concretekiss: (Default)
He loves a girl who yawns like an iris.
He hears the curl of her smile
when she speaks.

I take him by the arm through the shop
describing colors as soft, rich, warm.
Not dark, bright. Not autumnal.

His useless eyes in the nest of his face, blue
as robin eggs, motherless, tilt heavenward

I lift blooms to the swarm of his fingers
watch him trace the symmetry of oblivious lilies

by feel until he finds her
lashes in aster, tip toes in hypericum
her mouth in begonias.
concretekiss: (Default)
Let me save you some time. We begin
with two incomplete and co-dependant morons, at least one
preferably hiding some socially debilitating yet somehow
charming eccentricity, exhibits signs of mild schizophrenia
obsessive compulsiveness, hides it like a pulsating
baboon heart under his coffee shop apron or is possibly a whore.

Our fools meet through a series of zany incidents to find
they’ve never been truly happy until now, the way you never
knew you needed Cool Ranch Doritos til the day your finger
slipped on 2 at the vending machine, and each accepts
the other’s oddities. Surely we can find something to do
with your dick shaped nose.

Now the dilemma, since good lovin’ should be hard to come by;
One must chance upon the other in the act of what appears
to be treachery; their lizard lipped lover in the embrace of some
stranger, when really it was two secret agents speaking in Morse
Code through an innocent series of nipple pinches and THIS
is what distends into some unbearably gut-busting side-splitting
nun-punching hilarity because it’s gonna take a monumental
act of courage to reconcile.

Here is where you can hardly stand to wait for some bastards
to plow their Jaguars through store fronts
bust up the wedding, sob and grovel into the loud
speakers of your childhood, run naked through airports in nothing
but ranch dressing and hang from helicopters screaming
I love you I love you I’ve always LOVED YOU, and the drivers always
pull over and the crowds always gather cooing like jerks
with nothing better to do because oh my god Barbara it's love

and the speech always flowers like I know I lied and stabbed you
three times in the face but if you can walk away from something so right
I just don’t know what the fuck
. And there you have it
cue Mentos cue strewn glass cue sidekick blowing a sheepdog
cue incredulous janitor roll credits You're welcome.

self-caged

Jan. 30th, 2009 12:15 pm
concretekiss: (Default)
You are wise. You have overcome so much, but it hasn't hardened you, he says, and I grin. He has been sufficiently fooled. I'm doing well.

walking out the door this morning


Psychoanalysis assumes that people are often conflicted between their need to learn about themselves, and their (conscious or unconscious) fears of and defenses against change and self-exposure - wikipedia

Free association – stream of consciousness. The way water falls without conscience or deliberation. In dreams, thoughts connect, grasping hands in the dark without the constraint of caution or fear of vulnerability. Cards are shuffled and laid out, queen kisses jack, joker chases queen.

Rorschach used inkblots to trick the jaw into unlocking, and riches would pour out.

You are a stone closed cave. Your tongue, Lazarus sleepwalking.

Last night as I lay floating in a spring pool, I felt a current change nearby. A body nudged me and somehow assuming it was a cavorting child I kept my eyes closed, gave a small kick to drift away from the tangle.
But the body continued to coast into me. Nudging from beneath this time I felt legs intertwining with mine slow and carefully. I continued my refusal to acknowledge it. Chin up, eyes closed. Arms laced from below, and by then too curious I let it happen. And then fingers sliding between mine and then a mouth sweet as nectarine and I could breath underwater becoming languid and drowning and then I woke, tears cold stinging like razor cuts. A fist in my throat even as I type this out.

We wake from nightmares relieved, it’s not real. Into a soft and sweeter world.
I wake from utopian dreams teased, it’s not real. Into a monochrome second home.
concretekiss: (i am sorrow)
winding bow
serpent alley
moving branch
wayward root
prodigal artery
hungry vein
blooming medusa
live wire
eve's tiara
hissing tributary
thieving river
cold-blooded highway

Have taken to connecting metaphor to pass time.

My boy is changing. Talkative, compassionate, contemplative. Hugged his sister withOUT prompt yesterday. He wants to play flute in band this year. I had to finance the instrument to make it happen, almost fainting when I saw the tag. $900 ass dollars?! I slipped up in muttering mostly to myself "It sure would be nice to get some child-support once in a while" to which my son replied, "I hope I don't grow up to be like my father."
"Never," I told him, "You will be self-sufficient and brave and honorable. You are a good boy. You will be a great man."
I tore a bit that afternoon, once he fell asleep. So much. I have so much to protect.
In social studies he had to write of the most important people in his life. I got 1st Place. He wrote of how I help him with school problems; bullies and the loneliness of going to a new junior high. I am grateful he allows me to help, to listen, that he lets me in. No award I've ever won compares. He got an A for the writing assignment, and my heart all tender and messy.

