I plant each seed in patches of Eden,
handpicked first fruits from the limbs of the roots
sweetened by the wine of Calypso’s emerald sea,
seasoned with the salt of the mystic saints,
fattened with the manna of warrior cherub,
warmed by the furnace beating at the core.
The tree is chopped into a basket,
forbidden fruit is cooked into a pie,
and a lock of hair is sewn into a bow
and wrapped around the handle.
Then I throw it away when I give it to you,
not a lady, but a swine who digests it all
to the final syllable and responds to it all
with gas you shit out of your mouth.
Tag: Poem
-
Pearls
-
Bartering
No longer will I ask,
it’s become a demand.
The price too high?
Your pushed me into poverty.
Your debt towers heavens,
your slander will not topple it-
only your sacrifice, mutual suicide.
I died for you. You die for me.Proclaim my debt to you.
I never crashed your parties,
I never pillaged your purses,
I never pushed you off the bed
and pulled the pillow toward me.
I made your bed, now make it yourself
along with your days and your nights
and your ride to work.Ask for five feet of fluff,
receive fifty miles of an abyss.
Need a canyon of space?
I’ll give you a universe apart.
If you want understanding,
then I’ll give you a smile
when you realize your new boy
will not barter for what he wants. -
The Princess Is in Another Castle
I don’t care anymore.
Four levels of Hell
of sidestepping pits
of evading monsters,
always the same.
The oceans of fire
burnt away ambitions.
Royalty you may not be,
but I’m too tired to leave.
You all look the same anyway. -
Con
Peace, happiness, paradise: the gift.
Love, faith, obedience: the price.
I mold it out of play-dough collected
scavenged from desolate sandboxes.
Prostrate, a basin of three talents,
swallowed without breath, bite, taste. Still,
I smile
and waitand wait
and wait.
-
Portrait of a Princess
Your face shines that expensive joy you never got as a child
as he wraps his arm around you and pulls you, close.
Your eyes drown in your reflection in the glass iris, transfixed by the flash
that preserves your beatific vision for all time, filtered of all blemish, framed
on that dusty cornerstone of your heart, once forbidden, now the center
of the universe, the point where your pale face is touched by him,
your prince, your savior, your god, who carried you from the wilderness
into shelter when you were a lowly beggar desperate to be filled
those many weeks ago. Can charity surpass him
who dresses you as delicately as a doll,
who guards you against the cruel world that wants to steal you,
who saves you from your naive curiosity that sometimes looks outside in wonder,
who suffocates those nightmares that tormented you. Solitude! Isolation! Loneliness!
Never can you suffer another moment of such nights. Never again
will you have to. You have found the one – your heart insists – your Prince
Charming, and you are the glass slipper he sits on his mantle
beside the picture of you two at the chapel: the day all your problems
went away. -
Another Night
My best friends sit on the couch and watch The Notebook.
I lie on the leather recliner and watch the clock.
In two hours the movie will end, in three hours
I’ll have an excuse to leave without seeming antisocial. -
Reciprocation
A beggar prostrate at her feet,
spine pinned by the heel, crushed
beneath her weight. A morsel of mercy?
She denies me a crumb.
A minute, a word, a breath, all beyond
her tightening budget, shrewd
even in the growing depression.
Each smile, touch, caress guarded
by airtight hands and barred lips.Beyond the white picket fence
is a world I no longer know.
Chained to her porch with a leash
around my neck knotted with a noose,
the spine snaps whenever I stray.
Forever in purgatory, my sentence
for my sin. I listened to the serpent.
I swallowed her apple.
She swallowed me whole. -
Beyond Her Breasts
Peer pressure pushed my eyes past her breasts-
perfect pillowy jovial planets, firstborn twins of Aphrodite-
beyond the clouds to her face, a foreign place, the wilderness
of outer space. Deprived of sound, I drowned in noise
I never heard on the hills below. Soft serenity I found,
then forfeit for a siren’s song, remastered beyond truth
by naivety now lost, muffled by the white noise that never stops
once the dam’s unlocked. Eden plummets beneath the deluge
of the dead. Even the fruit lost its flavor. To a new home I flee,
snugly safe in the cave of her sister. Such warmth and security. -
I Remembered
You wanted them that night
the mist ravished your hands,
pierced creamy silk into ivory.
No more than a movie ticket,
no less than essential next time
we walk the winter downtown nights.
Shield for your hands, symbolic of mine.
The cold won’t relent. Neither will I. -
Her Natural Scent
The smell of her skin exposed beneath layers
of vanilla-sprinkled floral fragrances was nature:
the smell of sapling trees after a humble shower,
grass freshly-snipped, still surrounded by the trimmings.
Nature’s nubile nymph given flesh, scent, stench
obscene to a nose groomed by doves and Ireland,
Klein and Armani, chocolate scents from artificial ingredients.
The fig leaves fell from the truth that stole her beauty-
her mouth, her breasts, her candy-coated scent-
and cursed her forever a primate, a beast, an ape beneath.
In a world uncorrupted by a new brand of Eve named Britney,
she might be named Beauty rather than just another monkey.