Sour Diesel

Ilio

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:50:27 -0800

I was able

To reach the bottom

Of this river

And touch you

High temple stone

Made mosaic by the mosses

And you are most beautiful

Dark Holy Mother

Across Bog Bridge

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:47:32 -0800

Come to your dirty mamma
I am your violetta
That you look for
In the half light
and am wet and dripping
with the canal camps
muddy

My toes grip
the red root of the
black willow
which call the honey bees
Beeswax seals my lips
and I say nothing of how you come to me
in the quiet
in the chaos

I woke up naked
cool
with only your
new moon murmurs
and fireflies to clothe me

shake me
and jingle
my buckeye and catskins
perhaps I’ll be lucky tomorrow

I’m here with a
low down sorry man
He comes around
when my pockets are full
we eat catfish and
the corn we catch it with
Drink corn whiskey or rye
He likes my one red dress
how it snags on the Formica table
And eats from granny’s pie plates
licking them clean with his tongue
There are bones stacked high on old news print
on the packed earthen floor

I am being scolded again

“You can’t even carry a conversation
but your camelback shack
is filled with verse and broken pottery
and you sing with the uncaged birds that
flock to your veranda
cussing me in your languages
how do you carry on?

You have already disappeared
and it makes some sound
crazy when they say they’ve seen
you walk pass the petrol
stand at night
why not just stay in your swamp?”

I found a clutch from that
black rat snake
I’ve been watching her
and know some who taste the air like that
I’m singing
watching her tongue
Someone is still scolding scolding
talking talking
It sounds like
wood ducks

Somewhere in all this
I hear the Bloodroot’s pitch
calling from the holler
That red dress pales
against it’s medicine in the jug
sitting in the veranda

Aime

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:41:58 -0800

Yes I know you from the
Shadows of Mekambo
And the small smell of
Palm oil rubbed into the masks

Yet my khush balm leaves you
Copper mouthed, tumult of
Sensations, Thunder Side of the Camp

Cleaning out the fountain
In the courtyard of that place
We had on Rue Royale

Water lilies and papyrus had
Over took it and I tore the roots apart
Lifting out the magnolia petals that
Fell in summer, dipping in the still water

Where your bone wishes had coiled
And cleaved to it’s coolness in the humidity

While every one in the Quarter slept
Behind the filigree wrought iron, like the
Dead, in the oldest of the Parishes

Top Hat called from Blood River
Rounding up the animals and galvanize

But there was too much vagrancy
In your promises and dreams
And you failed to be the great
Voyant, sad solider, broken
Cart

Yet,
Not everyone knew how the Great
Bamboo cut like razor blades
No on can take that from you
In this way you were somehow
Pardoned

Down the street with chicory
And binets, your laughter lagged
With Tucker and Brossard
When my slightest glance
Unfrocked you

O, how you longed for the
Cicada and Dutch Wax
And knew secretly why the
Blacksmiths are so special

i give you

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:10:51 -0800

i give you
ebb and flood
fistfuls of harvest at the junction
of seasons

lark in the tangled meadow shows
your eyes hands
a ridge gullies
our bodies are painted
we are ashborn
and are returning
back to magma
back to stars

i will rest here
and am close
dove sunset
a song there

dreaming

Votive umbilicus

Chariot

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:37:19 -0800

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

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 22:27:00 -0800

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

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 23:00:19 -0800

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

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:31:00 -0800

(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

I have slept

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 09:08:19 -0800

with voyant the unholy and the brigade
My silence unfrocked them and they sunk
Into the wallpaper of the parlor

I didn’t notice
Perhaps they made promises
Perhaps I married them and
Smoked opium all day while they
Dined out with their lovers
I hoped they would forget the path home

Full moons promises

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:42:51 -0800

Only the ebb and flood of the sea can move me now. I cried once. Water flowed like seawater down granite at negative tide. - There’s a steady breeze tonight as I remember brothels, me on my knees them on theirs. Dark places where legs are easily spread, where promises are invented and constructed in such a way as to be easily altered at a later date, perhaps even on the same night. Lines become blurred, too much tapestry, down feathers, candlelight and the seductive oils of hyssop, honey, angelica and copal combined with gunpowder, cannabis, leather coats and kohl around the eye. It is hashish, slow motion time. Here I arrived too many times in countries where people smiled warmly, “As you wish, as you wish” they promised. Later in ally ways, dirt roads or crossing levees I was robbed blind- and used braille to navigate back to port, crawling following soldier ants and listened to dirty starlings sing me back.

i’m a mean bitch. won’t wash a mans back anymore and hope that any new husband i get has...

