Sour Diesel

Chariot

Can I carry on like 500 convicts, 25 to Life
Colder than ice, colder
Strap me down
How many men does it take
“You are vulgar,” they tell me

Requiem from the rivers
Sweet overflow
Dread washed in the sea
Aloes and shea couldn’t ever soften his edges

They took away my husband in chains
He used to bring me flowers that I swear
Were funeral arrangements
Perfume of camphor and
Formaldehyde
He waited too long for me to die
I out lived him
Barely

Slammed and tossed
I was free falling
He tried so hard to be a felon a thousand times over
And succeeded
Vandalizing my interior first
With his
Steady hands
Moving like an executioner

He was so precise
And kept calling for the guillotine
To roll my head
I wasted away
The antique band vowed
Enslaved me

It hung around my finger, wrist
Then my neck
I stepped out of it one day
They named me feral
Said my prayers won’t reach God

Many said he was so humble
But I saw how he was always so hungry
Insatiable
He got off easy

Red Delta Topography

You have come here
Beneath the still leaf

petal

Metal against bone
The stench of embargo
Barbed wire, broken bottles atop cement walls
Too much gardenia or the sickly smell
Of confined jasmine which weeps
Once cut from the vine

You are my familiar
Lone nightingale

Hear the festivities or the wail of funeral time
Let us hush in the temple and laugh in the corridors
Pushed against the pillars, unfastened in the groves
We have lost our reference points and time zones
Are insignificant
Unless we are applying
The neroli and lavender oils
To the pounding, pounding

the earth is shaking

Kaleidoscope migraine
Of timeshift to our temples

This is what you get
When you cross too much water
In one life time

floating
floating

I think I have drowned

You have lost something somewhere
Between this border and one erased
Smeared away
As in the soft charcoal drawings
The place between a woman’s legs
Where men get lost

Color of musk oil
Male deer
Blood red
Contraband
Ambergris
In the hidden containers
Of enormous ships and
On tiny airstrips

Come even closer
It is dangerous
Like stolen honey
Oil of hashish
To fall into and over again and again

I have breathed in enough cedar and sandalwood
Over these long nights and miles that my
Sweat falls into beads onto the myrrh
I am stringing them into a collar

A royal thing

Braid me into your stoic nodding as you
Pass the men at market silently praying or cussing
Bind me into the copper that fills your mouth
As if you got hit
Very hard in the face
Swallow me this way

You have reached me
Though you are so far

Greta, your Food Sucks

I am trying to write, it is days later and I am  making our Sunday gumbo and weaving the sweet peas onto their supports and harvesting  Meyer lemons, pressing out the Skullcap, Mellisa, Vervain, Passion Flower, Kava- name your nervine.  Phone is ringing again, it is Tess, who I  gather seaweed with two days out of the week. I tell her I am busy, she is asking about all this, and is not comprehending, I read to her some of what I wrote on, “Loose the Passport”. She said it was, “too much,” But Greta out at Zuza’s, the  Hunting Lodge where AL Capone had his hide out,  she loves it. But then again she is a woman of tragedy and loss. Rumors follower her and she is dying of all the cancers that you have ever been afraid of. Afraid to even speak of. They keep telling her she will die soon. My knee doctor loves it too, is dying also of cancer as well. Greta does not think it is all, “too much,” Like I said, she is a woman who people whisper about and are afraid if she catches them at it she will wink or spit at them or reveal something they thought hidden about themselves  right there  at the open market. So they try to be quite, and speak of her  in hushed, heated whispers, “…  race cars, charred meat, incest…. olives groves.. torn the kitchen apart with a hatchet…days and days she lives on only sea breeze and Cabernet.” We are all still laughing  when we remember how that great big man from the great big city left a great big critique for Greta. “Greta, your Food Sucks!!” So lovely. He had called himself a, ”… Connoisseur ”.  She took it to a silk screen shop and we all had pretty black tee-shirts with that big shot’s signature on our chest, wore it while we turned over the pork chops in the fireplace, poking them with that prong. Too much? I don’t think so, in light of everyone dying.

True Dragon

(For Fishturn)

Amabilis Insania

“The ancients had already observed the kinship between

the imagination and dreams, hallucination and visions…

Democritus had said that one could not conceive of a great poet

who was not possessed by a certain divine delusion.

Plato declared it was impossible for the production of

ordinary artistic intelligence ever to equal divine madness.”

~ The Theatre of Dream, Resnik, Salomon

It is way past 13:00

I know, you know I saw you, pass them iron tracks

Your Jack Daniels, your Lucky Strikes, your “Leave Me Alone” Ways

Thinking about your Dirty Mama, thinking about your Boy Blue

You have come to rest your head upon my torso

Telling me, it’s late… too late for Indian Summer

And that somehow you have lost a season, possible several

The season when some dry flowers

Pack fruit in jars                          comfort for that cold bitch February?

February

Moon of dimensional smuggling, place of echoes and shape shifters

Season of Broken Rosary

That chokes, asphyxiates

It will come you know, sooner than we realize

Red lipstick, smeared sheets, extra shoe polish

Polished grip of the gun, hand made, expertly crafted

Angora, wool, silk. We’ll wear robes of small prey

And draw with a stick in the dirt

Our mouths meet in a confusion of Raspberry, Vanilla and Xanax

Season of

Scotch and bourbon, a time to stay behind smoke          forget

And you close the bar

Absolute of Cèpes, Costus, and Black Spruce

Define and guard the nights

Cannabis takes a back seat to the Shadows, it simply won’t do

We have laid down in the Night Garden

chronophagoi

distant nuncio

lost days

I call upon Labdanum and Blond Tobacco and need fire

Michael

Gabriel

Raphael

To balance the cloying and sickening sweetness of too much floral

Too much treble, the bright lights and paranoia

Overindulgence and insomnia

Bitch Season

She wants to see me dead you know

It’s ok

We know death well

humans              born to kill

Like hyena, like lion, like bear

Sometimes we eat our own

I am drinking each day by 10:00

Beautiful diners, leather coats, the newest shoe/boot

The vitamin, herbs, roots. One tablespoon of dragon bones in grain

Pure water, enough fiber

I too want to tell lies

And leave the garbage bill, water bill and Lovers

To pile up

Fruit, cheese- all sustenance

Left to rot

Make it go away

All go away

For I have gone

See me without my beauty, lace shoved in my mouth to stifle the screams

I want only to kiss, to kiss

Sex is so over rated, absurd and desperate

Bad for my state of mind

I will Tango when I am well

hold both your hands

look into your eyes

1500

finally falling

This is penetration

Please

Do not speak

For sometimes I have confused the monster with the man you see

But don’t be deceived; don’t take my silence for frailty

I know enough to come out of this alive

To get up and walk 100 feet from the house

And call the Dream Helper by name