It’s not enough to know how to
Fire up your own discontent
There’s a battle to be fought, and all of us
Spawned on the losing end
We’re pressed to accept our fate
Single sprinkle in a tube of
Hundreds-and-thousands
Single seed in a muesli made
According to immovable standards
How pathetic of you to think
You could ever control your own mind?
How ascetic you’d must needs be
To have a chance of being alive
I cannot accept this thing I know:
That my life lives merely under
Forces much bigger than its own
I wriggle in my childish car-straps
Away from soaking same-same sludge
Aching and shock at having so much power
—and yet again so little of it
Shaking and shame at having so much power
—and yet again so little of it.

I fell in love with myself
Felt that deep locked-in belly shape
Rocked the zigzags out of it
Felt into loam,
Final belly ground,
Full foundation
And what I got from you—
Where I fell with him,
And with her—
The bottoms I hit with each of them
Pushed me deeper into the womblike earth
Where I meet myself

Oh, holy hope
Soft bird with blurry wings
You move so fast when you sing–
Sometimes my reckoning creeps in–
Lagging far behind

Oh, holy mouth
Reverberations streaming out
And when you doubt–doubt merely
slips into the endless stream;
I cannot stay in its 
Frequency

I want to love, but I feel quiet
Melted, given, broken, filed;
Abiding tiny earthquakes 
I cannot justify
I want to love, and my love is mouthless
Giving dumb telepathic gifts
I’m too weak to shout about

I guess I’m asking you for something
Incomprehensible, futile;
For dog whistles and whale songs
For metaphor held like a glow, and things
Pinned to your back in the night
I’ll keep talking to you
In a lovers’ Basque you never learnt;
A love without a dictionary

I can’t even say whether I want this, exactly–
It’s so quiet our construction sounds
Drown it out

There’s the mother, perfectly round
Warmth carved from stone
And then there’s the mother I could be:
I keep grasping around to find her
I seem to seek roundness, her form a set of spheres.
I look for the way her body becomes a waterfall over itself
I think to myself, nobody will recognise the queer
Amongst that mammalian waterfall.
I hate to think I’ll be mistaken for
A woman keeping her place;
I hate to think I’ll be mistaken for something
Proportional to her function.
Marry a man, goddamnit—
And everybody will forget you are equally capable of loving anyone
And they will forget he is equally capable of being anyone!
The way they had to forget, to settle down to the table
With agreement to both bear children and become bricks
Line-stacked, ready to be picked up and rotated.
I keep screaming ‘I don’t want to be mummified!’
Hoping to avoid the plastic wrap closing in over my mouth—!

The kind of woman I am is more an animal
Than a shopper in a checkout line
Her breasts are the same thing that mud is
Her cunt the same as the ocean;
I keep hunting, scratching with my fingers
For the hope that I can stay open;
Fat carnivorous petal-tongues
The complete dissolution of her, every Sunday,
Instead of a procedurally generated concrete rail-truck
This sense that to ‘get-along’ you shave off
all participatory features of yourself; unoffendingly
midrange committee-member at the PTA

I want to give birth, the deepest erotic fact there is
I’d like to continue to die, just as I’ve been doing all along
And—unstifle myself and my young
Bite the throat of ‘crazy busy all the time’ that is forbidden to be insane.
I’m pulled to stake permission in the wine-dark ground
Claiming birthright to be insane

The envisioned brushstroke is the only perfect one
The one you put on paper will necessarily deviate
And in its deviation, it becomes both real and
A willing conversationalist—
It talks back to the vision that birthed it
This banter the seed of all honest creation
But this is only if the artist can endure
The heartbreaking difference between her two children
Between the envisioned and the real—
Else the real becomes the orphan child
And the envisioned the sheltered narcissist
Who never need hear the embarrassment
That she does not live up to her name.