The first of the month is so bleak for us. Rent is painful. But mid-month I have a bit of breathing room, so I broke down and bought a tunic. It is a short dress, so I don't know where to wear it but gosh I am hot in it LONG TIME.

Gesso'd over a hideous painting I'd abandoned years ago, that back when I showed my BFF, she paused attempting to come up with something polite to say.
"Oh," she forced, cocking her head to the side "It's an...owl with lipstick on." Bless her heart. Southern girls; if we ain't got nothin nice to say, at least we crochet cozies for our insults.
I am thinking of a true barn owl, with a real face, maybe text of a poem in his feathers.

Last night I went to an open mic. Poets love wings, feathers and flying, never flippers or subterranean eminence. Almost every other poem I heard longed for wings, admonished the featherless. Do birds envy us? Our poetry. Our prehensile limbs, elaborate structures and burdened backs. Our strength to pull and crush. Our sturdy fists. Our soft mouths.
concretekiss: (Default)
inside out
"We talk about being able 'to control ourselves,' but self-control is a rare and remarkable virtue. We may think we have ourselves under control; yet a friend can easily tell us things about ourselves of which we have no knowledge." - Jung

What is it about time-lapsed cloud movement that tears me apart?

The vampire bat drinks blood, yes, though moves so slowly and carefully that his prey, often a sleeping cow, never notices it is being accessed.

No one would save up to have a surgery to unnecessarily remove a lung, in order to disable himself, though many people use large portions of their paychecks to facilitate a habit that leads to a similar outcome.

There are those at the pool who dive in without testing the temperature, like myself, while others gradually submerge, growing accustomed to the water as they descend the steps, prolonging the inevitable.

A film trick in comedy is to speed up the scene, in turn making the characters seem more delirious and chaotic.

Often disasters are recalled in slow motion; an expensive vase shattering, a car spinning out of control on black ice. Timing is everything.

I ridiculously try to piece things together, force them to make sense, but they sit as comfortably as Barbie on her motorcycle.

Fools rush in. Life is too short. Stop to smell yr rosebuds while ye may. Patience is a virtue. Carpe the diem while the iron is hot.

And what constitutes carpeing the diem? If it is silently and harshly judging people from the window of my ratty Toyota, then I have done so today in the back-to-school traffic. Shopping class supplies and new shoes. A's feet are now bigger than mine. He is so proud. Keep growing child, o, the errands I have in store for you.

An industrious and semi-relaxing weekend. There was an arresting movie at the Paramount, running around a fountain, climbing on stuff, skipping down Congress, many laundries and a quick and chatterly visit to a long lost friend who's next door neighbor's new baby tried three time to nurse from me, twice waiting for a few seconds and then lunging at a breast as though she could catch me unawares. I have a counter move, where I turn and give her my shoulder instead. She furrows her brow, foiled again. Breastfed babies got no pride.

My littles sleep now, their clothes laid out for tomorrow. The apartment is rarely clean, my book is delicious, and the wine is well deserved. Praise be.
concretekiss: (Default)
lady of shallot
my bright red fire extinguisher
axe blade keen as cap feather

under interrogation lamp
my artifact, my hard evidence
cut from its function, sleeping beauty

blinded bird
my passion in a padded room
wired into cardboard coffin

oyster tongue turned
my chrysalis, my impatient astronaut
rabbit waiting in top hat for cue

late to crime scene
my clumsy cape torn superhero
toolbelt caught on phonebooth door
concretekiss: (Default)
Uncounted thoughts, good intentions my stepping stones. Invoices impend in paper cocoons. I tiptoe over, careful not to wake them. Blank postcards wait for wish you were heres. Lit mag rejections to file away.

What now-famous poet once pinned her rejection slips to a bulletin board in her office? I should make some paper mache plesiosaur with mine. Every submission I made last year (about 10) was declined. The up-side, I guess, is that each had an invitation to "please try again," some even handwritten (a good sign I am told), except the New Orleans Review, returned in form slip two DAYS after I sent it. Such a glove-slap across the face. One rejection mentioned that I should subscribe to their journal to get a feel of what they look for, though I'd already skimmed samples of work from online and felt confident that my own was substantial. I didn't think it mattered so much that applicants hold subscriptions, or that editors take the time to stalk that out. The rejections come at random now, almost once a month, from journals I'd forgotten I tried to impress long ago. A swift kick in the crotch and a don't forget you suck.

