I kiss never

I kiss never

I leave light at night/ Outside my door
The fence turned on / Caught electric

Never thought I’d be here / Kiss 30
Never thought I’d live / Below ground / Light hungry

Was always / Day by day / Here I kiss
30 sun-rotations/ A lone press

Snail spirals to my ear/
The silence of oceans / Inside

For Mia Zipata

For Mia Zipata

August 25, 1965 – July 7, 1993.
The lead singer for the Seattle punk band The Gits
who was raped & murdered by Jesus Mezquia.


_______

Your rapist your murderer—
A fisherman fond of ankles in rivers
Of the caughtsun thread cast
Of ripples quiet going
His mind a raft

Any trace of river left
Inside that last pair
You pleaded for air with
White knuckles on the cord
Around your throat
Hands fond of tug & thrash
Did you wonder
About fish thrown back

A fisherman who once hung by baby feet
Wrangling viscera-covered
His back slapped for first breath
His mother who named him Jesus

Jesus who positioned you
Arms out on pavement
A human cross in early July
To mark his name by

______

You bluegrass child who grew
Where horse tails flicked eye corners
Pulled flies from your hair’s briar
How they swarmed even then into what
You grew

Double jointed Onloan-from-the-universe-child
A brother a sister who unlearned your shy
Each time you kissed the mike
Threw back your head to sing
For a second skin to take it all in
A little easier

_______

To think of the chance crossing
The 2 am intersection of that clashing duet
The street’s orange light
The music in your ears
The field you never knew Your last

To think of faulty batteries that could have
Cleared your ears to gravel’s sound
Or of one more last song before that
Or of the sleepless walker who chose
Left instead of right that night

To think of the makings
The tuned arrangement that would play
Your three am scream soon recorded on paper
Your last note Your instrument in someone’s hands
Hands we want Out Of the composition
Before you violin-screamed
Into the off-staff of stars

_______

Should leave it there they say
Let soften the brutality
Cauterize facts how he did
How he cut the air from your lungs
With fishermen hands Wrung the cord dry
After he raped you

The beating that would have killed you they said
The beating if not the strangling if not the raping
The beating of your heart let loose
Your blue rivers hitting air
You who never left the room
Without erecting each goose-bump-pillar high

_______

Did he know by the way the streets shook with scream you sang
Know by the strength you kicked you fought
Did he taste salt on your breast as he bit
Know your humanity when he left you
Eyes closed Out Of your body

That slug’s trail across skin
Where his mouth had been
That ten years later would bring
Only one kind of answer
Jesus

Inside Boxes

Saturday, June 5, 2010
Inside Boxes

A year after my last post, a poem written yesterday:


Inside Boxes

How the dust settles on
toilette bolts door hinges window panes
The trail of skin cells
winded to the margins
Those flaked wisps

Through air holes and light slits
the sketched rustling of inside sweepers
gathering evidence
into piles every second sunday
the scales cleared away

This Vaginal Day

This Vaginal Day

To the cab driver who said he’d buy me a car
if I’d have sex with him
Exactly how many times humming
with your dick in my mouth
does it take to buy me a hybrid
and can 5 missionaries be traded
in for 1 ass fucking
and what is the going rate exactly
for a Sunday morning cab ride
where I am not propositioned for sex

Later on the subway 2 young girls
in thighhigh skirts & a man
who touches them in ways
3 times their age
Pinches the youngest
she smiles says stop
& 50 tongueless watch

Later walking the street
home where orange light falls
I’ll not have music
in my ears these sounds
Feet on pavement
The keys of each step

Thou Shalt Not Suck My Blood, Impart Rash or Lay their Eggs on my Scalp

It’s barely the second week of a Tennessee June.
In the ninety degree humidity,
I’m swearing it off already.
Mosquito bites, scabbed and rescabbed,
turn my olive-colored, deet-slathered skin into
an ill-humored, greasy, polka-dotted print
of marks, left by little, greedy mouths.
Ticks, that teeth-first took the plunge to suck,
unnoticed, on the blood of my thigh,
till I yanked them, pinched their
pulsing heads between my fingernails,
staining my fingertips with blood
they robbed my body of,
without asking first.

I am not a happy camper.
In fact, I’m not camping at all.
And how could I have waited till now to mention
the poison ivy that has brought my left eye
to a swollen and crusty puss of an image.
Excuse me for hiding from the camera,
beneath layers of cortisone and menthol toothpaste.
And NO, dear gas- station-lady, my dead beat boyfriend
did not show me a thing or two.
Been there, done that already,
but thank you.
And besides, I don’t do the boy thing anymore.

And I’ve tried all the creams, the creative concoctions
that promise soothing relief-
Cool hummus slathers, fresh aloe, and calamine,
of whose bottle instructions ALL read:
Not for use in or around the eye.
Fuck them-
What do they know of this itching,
of my own body’s quest for relief?

I squint and twist my face into aweful
facial acrobatics,
road-kill contortions,
do anything but
scratch that horrible
menace of an itch.
Did I mention I sleep with cortisone beneath my pillow?
Mention that I roll my eyeball in circles,
like Halloween googly eyes,
bloodshot, to scratch the poison?
If it would not blind me and
result in ultimate conviction to an insane asylum,
I swear I’d stick needles into the ball,
voodoo-doll style them straight into
the socket,
nail down the source,
put it FINALLY to rest.
Instead I squirm like pinned down prey,
flustered beneath the droning sounds
of annoying little bug wings that haunt me
and grow in number.
Daily.
Yes, the clichéd image of ants in my pants
is utterly perfect.-
That’s me, walking down the street like
I’m feening for crack,
twitching for no obvious reason,
twitching for the occasion of this body,
dare I say- MY body
that I would pay money
to abort out of.
It has been taken over.
Excuse ME for residing here.
I’ll just pack my bags and go now.

Infested, rashed, scab-mapped
prison of a body.
I swat, I swear, I sit on my hands,
And NO citronella candle
can help me now.

My Word Collage

This website is great. You can create a picture of what your words LOOK like. Here's the one I just did by typing in my stream of consciousness.

Diving Into the Wreck on You Tube