Counterfeit

Writing poems

To no
One
Emails to send into
Actual
Black holes
Serenaded by black bird corvid caws

Perfection
Memorized
Memorialized
Is all about persepective
Because we are all
Cracked

Perhaps for
You
Perfect
Is the isolated razor
Slice that
Severed your scarlet brown
Bogatyr soul
From
Your shriveled
Untested
Unwilling
Capable carcass

A foe who chooses over and
Over
To not only not enter
The arena
But not
Acknowledged the existence
Of garden growth and stone

Play, my dear
As your symbols sear to plastic
Binary equations
Holey socks, shirts, underpants and
Heart
Your numbered cubes and magic talking box
Are a kind of
Magic

Your gaze is more bored
Than fierce
Your cunning outweighs your strength
You boast without song
Although your ability
Hums brown and gray inside you

Have you noticed?
No one is actually
Keeping score

Photo credit: 

https://nicholaskotar.com/2018/05/11/russian-valkyries-woman-warrior-brides-of-the-bogatyrs/

The Moon, the Blood, The River, and Me

WTAF

I

I have felt no home and fight

To forge one

Every fire lit, is a song

To this desire

 

 Candles,

 Electric Stoves,

 Batteries buzzing

 Camp fire crackle smoke

Mess and mire

 

I am pulled to

Clean but

What?

 

II

What is it about?

Web weaving worlds within and? or?

Without

 

Cobwebs and dusty town streets

I can, have, will

Create a living construct

Not destroy

 

Snake like shadows sing songs into

Tubes of buzzing river water

Trembling out mystical sounding tunes

Making love

To a deep and silent

Setting sun

 

Reweaving tears to stick to muddy

Toes tasting

The eternal dance of hips

And heavy breasts

There is no thing to

Stop me

 

III
What is wrong?

My lips lie about

The ability of my limbs

About my own

Mirror Image-self

 

I do own scissors

So

I separate Their Story

From My Steps

 

Cut out something else

To stand upon

 

Snakes and owls

 

A tree of snakes wound around what?

Thick and strong and

Writhing

Wrongly while still

 

Supporting one

Small

Owl

Who sits, quite calmly

 

Death and deep deep

Mystery

Sublingual serenades

A fire in my bed

 

Breath

Of eternal life

Through the soft, sweet loss of

Love

 

Open

Your own hands-

Don’t you see?

Your own heart bleeding

There?

Begging for a change of

Belief?

Bending out the rigidity

To let life

In?

 

IV

More information

Is sometimes too loud

And

Less likely

To be heard

 

Just bend, barely till the flames lick and

Melt

You

Into what feels

Right

Hot wax wet

Winding and quiet

So quietly carving

 

Teach me how to hold

My drip

And tilt it to a pour?

 

V

I’ve tasted

Tried

Danced there, more than once

And still

A statue comes

Devours me

 

Where is she?

The Her that can murmur mumble

Scream and say

Precisely

How unclean and

Not neat

I actually am…I

Hear her

Now

 

I can calm my campfire heart

Pounding crackle snaps across

The dark,

Like tickled fireflies

Mirroring silent celestial

Rocks a million miles away

Old as dreams

 

I have lessons to learn

From unnamable

Made up universities

If only I could find

My notebooks

 

VI

I’d rather waltz

In the soft sandy moonlit

Memory

 

Tango recklessly

to toss my head back, too fast, too low

Laughing

 

Salsa along with swaying hips

Holding a hot babe’s ass in grasping

Panting hands

Barefoot still

 

We are and always were

One

 

The Moon, the Blood,

The River, and Me

 

Read

And bleed

Unzip flesh suits down

Filaments and

Bone

Red and rippling muscle

Vertebrae cairn creations

Dropped onto stone

 

And our eyes ignite coal fire flames

With hearthstone hearts

And flaming dragon fly dreams

 

I have felt no home and fight

To forge one

This journey is not an

Easy one

 

I’m hoping you have a light.