Seed to sapling to spruce to shade to stacks of flimsy statements. My tomb of hieroglyphics. All the marked leaves we must keep nearby as though words are no good unless they can be held, folded, framed, shellacked, notarized by a previously notarized notary public goddamn.

I lose my drivers license often, my bank cards, social security card, immunization cards, birth certificate, receipts, warranties, work badge. Skin tags to me. I confuse them. I have absentmindedly swiped my work badge over a cashier's hand. It is difficult to arrest a naked criminal who has misplaced his wallet, I learned in the women's shelter. Your name does not belong to you unless you have the deed to it.

My hometown is shadowed in pine trees, certificates, newspapers, coupons, fashion magazines, eviction notices. When you cross over the bridge into it, the smell of the paper mill, which employs a large percentage of the town is overwhelming, chemical, gaseous. There is a free car-wash to remove the fine dust that settles over nearby land, destroying paint jobs, swingsets, tree houses.

Our trifling, uncertified, outsourced, hypothetic tongues. And here I am attempting to have my words infused, pressed tightly to an admirable Someone Else's words, my page 8 kissing their page 9, still as lovers in a photograph or carved from marble.

When I went to visit my Grandfather in April we talked about worrying, and how you worry less and less with each year and he said Just think, a hundred years from now, how much will it matter?

fuck I have got to get my ass to sleep.
concretekiss: (Default)
They found Her in the bathroom
fallen down drunk, wet jeans hung
on stubborn hips & hauled Her wilted
over the back of a strange man
to you. Fins beating. Black mascara
drooling through Her cracks
The congregation's scowls
smeared your dress. Cells divide
legs, lips, oyster halves. The womb
remembers its brightest star
the acoustics of your cry & how
all spun out from the center.
Err & stumble, glory & spite.
Little Jonah, Her mouth
will bloom in your mirror
return with your hook scar
to teach your last lesson, to say
She is sorry. & the word, a grain
now turns beneath your tongue.
concretekiss: (Default)
In this one my mother needed some strange surgery
to remove parts of her jaw & cheekbones that would leave
her face a pillaged wreck & I held her as I came to
tears like kite streamers whipping. From another I woke
on the bathroom floor, lucky
I didn’t try the stairs. The dreams are back.
The worst not just yet, but I’m ready this time.

My girl turns & slides off the bed, arms flailing, puppeted.
My boy philosophizes loudly, one hand up.
I will wait until they come to me, to teach them to prepare
take arm before falling, to watch for wayward thoughts.

Late night I am riding elephants
dressed as double decker buses, petting velvet
four legged snakes with the heads of dogs
Once I escaped a curly mustached man who traveled in a great
lumbering sphere that flattened all in its path.
Twice I've lost control of my car, carried it home broken
under my arm. I find & save so many baby animals
Have searched frantically for a clean bathroom
through miles & miles of dirty stalls.

Tsunamis other nights rise & impend, loved ones
looming in them their eyes wide as stone faces on buildings
bodies like bees in amber. I am lost in strange malls
at a new school, in labyrinthine mansions & bad parts of town.
Sometimes I fly, though always begin by swinging
or being thrown by giants & only just above the trees
never past the stratosphere.

Poor boyfriends past, I have kicked dreaming lobsters
were after my toes, waken squeezing their hands for
video control & left them to curl in the closet fetal
clutching my winter boots or babies in a blizzard.
Night stories the head spins independent of conscience
a cat's tail twitching, a hurricane. Sometimes I take hints
like loose change. Sometimes I hear louder what is never said.
concretekiss: (i am sorrow)
You, you made me leave my happy home
You took my love and now you're gone...


lost boy

Productive, slightly exhausting weekend. Moving at a steady pace. With Miss Katie at the so-called art festival Saturday, a fawn I cooed to stepped undauntedly up & kissed me right in the face. I assembled a wooden mosasaurus, into whose belly I will glue tiny army men. I commiserated over being awkward, drank a blender full of ritas & felt nothing, until the morning after.

& Today is for enduring some reely fantastic lady pain. My littles bear well with me. We took an hour out Sunday to play charades. I was a rock star, a firefighter, a doctor, a backup dancer, a lion tamer & rocket woman, burning out her fuse up here alone.

