nor can it fly

This is the bird I gave you because
Near you, it always sings
You love it, you say.
You feed it and tend it but you never let it out
You never hold its trembling tiny body
And feel its heart race.

I wonder if you have a room full of caged birds,
And love them all equally,
Platonically and
Distantly.



My heart is a triphammer,
My heart is shot silk,
My heart is
not a bird.

Truth is

She lay on white paper and had the child
Draw her outline in purple and black
Then she stood, stared at the shape before her.
With her eyes unfocused, it looked enormous
Shaped like a continent filled with ugly buildings
And smoggy cities and dense grey highways.

She took a green marker and drew inside
The shape she felt within herself
And it described an island paradise
With beaches and breezes and
Small animals that rustled the undergrowth.

What is truth but refocused lies?

Not eros

I have been
Wooed by words
Before

Swept away
Semantically, set
Adrift

Gave my heart,
Blindly to man and
Muse

But
vision complicates, creates
Distraction, physical needs,
Greed for warmth, strips
Away the purity of the
words
alone.

Someday my mind
Will master this body
And this will be
enough.

sheherazade's cousin

You are
Perhaps another shimmering oasis
soon to
disappear, and even if
you aren't, you
are not my oasis. I cannot water here.
You have said, and you
are king.

I need reassurance once in a while that
I serve a purpose beyond being the keystone in
The arch that holds your ego in place. Perhaps
not even the keystone, maybe the stone two
places to the left of it.

When I am removed, your sultan's palace will not
crumble, you will simply find
another stone.

I want to find that place again of being
Essential, needed
I want a courtyard to hang on my every word. I
want to be fed grapes.

I deserve this... but I sure
don't want to head back out into that
desert tonight
unwatered.

backblogged

Sometimes days go by before
The words rise to my gorge and
Demand spilling, you know,
It kind of depends how many
I've had to swallow,
How often I've been around you
And not said Kiss me, please,
And how often I've not yelled into
The phone, LADY LEAVE ME ALONE,
And how often I haven't said hello
To an interesting stranger, and asked
About that curious scar...
Once there's a base of
Swallowed words, they build quickly though,
It seems, rising from deep inside, until,
Here I am, purging
All I've eaten for a week.

And synchronicitously, a stranger
across the Internet is doing the same.

Bill Murray

Choose the day you'd relive.

So hard with spotty memory,
Flecked and smudged with greasy nostalgia, but I
Can remember lying on the prickly grass,
Inhaling the smell of ground and
Home through my blanket,
Warm sun orange through my closed lids,
Soft breeze rippling the pages of the book nearby.

I don't remember which book, and this
bothers me
Probably Anne of Green Gables, or Little
Women, but it could have been during my
Stephen King stage. I want it to be a Huxley
novel, or Vonnegut, but those were
later.

Smell of baby oil, and the sun toasting
me, because I didn't know it was poison.

The best part, the part that makes me want to live this day...
Listening to In Search of the Lost Chord, loud
In my headphones, feeling deepened, different,
transported. House of four doors, opening
the doors of perception in my tuned in mind, as I
settled down into the grass and became a part of
everything.
Om.
Never more present, never more distant.

I think
It was that night I felt infinity expand in my brain as
I looked up at stars forever.

Things I wish I could rip off me

My belly,

My girly need for reaction and reassurance
that makes me fuck things up;

That stupid look I wear
when I don't want what just happened
to have happened;

Two of the nights we spent together that cling to the sides of my brain
Like alcohol coats the glass

My self-conscious fear of asserting my needs,

My experience and wisdom,
so I could frolic carefree like I
never did.