Sleep

She is an elusive whore-
Comes and goes as she pleases,
But rarely pleases
Me.
Sneaking in and out-
Surreptitious and cunning,
Meanwhile my mind is running
On empty.
But still I wait for her...
Seeking fruition
Of the torrid affair
I know is possible.

Sleep,
how I long to be
your bitch.

Swell

My resistance was swelling
held down
my mind is fading now...
I see it happening-
I've been here before.
Before
Before

My resistance was swelling,
(or at least I think it was... maybe it's rage. I'm a little unclear, or maybe unfocused... how did I get here? was it one drink or two and who the hell are you?)

Held down
by alcohol and calloused hands, rage igniting and inciting while his hands are delighting, creeping here... and there.
I'm feeling heavy and tired of fighting.
I'm almost gone- fleeting, flickering, fleeing- a trick I learned the first time...
My mind is fading now...
teetering, shifting, slipping, drifting-
I've found the intense numbing peace of empty thoughts, but soon they
Escape
me.
Spinning, slight swirling, twirling of the room, my eyes are out of focus,
then
Shattered.
I try to find my way back, but something has changed. It's becoming clearer now, and happening too fast-
Penetrating
I see it happening-
something tells me to disappear, but I don't, I can't- she is familiar to me,
ashamed of trusting, while he's lusting and thrusting...
forward

I've been here before.
not here, but here. The room is nicer this time around.
Once upon a time
this child's bed held stuffed animals that offered comfort
now it overflows with his
emerging emissions emitting the casual omission of permission.
Almost like before,
almost.

Before
There was no alcohol...no numbing peace, no
Escape.
just the cold penetration of his eyes,
his cock,
filling me up four times in six hours
not subsiding, but persisting...
the room whirling and twirling
like Van Gogh's Starry Night...
into unconsciousness

Before
I said I would never let it happen again, but here I am watching
with my own eyes this reprise between my thighs
as he whispers "Ohhh. God.", followed by exhausted sighs.
And this time I'm left with a prize, swelling, protruding, projecting.
And I can't help but think, as long as it's still my decision this sweet derision needs revision-
and just like that
Life
was sucked out of me.

pale blue

6 minute freewrite...


You are retrograde
in my roladex heart
turning back the pages
to find bruised and burned bios
of exed out exes
and one night stands
still stand heavy in my eyes
but i am spinning on your axis
i wish time moved like saturn
10, 760 days of burning stars and supernovas...
I wish I could bend time
and leave you in my arms forever.
Nothing has felt more real
than resting inside your dreams
and I am tired
from climbing your mountains
and sliding down your hills

Tonight
I awoke in a cold sweat
to find a nymph
resting on my chest
pushing her weight against
my fraility
my ears are bleeding
from a Siren
sounding off all night

I'm shivering in your sheets
but you are warming my soul
a little at a time
we're diving backwards
into a pool of love
riding tidal waves of emotion
and caged hearts being let free
I am smoking
your essence
you are looking for my heart
but it's not in my chest
you swallowed it
like Cronus
and I am blinding you
with diamond disco balls
and laser shows
but I am blind
and heartless

and I swear my soul
turned blue
the day your eyes did

block block block

i hate writers block.
especially the kind where lines of words, (wanna be poems) are forming in your head and they just sit there until you birth them onto paper... (or a computer screen) but you can't seem to do that because you have ignored them for so long that now your mind is telling you to fuck off. it's so frustrating. This is how I know it's been too long. There are so many words lingering that i can't seem to sift throught them and make sense of it all. so instead i'm thinking of assignments I've given to my students and hoping that the brain exercise will somehow alleviate the blockage... a brain enema of sorts. It's hard to say if it will work or not. If nothing else, there will exist mediocre poetic randomness...

I feel like I've just spent the last two hours writing absolute shit. I deeply desire to turn over, go to sleep and forget it all... but i can't .. the second i close my eyes the words start appearing again and then I'm stuck trying to arrange them in some kind of order. maybe that's the problem.

arrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

ophelia

Sometimes I feel like Ophelia. I'm standing in the middle of the promenade. Im counting flowers out to the rhythm of lullaby's gone by. I'm wishing the violets in my mind hadn't withered and died. The flames are licking at my skin, which is threatening to fall away like the skin of the ripest fruit. I'm trying to get people to listen to me, but the words come out backwards. And with this infinite amount of reason and god like judgment I'll lean against the railing and scream my song for the court to hear.


