Your Son

Will she tell you now? This morning
when all the twigs and buds on trees
are shimmering, winkling against one another

and you are holding her son’s cold face
against your breast, and you are weeping.
Will she tell you now, now that the chance
not to love him is past? You stripped off

your jacket last night when you pushed her
up against the door, pressing your mouth
into hers. When you saw him this morning, lying

on his side as if his body was a letter folded.
You saw him, you ran to his side, you knelt
and lifted his head to breathe into him.

But she didn’t say a word, she let you
mourn, let you take over where her mind
was as white as the snow. Afte that, there
was no way to get the words past
her teeth. Forever, he will be yours.

Lament for a Modern Danae (DRAFT-A-LICIOUS)

I

There were nights of motion, of wetness,
of weeping and pleasure, of ghasping for air.

Once, she lived in desire. She woke in the night
to the feel of you between her legs. You were

her Zeus, your hand sliding into her was a shaft
of moonlight melding her life to yours, creating in her

a divine pregnancy. The love you left there
was her salvation, her down fall.

II

Looking at you, no one would know your divinity.
She could see it from the moment she first saw you

standing outside her house in the snow, slamming
the door of a rusty truck, it’s creaking was

the sound of the muses that proclaimed your presence.
Months later, you left Perseus in your wake, her love

without a body to hold it, faltered, failed
to live up to the demi-god as it was formed.

III

Your Danae, with seven bite marks on her back
moves thru the world, different. The damage

you left, the bites, purple marks that you lift her shirt
to show another lover; the strange pattern of welts,

the shape of a whip at her hip. Feathering moonlight
between the legs every week, calling her back.

Home

On your back, I traced the words I was too scared
to say. You followed the path of my fingers, though,
and were disappointed by my fear. When you asked
me to give voice to that sentiment, I thought you
could be my new home. I am obsessed with a house

two blocks south of my apartmet. A two story brick
house across the street from a bar I never go to.
My house has had a for sale sign for months,
since long before I thought you could be the place

to which I long to return. I know now, you are no place.
You are a person. You will move, you will shift, you will change
your mind. Like me, you disappear. I carry home on my back.

I carry it when I take the dog to the park. I carry it when
I go to my parent’s house. Maybe this is what the homeless
woman who sat in the middle of the sidewalk this afternoon knew,
that her home was wherever she was. She yelled at me to say
she was not afraid of my dog. If we were young together, I would

take her to my home, I would undress her, I would trace words
on her back that I longed to say. I used to lie in bed and stare
at you and think, I will never love you as much as you love me.

My great love started with the thought that I would never love her.
What a fool, to think that. My great love ended with new scars
on my skin and flailing and job loss. No matter what, I can always say
I went the farthest. I am trying something new these days, I am letting
everything slide. I am walking past that house, my longed for home, daily.

Today, I heard they are closing my favorite dive bar. I thought
of the time you took me there, how we got drunk, how you wrote
my name in sharpie on the bathroom wall. I would like to somehow
take that part of the wall, to have a memorial of our home. You came

back once, but my bed distubed you, the thought of someone new
in it. My next home will have a porch. It will have wood floors,
and a yard for my dog. There will be a light in the kitchen, too.
I will make breakfast there. I will take the dog out. I will clean
the bathroom and decorate the foyer. I will hang my paintings there.

It’s morning again

I keep expecting to run out of new mornings.

I got a new vacuum for Christmas, I ran it twice
last night after putting it together using the cheaply
printed instructions. My old vacuum hadn’t worked
in months. It collected a trash bag full of dog hair.

I put it in the trash can immediately. This morning

I woke up and could hear the sound of water beneath
the tires of cars on the street three stories below.
That’s some loud water. When I woke up this morning,

I wanted eggs and toast for breakfast. I opened the fridge

and discovered I am out of eggs. I am constantly working
against myself. One day, she told me she loves me and
tried to slide her hand around my body to my back. Was it
morning then, too, when I never said I loved her back?

Across the street, someone has driven a limosine to the food bank

and I wonder if it is their job and their only way to get around.
I moved to the city and planned to walk everywhere. Instead,
I drive. My clothing is not nice enough to handle the weather.
I am weak, I will call off work to sit all day watching movies.
I thought I was going to go for a run. Flannel sheets are
very appealing, and the sound of water under tires fades.

