You bit in before I could say: You are a burden, and I am a beauty and it is my duty to carry you close. Old lover, I love you, but can’t love you rightly, and so take me tightly and lift me and then thrust me far.

“Any complicated thing can be described in different ways.”

Where have I been? Sleeping. I have been reeling. I have been winding and unwound and giggling gagged and bound in the black catacombs of this skull. I have marveled, I have cringed at the light. I have been out eyeing cloaks to cover this thin skin. And standing naked in the pits of crowded colosseums. Where have I been? Closed off in wide open pastures. The universe knocking at my unanswered door. I’ve been open in cluttered corners, ringing the doorbells of old abandoned houses. I’ve been kissing fools. Consorting with kings. I’ve not been myself. I’ve been myself a thousand times. A thousand varied versions of myself. And you, you, too. I’ve been every ounce of you.  

Who are you, you may ask me. I am no one, I may answer. And where have I been? It would suffice more to seek out where I am. I am lulling where the ceaseless tunnel breaks out into light. I am rocking in awe at empty space.  I am sitting in the library of some foreign city: illiterate among all the answers. I rest to write where most run to read. I speak when I should listen and say nothing. I say my own name over and over. Feels good ricocheting around the roof of the mouth. Sounds stupid bouncing off the brain. I don’t know how it rests on the eye.  I. Me. I.  

Where the fuck am I going? 

Little Girl,
wide-eyed and stumbling,
Can I tell you I’m bumbling, too?
If you’re up for a game,
we can make believe
that we are perfect and pretty and new.

Or we can stay ourselves,
in our too big clothes,
and dance, clumsy as we do.
And when we weep
for feeling fey,
we’ll be beautiful in blue.

Yes, our daddies will leave us,
and our lovers will lie,
but we’ll learn to make due,
as our mothers did,
lost as hell,
with eyes on what is true.

Little Girl,
when light,
your eyes are suns!
And low, they’re big fat moons.
Inside you is a universe,
wildfired and monsooned.

Love yourself: your ups and downs,
your waltzes and your blues.
You are a vessel, Little Girl,
a cosmic muse of hues.

What parasite plagues this body?
I am losing my color, my will.
‘Down,’ I say to my tired bones,
they do not stir; I stand still.

There is a chair in this chest of mine,
cobweb cloaked rotting wood.
‘Sit down,’ it creaks, ‘for you are weary.’
I don’t. I know that I should.

O! These legs!
These stumps of mine!
Marching in and out of line!
I can not help myself refine!
I am at the wim of time!
O! My faults! O! My crimes!
O! The fine that I’m assigned!
A mind that won’t recline.