Decay

Published in Down in The Dirt Magazine.

Having grown up involved an extremist faith community, this poem reflects the journey of healing and recognizing that though my upbringing continues to impact me, it is no longer something I have to fear. I can feel the echoes of my journey without the fear.

Eventually, the world spun when we spoke of putting mind over matter. But how much could be understood when only the understudy was there to hear it? Yet here I am, subtly compelled to repeat it. After all, it could just be some international conspiracy approaching me. Call for emergency as I dangle from the bells that clang and clatter with a message that ultimately doesn’t matter yet still prompts us to sit and wonder whether these lives are nearly over or have the lies only just begun. There’s a cigarette burn on your arm yet you insist it isn’t there.

Years do odd things to identity. What does it mean to say I am that child in the photograph at Kishamish in 1935? Might as well say I am the shadow of a leaf of the acacia tree felled seventy years ago moving on the page the child reads. Might as well say I am the words she read or the words I wrote in other years, flicker of shade and sunlight as the wind moves through the leaves.

A tribute to the poetry community, written after attending my first poetry reading.

An age of innocence started with eager eyes, unperturbed by the mountainous swells of Summer. All by themselves, they feasted their eyes on a banquet of peonies in the garden that knew this time of the year all too well while the sunlight's immortal warmth gave them afternoons, supreme rest heaving with soulfulness on bedcovers. They must not let go of yesteryears. They must not look at the swelling feet of Today and Tomorrow. Even if they don't catch a single wink of sleep the way they once did back then or look at peonies or a primrose with the same affinity for touch and the same kind vision, they know: Those afternoons are a lifetime's song. They take them with the events of their lives everyday.

my insistence in green leaves and sunsets and crisp air on a white field are the fruits of my unresting reverie, nurtured by my pearls made of salty dolor and angst out of love is born fear tension is bound to arise between a limitless mind and limited time the alchemy of the rain and the sun is glistening water does the duality of my nature drive you insane or do you stay for the rain?

Forgive the whirring, my spastic plastic cerebrum, hands that hold memory like water, words that splay outward— careless scales of a fish being sloughed by a swift blade Instead, give me new vision city, the home by the backwaters the garden by the sea-shore where purple organza jellyfish swirl under the jacarandas and the vine's long, lenticellate limbs entangle in yours and mine where the earth has buried the dictatorial drones of factories and sunbirds sing, circling above us language leaping towards the unrelenting light like silver flying fish where buses shoal in this labyrinthic blue womb filaments of thought sparking against the other and where warmth like love-sick cellophods is always wending its way to you

and sometimes I lie awake thinking about all that lub-dubbing on the ocean floor and no one to hear it. What kind of god gives a cephalopod three but a human only one? I want more thumps. I want more time. I want to waste my love on everything. Give me a heart for Ohio. Another for a silk butter moon. Another for the park bench man who swoons for doves, his quiet hands full of crumbs.

Written after a sleepless night and thinking about being in active psychosis.