Love Letters

1. Dots on the bottom of my wine glass. Your sustain petal creates reverb like a dreamworld. If I could write a song with your name in the title, I’d be all in. Tricky radio. For the healing of a lesser god, I give praise. For what I cannot claim to own, you have inhabited me like the stroke of midnight. I’m peeling off my clothes to your strum. I am breathing loudly but trying to seem “alright.” My feet are cold. And I’ve had nothing to drink but you. Count it all joy, and yet, we ache for one another. You are the repetition of my heart. Reverberating off oil slicks satirized in their appeal to satiate my hunger for just another appeasing.

2. You stumble in late and I’m supposed to accept it. We bounce off all the walls like rubber bands and I will try not to cut myself up into leaflets you will mourn in the morning. Though I am happy to have you back, I am fully aware of your distractions. And how much you did not miss me while you were away… I will play it safe. Create another distraction for you. I was never a good housewife. Laundry and dishes and sweeping and dusting and the like…I always thought you were better. Not because I didn’t want to do them, though. I loved it all. It was grand. It was all that I wanted. It was you and me and Saturday nights and wine and kissing and you being as interested in the moonlight as I am.

3. I believe in our co-existence. I believe in co-habitation. I believe in cooperation. I believe in companionship. I believe in collapsing into you. I believe in cats. I believe that catastrophes can be avoided or dealt with gracefully. I believe in catapulting myself into your worryship. I believe in cutting through bullshit. I believe in calling you when we are apart one from another. I believe in carving my initials into your unyielding heart. I believe that cacophonies have ruined us. I believe in naming the culprit, even when nothing can be changed. And I believe in changing our minds…

Howling at the Moon

I’m fully awake in my rage tonight
Nails sharpened to snaggly talons scraping at the fibrous black patterns choking me
When your mouth hung loose I ate the air that escaped
It dazzled me, the thought of filling up my belly on your wines
My legs cannot carry me fast enough to reach the white-hearted moon child riding on the backs of all that is moving
Moving every filmy figure out of her way
I am
Closer now to being in her way
Choosing to engulf her madness
Like rain water from the gods sliding down my wide opened throat
The dark bird is settling into her knotted nest squawking and craning its stiff neck to let the sound filter into the psychedelic thoughts dancing past
I am
One of those thoughts
Heavy with coins to toss into the vastness spreading out like wildfires
Hopes for new days to come
New moons to ravage
In my haste, I will pour a little shine into her void
All the masks are jumping off the walls here and it is affecting me like cotton mouth
That sensation of dry swallowing, squeezing every drop of moisture under the tongue, begging for it to stick around but it never does till you end up gulping at the water you ignored for too long: that’s me
Twisting and twirling my hair ‘round dizzy fingers getting tangled up in those talons that have bloody sprouted
I am
Shaking my fists at a mocking sky
Demanding reprieve from a deaf cosmological ear now crest-fallen
Hurting in my wander, barefoot and sheer searching for shelter from these temptations to call it all worthless
All the prayers that have hung themselves like nooses made of exquisite pearls so shimmering in their appeal
I’d appeal to the ‘highest’ yet she’s too busy spinning, opening and closing her eyes amid shadow constellations to notice me upon her heels and that cotton mouth feeling is back again
And in mid-sentence, I realize I have been holding my breath since I was thirteen
That’s the day I forgot how to scream
And here, tonight, finally
I am
Ready to howl

here/on earth

it frightens me/when I let go/when I forget I’m some kinda ego/when the threat of distance carries me/from the face of pity/and fear, she wears a gardener’s cloak/drenched in feelings/too hollow her throat/I’m a little bit off/a little bit strange/I promise there’s a point/there’s a nothing to attain/I’m not here/you see me/I’m dancing, your peer/but baby, I’m not here/I’m an experiment/a figment/and if I justify my existence/it’s pointless/this forgetfulness/begging for attention/’cause it feels too much to abandon/yet it cuts me to the crunch/I’m laughin’/I’m talkin’/I’m walkin’ amongst you, but my brokenness aches of the nothingness I can’t fix/forget it/let it go/she knows no promise of tomorrows/there’s so much I wish I could change/the less, the more, the broken, the strange/and if these lungs give out before they’re due/I pray for another body in which to save you/I’m a song/a poem/a line in a book/an eye that sees/every cranny/every nook/I’m not a girl/not alive/not a dream/a breath/a sigh/but relief in unknown places/a letting go in the solace/of godly embraces/a daughter of moons/of suns/of stars/of bellies/of mothers/of lions/and arts/you see/I may be a bit off/and a whole lotta strange/but in flesh/chained to all that I would change/there’s so many hungry/and uncovered/and alone/as I stand/as I sing/as I share, I beckon them home/’cause I’m just a figment/an apparition/imagined peer/and though I am among you/I’m not here/I’m begging for you to feel 50 percent of my tears/and 30 percent of the randomness that gets lodged in my fears/or maybe just 15 percent of the lies I’ve told myself to keep alive/that it’s fixable/these broken lines/if you’ll take just a bit off me/a thought/a healing/then maybe/just maybe/I would finally/in moments really/though painfully/be/here/on earth