When I was a dominatrix

I.
you drove me to work every afternoon laughing
at how easy it can be to earn so much, to do
so little. I never told you about the seventeen
minutes of fear, alone in a room with this unknown,
possible peditor, the way I listened with my whole

body; I felt what should come next. You saw me:
the high heeled boots, shining vinyl bustier,
my Betty Paige bangs. You saw red lipstick,
eyeliner. You felt the welts I left on your back,
you hear my husky-voiced commands.

II.
Inside my stiffened, well shaped cacoon, my heaving
breasts were not born of excitement. I was not
throbbing with desire for your flesh. I kept my fear
and left you with pleasure. While I held that
many tailed whip, I sent it sizzling thru the air,
I made it crack and twitch against your skin,
I was the one being tortured for your pleasure.

III.
That fall, when I was a dominatrix, I gave.
I gave and gave and gave and gave. I pushed
your face into the floor with my boot, I pressed
your nose against concrete until it bled, I tied
you up and left your when the snows finally
came to press against the wounds.
Your frayed skin, in the end, was mine.

Poetry Bombs

I am thinking of starting a reading/writing/critiqu group here in Columbus, Ohio. Here are a few things we will do

* Meet in local bars, coffee shops, and resteraunts once every two weeks
* share recently written or discovered poems
* offer critique when asked for
* divvying out of poetry assignments
* offer chances for collaboration
* bring poetry to others by presenting inpromptu “guerilla” readings

If you think this group will be right for you, please comment on this post and I will send you info about the first Bomb.

Seal these wounds

I’ve been drowning my fears
in astringent and slitting them
open with the tip of a knife.

Your words can dissolve
the edge of my anger, but only
motion can wipe the residue

of horror and sadness
off of my skin. Only the feel
of paper against my index finger

or the warmth that lies
inside your mouth can seal
these wounds I created.

The Poet

So, here you are, rubbing words
against words to see the sparks
they create in a world gone cold
without meaning. One day,

you noticed you were alone.
You read aloud, throwing your words
at the lamps, breaking dishes
with their velocity. They bounced
off walls in search of ears, keeping
you awake at night. You knew

you had to find someone, anyone
to lend them to. You packed your articles,
verbs, adjectives, into used grocery bags,
and took them into the streets. You left
your first bag to a man wearing a grey suit
on the church’s marble steps. The next bag,

you left at the feet of a homeless man sleeping
next to a boarded up shop. You handed them out
smiling, joyous. You did not flinch when a woman
with a pug on the end of a pink leash dropped
hers into the trash can. You gave your words
freely to all you passed, and went home to finally sleep.

What I told you

I can remember the low orange glow
of lamplight lost in the high cielings
of my first apartment in this city
casting the shadow of your profile

on the wall when I told you
my poems are all fiction, and none
would really be about you. I told
you you might recognize gestures,
movements, but these have been
ripped out of life at the seems

and transplanted into a world
full of deer and queen anne’s lace
that I write in blue lined notebooks.
But I never told you this, even after
you moved with me into that low

ceilinged loft across from the drug dealers
and families with dirt for front yards
and children wearing only diapers playing
in the street. I never told you that that
blue lined world is my world, and you became

a part of it the moment you slipped your hands
down my body, the moment you locked an arm
around my body while I was sleeping. I never told
you that since then, every word has been for you.

An unknown illness reveals need

Then the world blurred into color,
sound, and the lack of ground
beneath my feet. This would be

death, but for the cool porciline
of the bathtub against my sweaty
face and the question of what to do
with my last moments. Getting up, struggling

thru double vision, arms and legs dancing
towards the bed, a sickening marionette.
I hold in my mind the idea of myself

at the other end, ok, laughing. For days
my brain melts into a buzz of exhaustion,
pain, and the need for a hand on my back
or my arm. All I get: the checkout girl

pulling away as I kneel to vomit
in the trash can next to her register,
a brush of a neighbor’s hand when

he hands me some pills, and the dream
I held to lull me to sleep of unknown
arms around my body, holding me down
when all of my life was the sea.