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 09:26:00 -0700

i’m a mean bitch. won’t wash a mans back anymore and hope that any new husband i get has his hands full with a bunch of lovers that do all the work- i can’t be bothered. i’m busy dragging my vodka bottle around from room to room. people tell lies about me. they say i cuss and throw things at them, never pick them up at airports, take the phone off hook and that they cannot reach me. i tell them it’s easy. book passage, currency should be in wishing rocks collected by crippled children in places one would never want to live. bring me, mezcal and the scent of collision and too much gardenia. smell of inebriation and wonder.

rain that does not cease

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:48:05 -0800

perhaps i should be grateful, yet long for the desert and it’s expansiveness, to just stand in the sun like Joshua trees. arms up, all praying. we have much to be grateful for, i still rose this morning. others, many… did not.

have you crossed the invisible line that some people call border? go to the places, trespass? it is said that special papers are required for entering and exiting certain points of entry, they lie. there are places where one cannot enter with paper and a photo and much more is required in exchange for even a glance.

here on turtle island i hear some make the arrangement for spring break. it will be nice yes? i try too to pull a softness out of the square of my jaw. is it possible? the arch of my brow to severe? i lean into a peach colored daffodil, i dress the house in cream lace and peonies. i am fraudulent but give me enough time and i’ll warm up. maybe whisper into the ear of someone, confess.

tell me love, how are you.. looked for you, saw you in dream

extending the passport

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 10:28:03 -0800

we sigh the collective sigh with all others who disappear from time to time. we are questioning. we are looking out of our passport. some hold us responsible. for.. for… for.. soothing them. but we are not the creator, just mere earth beings. and fail so completely at times.

Sweet Nothings Outta Stinking Lake

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 22:27:59 -0800

“Hey, get yer’ red ass out here…”

“- lost his job a few weeks ago,”

“- can’t handle the vocables, don’t know why they

can’t get that Sizzertail one either.”

“Did I say that, or think that? Did you hear that?”

“ No man, it’s just that way.”

“Hey, did you see that? I was inside out?

“Yeah man, stop looking at it so much.”

“The timing’s off.”

“No, bro, there is no time. Stop thinking.”

You wondered if that Rattle was in here, in here .

Are there Two Rattles?

“Was that in here, or was he doin’ that?”

“sssssssssssssssss…”

“sssssssssssssssssss..”

“Are you with me?”

“ssssssssssssss…”

“We see what you see.”

"Later somebody took my name" he said

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 21:47:00 -0800

someone already took ours, all of ours before i left, actually bailed (for a while) turtle island. a halfbreed you see, so i have mean and trader in me from the invaders. genocide and destruction runs through my bloodline passed down from one of my ancestors who loved wool, long knives, white sugar, white flour etc.

As for the horse, i couldn’t help myself, love them… we’re a horse nation don’t you know and also savages- eat dog

cante wasteya nape ciyuzapelo

In Egypt I collapsed on a bed

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 21:31:51 -0800

tired from too many miles and bad water. Upon waking I went to see the Grandfather choosing horse over spitting camel. I lost my mind in Egypt, staying out in the sand well past the time when one is suppose too. Hashish and mischief, talking unreal and real things, back against largest tomb…too much lotus and attar

draw in the sand

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:24:47 -0800

did you hear about that apache girl who gave her life off this very mesa, right over the edge she flew. on a night like tonight- when the lightening seeks the tree top. perhaps she turned into the owl. perhaps some part of her was severed

My house is dressed in furs, fried liver and printed words

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 22:50:00 -0800

Today I throw away old letters lingerie, dried hibiscus, mescal seed. Handfuls of trash- why did I keep it all? Jewelry, trade beads, to give, give, giveaway. Take it away. All away.

No Dove I will not wait for April, but I cannot see clients. – still unfit for human contact I heave my life into a hefty bag and set it on the curb. Garbage day. But I can write. I can still hear the medicine within the rhizomes. I dry angelica, I dry calamus. My house is dressed in furs, fried liver and printed words from all you good people. I enlarge the text and cover all my mirrors and doors with your heat.

NyQuil and Listerine in Shots

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:51:00 -0800

Kills His Own sat upright
dead drunk on NyQuil and box wine
he told me how sacred his life has been
how sacred he was
i sat quiet

there was a broken
eagle bone whistle, silenced
in his belongings, buried
somewhere between Flandreau and Baja
it coughed and choked when it heard
his words

he advised me to walk the streets
to get a good education
he offered to be the first
to break me in

i sang a silent song
always the same

pity us all

Side Winder Sings to Iron Heart Woman

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:28:00 -0800

…there was a wounding

She walks toe heel, toe heel
A soft padding against her mother
Looking forward thinking she knew an
Invisibility song, sang past a curled hand
The way they do, those medicine ones….

I muse as to her Spells
Sung to unwind , unwind, unwind
Unwind the words, Unwind the songs
Unwind the Love that mistakenly
Left her heart, and made her appear

Human, vulnerable, womanly, gentle
To me, it was a valid attempt
So heroic for one so untrained
In those arts in which failure
comes so miserably, so sadly, so strongly

My throat calls for water to stop
It from breaking its silence, stop
It from cracking her name into the
Wind that tells me of her pain
Her toe heel, toe heel soft padding

Does She think she escaped a fate
Worse than death, to one who would
Wrap her heart in the maza of the wasicu?
Like the maza pushed against her temple?
Like the aboes left in the dirt crying for release?

You’ll see me in the wind, wind is
My lover, my brother, my sister, my relation,
My eyes, my ears, singing me of news
From miles away as I sing into
It’s heart, it’s breast, it’s mouth, it’s

Special Shil Danolzhoni be’ aile
Toe heel, toe heel, to escape work
She made when she saw a view
She knew existed, she knew how these laws work
As I do, but I am human, I am there….

She walks toe heel, toe heel
A soft padding against her mother
Seeking, hiding, lying, biding, finding
To walk to heal, to heal
A soft padding against her mother

There was a wounding.

- Side Winder, 2006 Cave Scratching