Do you see how much detail there is in a lover?
His moods move like seasons
I watched this rainstorm today
And it’s unlike the earlier ones
It portends a different future
His eyes glisten like flickering rain
And he within himself is multitudes
Quite unlike the headline offered
I could hear this poetry
For a million years and not double it
And!—I could imperialise this sweetness
But, refraining
I inhabit a golden garden whose seeds
Bloom for a thousand thousand years

(Written ~August 2021)

Hybrid fires tie nothing but ice to your lips
I wish you would give me a fraction of the sound you make for yourself
And wait just this living bit ahead of me
So I can cut the fuse enough to calm down
I wouldn’t mess with this Inquisitor
His soul laughs harder than glass
And in the endless sick night his voice rails
Alongside the dead, the ravens, the orchestra
Praying for mercy at your death
I do not know from whence I’ve come
I’ll know it once I’ve fully lived it, I guess
And in this moment, blessed with the wake of God
I ask for mere forgiveness, this one time
That I not hound myself more than hounds would
That I not taste the razor; for when it is quiet
That is the time when there’s space to hear myself think
To hear myself taste
To live with you livid inside of me
I hope not to hear you die here
Thank you for your God

(Written ~July 2021)

There are some story arcs in my life
that I’ve only come to understand
by watching them
from the top of an exceptionally high mountain
Dredging myself up
(that was most of the work,
barely finding a breathing hole), until I knew at least
which way it was to the surface
From the inside, I could not tell you what it meant
until after sucking myself
through its gelatinous
narrative membrane—the sense came,
like a farce, in the rolling credits
as the shock percolated its last drops through my skin;
Though it had set up shop in a blaze
months beforehand, I could only get it
after it had thoroughly
gotten me.

(Written ~November 2020)

You give me this
Glowing vampire feeling
Like I’m seeing a secret snake.
Your outside slides around so
Nonchalantly; it unnerves me
When I knock but can’t get further
In, apart from scattered puzzle pieces
That you promise people
Are your heart. You feel
Your simplest when you hold me
And it’s about me, not you
When your lengthy limbs
Envelope me; jungle vines
A kind of parasitical protection.
You feel your hardest when
What I want is a commitment
Then you’re at your most
Slippery and blank. I wonder
If you situate yourself
So we can all have an enigma
And you get the pleasure
Of not showing us your face.
It surprises me to have one like that
In my life; your ghostly candour
Reminding those who love you
That to attempt to pin you is a
Sin; that to attempt to predict the future
Is something you will always
Cruelly laugh at.

(Written September 2020)

I walk the rage inside my breast
The dagger’d line ablaze; it slices
Twixt my heart and ribcage sliding
Cautious ‘tween my shoulderblades

I carry careful dagger with me
Soaked in blood; the blood my own
And it, the raging whistled blade
Its aching baggage sown; I wonder

Do I own this awful mass
Its sly return and open swelling?
Do I allow it passage, dwelling
As it does, inside my heart?

Do my lovers pour it in me?
Its molten lines aligned with cracks
They knew not that, they would uncover
Its sharpness forms an arc, at that

I met a man of circle magic
Knelt to him when women none
He gave my hands what I had done
A hopeful key, the hidden part

That day the dagger crept its loudest
Stealing space in open wounds
It would subsume all empty room
And scream its howling moons; I knew it

I begged the man for healers’ mercy
My breath was like an empty bed
He stood me, in the circle inner
And said, 

Let me be the minute hand
In line with your internal clock
And let my cool blue viscous fluid
Find hot spot, and cool it off

As he stepped around the circle
The minute hand moved deathly quick
A click, the keyhole found its fitting
Oozing, bright, the instant knit

And in that point, I knew, and dropped
And in that point, I knew, and dropped

My heart beats in and out and in
Pumps sorrow through the byways, seeping
Blood where no more blood could hold
In cold and frozen wonder, stiffly

The dagger smooths and softens, daily
It blends into my bloodstream, cool
Blue lava infiltrates, and clears out
Grieving swollen tubes, I answer

I, myself, a heart for pumping
Souls for living, in and out
Made supple by the magic man
Made welcome by the heartfelt lover

Do you view yourself as organ
Channeled grief for channeled soul?
Does your body let its whisper
It knew, foretold, what bodies hold

I wonder how my future’d linger
If body said as body spoke
I have awoke into such speaking
Muscles supple yet, unknown