There is a same you'll never be
again, that each day you drift
further from
There is a same you'll somehow
become, looming if you will just
look ahead
concretekiss: (i am sorrow)
for Joshua

One lonely year I begged my mama
for a mandolin to impress a mournful-eyed boy
who said my hands were good for it
examining them with his & I would never
ask for anything else ever again
ever I promised, driven by winsome grin
a hallowed heart smooth as polished
cherrywood & strings sore with song. When it
arrived, the instrument was unruly
kept its melody a secret I could not contrive
stung my fingers, would bleat & yowl
til I hung it from the wall red &
tongue torn as an honorable mention
while the boy faded off like the end of a song
into the pines. One lonely year I heard
he found an opus his hands were good for
of steel, of shrapnel, bowed his head over & played
One lonely year I lost the mandolin in the belly
of an abandoned house, a bad egg, a hollow heart
now home to fauna & in my dreams the boy
still visits me, cradling an instrument
that only sings for him, hangs his head down
over sometimes my hands, sometimes a metal means
sometimes the wooden heart & sometimes stops
to lift his eyes like limbs to light
& ask me hey, do you know this one.
concretekiss: (Default)
We waded into the sea up to our shoulders
made shallow talk for show, while waves
hummed white noise like wind shook trees
It was when I felt your foot slide
a stone to mine that I knew we
were secret agents. Geodes turned
between us & alibi spelled themselves
by touch in a braille of goosebumps

All dreams are poems if you tell them right

sunset@lamar&benwhite

I may have thrown a tantrum at Circuit Shitty & kind of laughed maniacally at a "Customers 1st" sign & then tossed my USB drive into a random bin & exclaimed loudly I ain't buyin' shit heer! before stomping out, maybe, but the cashiers were acting like apathetic high-fivin' congregatin' no-good punkasses & I have been keeping it v. real lately.

In grooming my list of obligatory Movies 2See B4 I Die ) I can't believe I'm watching Rocky 2nite. What a DickFlick. Suggestions are welcome as always, esp. comedy, with which I am hard to please. One day I will be able to say "I have seen every movie that was ever important," & I won't be lying like last time.


You know what it feels good to say? Chakra

...chakrachakrachakra
concretekiss: (Default)
When your swingset galloped away
it left two clefts where tiptoes prodded the earth
into momentum, where goliaths knelt to pray,
their bodies sin scalded

Prideful lies about scaling the swing bar
twice, tangle in the honeysuckle vines
along the hurricane fence
If you close your eyes you can see
tiny & tarnished now, what's left
of your schoolyard, stone state lines
where behind you kissed in earnest
the crook of your arm, the imaginary mouth
of some church boy. Now, peering through
the telescope of a decade

with the shortage of kid skin
& candy wrappers, ant labyrinths wither
skeletal. Their teetering queens shell stories
of long fought wars, kool-aid mustached
villains slapping a massacre of thousands

Marbles sit aristocratic next to pebbles
Tetherball post pines for garden snake embrace
& you turn the memory like a pearl
a jawbreaker, the escape swingset, a serrated
pendulum's dictating tictoc, keeping time
concretekiss: (Default)
3am thunder goosed me awake.
My youngest one’s voice snuck under the sheets
There is big growling outside. Yes
I told her, took her hand to my belly.

Certain things children are born knowing.
Naps and baths are tools of oppression.
Crayons are appetizers as well as art supplies.
The floor is molten lava.

On my way out of sleep I passed myself
perched atop Mama’s tiger-oak dresser
hurriedly re-hanging the drapes I tore down
when I fell, in my attempts to inch along

the window ledge toward a strategically
placed footstool. Some things grown-ups
forget they once knew. How to imagine oneself out
of a rained-in house. I crouched by the door

to my son’s bedroom to hear him sing
his voice extravagant, brazen.
He was not waiting to fall back to sleep.
He was shaking a stadium, & the crowd was wild.
concretekiss: (Default)
Gemini & the Double Dog

What forest ran through you.
What history troubled your hands
into dizzy march kites
garden prowling jackrabbits
tethered moths conducting night choir.

Remember. I rode your back
pulled gray from your mane, pestered
the splinters from your fingers.

Remember. I watched you fidget
in your sleep, where this time
you are strong & brave enough to push
him off of you, off of me. You are a hound
who can only catch his fox in dreams.

