aubade, II

maybe you're sleeping now,
your soft suede eyeballs rolled safely
like some bassinet inside your forehead,
closing their soft unlaquered lashes
against the swell, ebb, roar of
your hearts untempered ocean,
swelling proud and diaphanous,
the swirling stride like a pattern in marble.

where are you now; are you breathing?
what could you possibly be doing without me?

and i think how you are like a strawberry
of unimpeached beauty whose flesh one rolls about
on the tongue with eyes closed tight,
heart clicking quickly like thunder, a rail-car in a storm;

whom one devours slowly and without caution;
only really registering the beauty of the thing
once one has seen it completely destroyed.

english

we speak it thickly in the South
dewy, drowsy drawl
like pudding lolling along
against the hard grain of a well-gnawed cheek.
they speak it snappy in the Nawth
their tongues tap dancing about
like some maniacal Broadway darling.

south carolina solitaire

at one point in your life you will realize that
the world will not fall apart in your absence.
i was sixteen, staring at the racks of Calvin Klein
sundresses and realizing that i could no longer
close my fingers around my upper arm.
inharmonious bursts of air conditioning swirled
like sandstorms, fluttering the price tags on two pairs
of slick Marc Jacobs flats.
and that's when i realized that life is like
an exceptionally difficult game of solitaire
which one must play against oneself, and may not restart,
and cannot win.
the cards which i had been given were strange & unrecognizable,
and i was burning them.
i was setting them on fire to keep warm the one i loved.
i stared, something saccharine flitting behind the floor
like frightened fish.
and i bent towards the linoleum, and i bit my tongue hard,
and i put out that fire.

mid-june, in south carolina

some malevolent, angry squid lacerates me
with ember-tipped tentacles and refuses to let go.
a small hurricane threatens three quarters of my heart
and that doldrum-red dream ballooning and rattling around
inside my chest cavity is barking to be let outside.
today, the day the sun got so hungry
that it sat ourside my door and wailed.

the charcoal-flavored panacea that is falling quickly and violently out of love

it was late spring, when the crepe myrtles
must be watered daily and my tulips have died.
spring, when the lolling bodies of fat earthworms
replace those dried and shriveled corpses
of earthworms long forgotten;
when the doe-eyed females bloom out of their wool,
veiled in that thin coating of spider-lace lust.

we lay, smudged-lipped, ears to the ground
to listen for the growl of that train, that future.
the sweet, musky smell of the earth before a storm,
the somber scent rising from heavily impregnated clouds,
the dry soil opening its mouth like baby birds
for lack of something vital. it saturates.

my hands are wet with something like water, like blood,
your teeth show through those pufferfish lips
like clean white rows of childrens oxfords.
the sun smiles down sheepishly,
the air roughly blooming against my pores,
like the inside of a loaf of bread.
the sun kicks up skinny legs
like a dark-skinned pin-up girl, and sips its tea,
and kicks sand in my face.

your eyebrows furrow like some overgrown centipede.
we are all blue-and-black, bruise colored,
like the inside of a lobster. must you evaporate,
curdled milk between my fingers?
sweet, sticky? morphing and sticking and slipping
like Cinderella's slippers out of my palms.

you lay at my feet,
no violent spattering of crimson
which is not ink and is not blood;
but rather the haunting,
the forever- caressing ghost of one who is and is not there.

rumbling along its tracks like a renegade bride
it shoots past me and into your arms.
and i am a-l-i-v-e without you.
oh, unexpected tragedy! the world shrieks!
i am inconsistant, i am indomitable.
i am dangerous.
no pretty face can hold me down!
the dewy wool air rubs like sandpaper on my body,
sloughing like salt,
and i am clean.

27 hours after my destruction

we fell apart like an overbaked casserole,
like cheap sneakers.
we fell apart like an angel falls apart,
suddenly and with such lustre
we were ejected from the heavens.
we fell apart like split ends,
the overused notebook, the yoga mat.
quickly and cleanly,
so that no amount of lip balm
can glue us back together.

twenty-four hours after my destruction

the world is waxing, firing my bones
inside some arid furnace where they'll char
like ash leftover from a potters kiln,
peppering the pavement,
quickly swept away.
the world drops down and slides into its shell.
the sky is damp:
i ache, i ache, i ache.

the world is sharp, a stapled envelope
with no one's name and no one's address known.
i stuff myself inside.
so cramped and dark:
i ache, i ache, i ache.
the world is wide. i stretch
my arms to hold it but it crumples.
forced descent:
i ache, i ache, i ache.

the world is firm. it squeezes me like clay
it pokes me into strange, uncertain shapes
like paperclip dolls spread out on the floor
for Not One Soul to touch or throw away.
i shiver in this ancient unsolved maze.
the slow decay:
i ache, i ache, i ache.