Published on: 6/14/2010
Lost

In this unnatural light
where fog hangs in veils
draping rooftops
permeating streets
night melting away
falling too quickly
from your fingertips
the world retreating
its ghosts always
just out of reach
as you grasp the empty air
hoping to be found

Published on: 6/14/2010
Golden Lilies

She was just a child when her mother
sliced the black and odoriferous
flesh from her feet, crack of broken
bones molded into crescent moons.

Now widowed and old,
her ragged lotus shoes barely shroud
the corpses of toes buried underfoot
still weeping the bloody sunset of a dead art.

The erotic tip of the big toe,
the arrow's bow of heel and sole.
These are the painful, ugly relics
her husband so admired.

Published on: 6/14/2010
Reinventing Yourself

I hadn't seen you for a while.
When we met
I didn't recognize you.

Face smooth as a china doll
with startled eyes.
Skin sheared from bone
and hoisted up like a reluctant flag
into an Elizabethan forehead,
a white road now mapping your hairline.
Eyebrows arched like bird wings
about to take flight.

Each word carefully enunciated,
your lopsided smile
trying to stretch skin no longer there,
lips swollen
as if you'd been kissed by a bee.

Questions I don't ask:
Were you raw and bleeding
like a peeled beetroot
dressed in mummy wrappings,
stapled like a box,
and shipped out the door?
Was it painful?
Was it expensive?
Was it worth it to have
that strange doll's face
forever startled?
Did it heal the disorders of the mind?

Published on: 3/11/2010
Ashes

Your grave
is where your spirit lingers most.
An image laid across the mind.
A ghostly moon adrift in a place
where darkness burns to come home.

Crows settled on the rooftops
of your house when you died
and when they laid you out
I did not come to see you.
Now your voice is impaled
on the velvet darkness,
your bones rattling in the closet.

Dissonant bells ring in my dreams
as I run across dead leaves
willing it all back into place
trying to breathe life
back into everything
being carried away on the wind,
your ashes rising with every breath,
damp and gray like mountain fog.

Beside my door is a mask
which I wear whenever I go out.
Lost among crowds, I imagine you
as the fire of a desert wind
with a body composed of light
in a future of glittering skyscrapers
and your light amazing the mind.