 

 

 

Ink Blood Demanding (July 22)

INKBLOOD DEMANDING

My fingers
Show my age
Smell like sex
Turn red
Swell
Grow and shed extra
Layers
To peel like mica

I am in
My 5th decade
I feel
Ancient
A survivor of a hundred
Lives
Bending toward learning
Like a sunflower towards our
Middle sized star

Let me learn? It’s how I find a way
To live
Engage
With the world

In a mental dissection
A microscopic mutilation
Like a sense arm tendril diving
Inside me
My mind feels and hears and sees
Screams and cries and whispers, dies
And gives birth

My hands have touched it all

Our stories matter
Cut and scraped, with mettalic tools
We put a message into flesh
Into the shouder
Pouring ink into blood
Black into red
Clotting
Closing
Creating

And the stories
Cartwheel away ending in
An arabesque, with
Outstretched arm and pointed toe, trembling
The measurement of every inch of you
Tips to lips
Conception to deception

Regrets that birth the only breath
You’ve ever taken
Fresh

So many solar systems
Of separation
From
them
From the parts of these ones
That scream-sing
Sonnets

In a soul garden
Built and rebuilt

Shake it up and
Out
Pause
Remember the moment between: it isn’t about you
It is
About what and who
We choose
To share our footsteps with

Will you follow me? When
I am tired will
you lead?
In rainstorm straddled paths
Of betrayal
And broken promises
With hearts
Wide open
Dripping
Black and red
Opening
Creating

Our inkblood draws
Upon our souls
No matter how
We move

Will you hold the needle- buzzing metal brush
Knowing it will drip
With blood?
And Choose your indiscretions
As mine were chosen to include you
Lead me deeply into the temptation
Of a forest glade full of life-giving fruit
With juices made to drip
Down deserving
Chins

And deliver us to
Light
Passion
Imperfect impressions giving birth to
Life
With burnt and broken edges
Cracks as deep as ocean trenches
And louder than a midnight sleeping forest
Screaming at
Us
Begging

Demanding

We just
Keep
Trying

Spinning... No One

Do you ever feel done? 

So done, all your extremities are dried
Numb
Buzzing
Your fingers, toes, nose,
dreams

Do you ever feel done?
Like, your tears may keep
Falling but
They are emptying the reserves
Till veins collapse
Dehydrated and folding in upon themselves

7 years
15 years
19 years
46
Years. My life time
Clawing at the edges of
The cylinder they dropped me down

A rocketship
A miner crawling on hands and knees
Chained and dragging someone else's treasure
A UFO
Zip zagging in make believe patterns
Across heaven
A hopeful, untouchable, homeless
Caress across infinite sky


Breathe
...
Count your pulse beats
Throbbing softly...
Breathe...

She is
Dead
So is he
And you are sewing your own
Safety net
With every breath
So full of human shaped holes

I feel
lazy, unworthy
Broken
Weak
Scared...so scared
As much as I am

A warrior
Strong as diamond facets spinning
Singing
Silent rainbow songs
Of petrichor ornaments that
Pirouette in pinwheeling patterns
Away from my weeping
Shining heart

Do you ever feel done?
So much fear filling your bones and
Spilling out your lonely lacrimal glands
Drowning in disconsolate
Desperate versions of you
Me

Longing for the breath of
You
Inside my
Lungs
Ornaments
Of life and blood and heart and
Broken stone, our bones woven stronger
Together

Do you ever
Feel?

Me...
You...
Pain like pin pricks behind anhydrous eyes?

Love, a reverberating scream too loud for
Breath and louder than the fear of
Hope?

Does anyone
Anymore
Choose to see? Hear?
Try?

I'm reaching...and still can see
trapeze twisting acrobats will die
With no one to catch them
No matter how brave they may be

Who
Will choose
To breathe
With me?

Catch me?

I Think So

Is it odd? That I didn't survive
By a dream I had of the future
I got here
By falling inside myself
And digging in the quagmire
The squelching putrid slimy stuff
That squeezes between your toes

I let my fingers fall between the folds
Of my pain
Playing with the short hair
At the nape of my neck
Soft and fuzzy
Not particularly female
And
I love it

My head, purple and gray from the
Follicle
My pain coagulated with the scent
Of honeysuckle tears
Mango magic red deep marrow

Is it odd?
That I still grasp for
What lives in death snake shadows
Curling limbs into solid slithering trees
Giving solitary sanctuary to owls
Telling tales
Of generational pain and healing
Allowing vibrations to shake us
Leafless

Crawling into frozen
Small
Spaces.
Broken
Barely big enough
For one
Desperate
Breath

Taken

Given

Taken

As the chest of the world
Breathes in and out

Jupiter
And Pluto
Orion and Perseus
A hunter defeated by a scorpion
A slayer of the gorgon
Crowned in snakes
Misunderstood
A formidable warrior
Her fury cooled by the silent flap
Of owl wings

Wisdom
Solitude
Transformation
Fearing that what faces you is human

Breathe
For that
Is human too

My fingers fall between
The fading years
Between wedding ring
And diatomaceous diamonds on the fingers
A life that had to learn
To caress death

 

Breathe
Choke
Falter
And fall forward
In broken bloody baby steps

Be.

