I

A justification for self-destruction: something unspeakable

Nicotine stutters the heart to
Hummingbird-life. And lasts
only a week to starve and break.
Chase the tumbleweed for the buzz
of endorphins and open your skin
to a palmful of sweat.
You pays your pocketful of rubies
in exchange for his heart, gasp
around a mouthful (of him) as
it kicks your ribs like a newborn.

(adrenalineadrenalineadrenaline)

Bare your throat to feel cold steel
on your tongue
And cry in violent delight as Damocles’
Sword slides into your stomach.
You’ve always had a hunger for  ________ _________
To feed you fat and make you
Too big for the cradle
But a starved body (soul) that made you
too small for the grave.

II

Choke on Nostalgia

Timepieces with clock faces protected
by Quartz; so eat the rose-tinted crystals
And choke on Nostalgia.
Be canonised in clear waters
When silicon brushes kiss you to lovely life in
between silver and iron:
they will forget your name anyway.

Without a name, you turn home-ward
but find only red-rust and desert.
Parched, you hitch a ride with
a sinner, drink blasphemies from his hungry lips
and steal his watch (for old times’ sake).

Heaven welcomes you as their silver-
skinned saint, with a choir of 12-eyed angels.
And the sinner’s body is red-rust,
bone-dry in your home-bound desert.

III

Street Corner Prophets

The homeless man near my block:
breathe life from spent cigarette
and coughs each red-breath out.
He says he was baptised in fire,
‘cause June-water touch no lost boy,
so the priest soaked him in blue flames.
And each time he goes to church and looks
up from receiving Eucharist, he sees Virgin Mary’s
wings melt into candle wax,
pooling on church floor, to feel
closer to Saint Margaret’s bones.

You talk to a man with a sign
that says: the end is night.
And he says judgement falls
when the birds do.
And they rest their heavy bones over our
cemeteries. Covering our dead,
when angel-wings couldn’t warm them.

Go home to a girl with emerald-for-eyes:
And forget (or the memory never exists) when,
or how,
but she knows where you’ve been, what you’ve heard,
what you’ve seen. And tells it back
all in reverse.
She makes you coffee just how you like it.
Even thought neither of us ever told her
How.

IV

She is a Portuguese man-o-war

The Lamb of God treads over surface tension
of water, and droplets cling to his sole
(trembles) and falls, blessed, in
Honey Lavender sweet kisses. He
walks
And oceans spread His divinity in
Ripples to scare away the dark.

But the sea is endless, and there are trench-

pits

where God’s blessings
has expired. And those that live in long
nights
taste like over-ripe peaches
That have decayed since last summer
into bleach-white pits.

These creatures that drift to the surface
(to breathe) when the New God’s ripples
have faded, diluted into the waters.
She holds open delicate sails –
iridescent, and pats down annexed organs
And becomes Voodoo Child to older gods,
like moonlit ocean breezes.

 

 

***

Inspiring polyglot. A reverse R, who understands mathematics, but not quite love and/or liberty.