I wonder if anyone would fight at my funeral. Would the leaves crunch under you as you strangled the one that I gave orchids to? I can hear the heavy breathing of you against my back. I can feel the hands against my skin. Cold and metallic, grasping at my flesh and pulling me backwards into the wet dirt of my home. My home with the granite headstone. The acid rain will erode my name soon and the ivy's will call the sarcophagus their home.


There's silence in the water. Thick, inky silence.

Let me drown in this silence

And watch my flames burn the surface of your quiet contributions.

the locked ward

don't touch my hair, she screamed
as my fingers
reached between
the golden waves
and pulled out again
clutching locks
of still tight curls
in my fist,
my mans fist
compared to the size of hers,
knotted and fixed on the sheets


i relax my hand and let it roam clumsily
in awkward lumbering steps
over her paper white skin
it must feel like i'm made of sandpaper to her
my skin looks dirty
my healthy glow seems indecently diseased
in the sterile blindness of white washed walls
and steamed sheets
my throat tastes of silence
the kind that chokes you quietly
because you dare not even splutter and cough
to break it free

and I know that she's not there
that she's away
where none of this can hurt her
looking past the walls
of her tomb into the
tv lined prison walls of her head
where the reality of death blasts out
like a sing a long chorus
the whole audience can join in
where the final credits
aren't really that final
but just a break between
two episodes

blueberry peach crostada

Today is the perfect day for lounging. I started the day at Joe Van Gogh's...and somehow managed to pound out a week's worth of lesson plans. I'm starting a poetry unit tomorrow with my freshman- which is always interesting. My biggest struggle is choosing the right poems. I prefer to teach high interest poems that are engaging for at risk youth, but then I remember that my job as an educator is to be a whore to the absurd curriculum guidelines that require me to teach cheesy poems that some 70 year old conservative white person, who hasn't taught in years, reminisced on from their childhood days, while drinking prune juice and praying for a good solid shit... and so I do this mental listmaking thing where i weigh the pro's and cons of what to teach, and ultimately, I say screw the curriculum and teach what I think they'll want to learn. Because that's really what it should be about. Not some ridiculous standardized test and one size fits all approach... so I'm teaching alix olson, countee cullen, adrienne rich, langston hughes, audre lord, ani difranco, tupac shakur, stacey ann chin, william carlos williams and a few others... When I finished we were hungry so we tried to hit up the mellow mushroom but sadly they weren't open, so we retreated to our kitchen for some lunch...

We have a small kitchen. Very small. With the fridge and the oven, there's not much wiggle room, but since both are necessary accoutremonts for the kitchen and we don't wiggle in the kitchen all that often, we somehow manage. Today we had a stew with lima beans, corn, tomatoes, pinto beans, carrots, onions, garlic, tvp, and a delightful beer base. Cooking in the kitchen with Amy is a wee bit challenging, but thoroughly exhilirating. We become a well-oiled machine, moving in circles about each other; we each have our roles and places where we hunker down and chop, slice, simmer, mix, toss, and knead. We don't necessarily decide and divide these roles, it just sorta happens- without words. and I like it. a lot. My next kitchen adventure is going to be Peach Blueberry crostada. It's an open-faced pie, and well, we all know those are the best kind...

Now, we are engrossed in the middle of an iNSIDEoUT board meeting discussing dates and deadlines for our upcoming prom, benefit, lobby day and speakout. Working with queer youth is awesome, it just requires patience. Lots of patience.

We're settling in to our new place and learning to love all it's intricacies. Our first yard sale is behind us and I have shed numerous aspects of my former married life in the process which feels great. AND... we have a kick ass porch. It's the ideal porch, right on the corner of Buchanan and Green, and it feels like we're right in the middle of all the action. Our friends walk by daily and we feel so much more in touch with the outside world. It's amazing how half a block can make such a difference. And it's kinda fun living across from a church because we seize opportunities to alter the sign and let people know that "Dogs Love You"! Cause it shouldn't always be about god. It's a little longer of a walk to hit up The Federal but once the weather warms up and I don't have to fear pneumonia at every turn, it's on!



This summer is going to be amazing. There are only 161 says til Michfest, and I can hardly wait! While last summer goes down in history as the best summer ever (especially in the sense of Midtown Dickens' song- cause I lost a lot in a really good way- but man it was fuckin' worth it...) I predict that every summer going forward will be equally awesome. This summers major event will be Michfest, but you never know, we just might work in a trip to South America...


anyhow, that's enough rambling for today....