The human creates life from
Microscopic substance
Rockets from electrical impulses
Scribbled by dancing phalanges
Playing with graphite rock
Onto skin-thin dead tree trunks

Is it odd?
That i survived at all?
So far?
When all I dream of
Is a world where we all
Stop
Hiding

Grief

There is a swirl

That starts small

A whirling darkness of

Nightmare blue 

Inside my insides

Deep in the marrow

Of my aching bones

There is a cramping

That winds its way

Bubbling from the center red

Of my gut

Stretching out claw tipped fingers

To scratch lines upon

My obsidian stone heart

The silhouette of a wasp 

Outlined against the crisp

White disk moon

In search of protein to

Tear off in chunks 

Fuel for the generations

Death is a benediction 

A balm upon my blistered, swollen

Flesh

The spasms of the farthest star

Pulling on me

Tugs also 

Upon the web weaving us all

Into our circle

A labyrinthine twining

Of your soul and his blood

With her tears and our muscle

A rippling scream 

That we are rent

One from the other

As surely as a tree limb is splintered

By the end of the arc of an 

Axe blade

Our fear kills us

Bleeding black skin, red skin, brown skin, white

And thick

Wet

Hot

Our blood 

seeps deep to the core

Journaling 1

I haven't been on here in quite a while.  And when I have been on here, I have been writing a lot of poetry.  This is a thing of which I am very proud.  Right now, I have been struggling.  We are in the middle of the global pandemic, coronavirus covid 19 shit storm.  I left my classroom on March 11th and haven't been back.  Virginia schools closed for the year weeks ago and our county in Maryland just made the call a few days ago.  This means I have been distance teaching for over a month now.  I can safely say I hate it.  And I am insanely grateful that I still get paid in this unsettling time.  I am blessed and privileged and I am aware of it every day. Somedays, I feel that privilege as a joy, others I feel it as a weight because I know others have so many needs and it feels selfish to have a huge container of cashews and a bag of Dove dark chocolate. 

I thought of sitting down to write because I am struggling emotionally on a daily basis.  I am pretty sure others are feeling it too, in various ways and degrees.  So maybe if I write, I will remember to lift myself up.  And if I can do that, in even tiny ways, perhaps it will be able to do that for others too.  

If I have learned anything in my life, and the lessons just keep coming, it is that you cannot skip around painful things.  Trauma, abuse, fear, grief, loss...all those things, they will be felt, one way or another.  So I try my best to sit with them, these beautiful, strong, willful emotions.  There is no use fighting them. 

https://www.turningart.com/artist/zhan-ni-li

I am going to sit with them here, with words, to honor them and help them feel seen, to try and create a way to help them sink into my heart and become more of the stregnth I know I will need going forward.  

Taken from Trauma Informed Parent Credit: #sheenahill

May is always hard for me.  I was married May 1, 2005.  My husband died May 22, 2013. Between the 1st and the 22nd, there are so many painful memories.  I mourn the future that was taken from me.  On the 22nd, I never work.  I take the day and celebrate every second of his life with our kids.  I'm not sure how I would survive the day if I didn't do something like that.  We go on an outside adventure, to a zoo, or take a boat ride, or watch a movie he would've loved and spoil ourselves silly.  The day he died, we were in the Kline Hospice House...such a beautiful place full of hard working, lovely people.  I had stayed there with him the whole time, sleeping on the sofa beside his bed.  The night of the 21st, I scooted the sofa closer to him so that I could reach through the metal bars and hold his hand.  

I don't have anyone's hand to hold now. I hold my kids and try to give them strength and a foundation, hope, connection. I just wish I wasn't trying to build this for them all alone