Remember. I listened
to the telegraph tap of your tireless bones
while reading novels tucked
surreptitiously behind biology textbooks
hid a 3rd degree bracelet up my sleeve
was the curl you could not straighten
the lid you could not loosen

There is no vigilance to evade here
now & admittedly sometimes I miss
an anxious peace, the weight of
your worry that held me still
There is no yellow kitchen to gloat in
no burdened womanhood to win.

It's noon & long away your porch light
still shines. You doze in packrat attics
long after star-spangled tv static
Come, set me on the sill to cool
Iron & beat the dust from me. Come
there is still soil to shake from my hair
Slap my hand from the screaming teapot
Remember me. I was the first
of your unfinished plans.
concretekiss: (Default)
on tiptoe a taproot wedged
between two stones & so stubbornly
it grew. a dove born impossibly
from a top hat, you loved me.
the sidewalk buckles over a
patient pressure, a clever
slow motion explosion. slithering
tributary come to tangle my
best laid plans. nothing listens.
the birds grow gills & the ocean
will not stay inside its name,
becomes catacomb & bottomless belly,
blood & bloom, wets the mouth of saint,
slave, swine, loves unasked &
unwelcome & wrongly despite
your complaints, its imperfections &
the husks of lost lovers caught
in its throat, a growing trove
of precious stones, ivory beads
pillaged by a strange magpie
a slow sweet murder.
concretekiss: (Default)
Pride

never cools
heady as a hit
dizzy tequila on
snare drum tongues

You left me 7 again &
scowling at the dinner
I must finish, the one
starving orphans

long for, the crippled
& elderly appetizer.
Through the screen door
my dog waits wagging

would happily help
if she could. Dogs have no
Dignity, I can’t simply
hide in my overall pockets

with the dead cicada
& throw to the furthest
edge of the backyard
If I want you

bad enough, I must rely
heavily on centrifugal forces
ellipses, pheromone
flightpaths & your

observation skills to
finish this rich plate
swallow this comet
this barbed apple
concretekiss: (i am sorrow)
Over the weekend I threw nail polish, pizza, beer, PJ Harvey songs & potstickers into the gaping abysmal void that is my soul like so many weenies down a hallway.

My daughter is coming into this blissful age where she seems to admire me surprisingly & immensely. I know in a few years that won't be the case & am ready, I guess. But in this fleeting phase she spontaneously says things like “Mama, all the boys like you because yr so hot,” as we trot across the parking lot & I laugh & toss my hair & say “Oh stop it,” in that “Please continue” way.
Truly, everyone should have a little 7yo chick sidekick for when yr feelin’ like ass. For when you wonder if you were born to walk away & watch others do the same. For when you are tired & hoping no one notices your Hideous Eye Twitch. These past few months I have soaked up the lovin.

Rachel, I found some face wash for wrinkles & blemishes!
What? That’s ridiculous, you don’t have wrinkles & rarely do you have pimples.
Rachel, recognize. My wrinkles have pimples & my pimples have wrinkles.
Stacie, you were reading Cosmo when you were 8. You’ve been bitching about yr crow’s feet since you were 10.
Rachel, recognize the fact that you can’t HANDLE my wrinkles!

Imagine us all in nursing homes. Our tattoos distorted. Youthlorn words & symbols eroded. We will search for once wild windows in the soft pleats of our faces, our grins drawing back lose drapes of skin. We will tag one another’s bedpans, white dreadlocks, gray mohawks, race our walkers down the hall, pimp my wheelchair.

Oh & if you've recently wondered what happened to Sunny Day Real Estate (yes try not to pee yrself in anticipation) you can exhale now. It's old news but new to me that Jeremy Enigk, lead vox with the passionate, raspy cry gave himself up to hardcore Christianity & broke up the band. Real good ChristJesus. If you aren't too busy I have some requests.
concretekiss: (Default)
A bird's home sways
like gypsy hips.
Within its walls a strand
of my hair was woven
with your cardigan thread
A coastal sigh set
metronomes into motion.
Fledgling robins stir
& rock in cradles. Their
breasts flush, fevered
from dreaming us.
concretekiss: (Default)
Immunity

What doesn’t kill you
doesn’t need to
You will die just fine
on your own, eventually
incase you didn't know
Despite the backpocket
proverb, wolves go unwelcome
senses of touch unjustified
& wilderness is left to beasts
who hunger for hero meat

Valor for affliction
Admiration for a word
that always gives in to Was.
We handle terms
through plastic slip-covers
hand-shakes insured & boast
like we know a bitter glory
still in the box, action
figures, all wired down
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