SkyScorcher

The rivers soft and winding through, Too cold quite yet for dipping, Seemed nonetheless a tempting blue For children rising dripping. Their bright and shining rosy cheeks, Slicked wet with waters briney, Are salted well by gentle creeks And left in dampness shiny. Too soon they're caught by time's black nets, And towed through life a-wailing; They'll drink to swallow their regrets And in the dawn, keep sailing.   The ocean foam may be their rest-- A peace scarcer than treasure chests.  

     There’s a special time, inbetween the last few halfhearted gasps of autumn leaves and the snowy, clawing cold of what we consider winter, when the weather is nonexistent.  Everything, in fact, is nonexistent except for grey.     Grey is pervasive and infectious the way smallpox is, and just as deadly, though it can be hard to tell.  And in November, almost anywhere you go (north of the Mason-Dixon line, at any rate), grey is working itself into the foundation and façade of everything—the ground, the once-blazing leaves rotting underneath their trees (also grey now); even the sky, should it choose to occasionally poke it

i wanted my words to sear open your ribcageand tear a hole in your lungs so that i could stuff my own apologies in haphazardly; so that you might understand that you are not stardust for once in your life.

Word-shy, you leave thumbprints as Rorschachs and call yourself a poet if someone sees a word. You wonder why they treat you like a doll your glass hands, you insist, are diamond. You blew sugar from the palm of your hand into my eyes and claimed to be in love.  

Dear mothers, you call it adolescent confusion and it is, we know that, but we respect your opinions when you say you want divorces, so is it too much to ask that you accept the word 'gay' without the arguments and the denial? Dear mothers, stop the victim-blaming, it isn't our fault if our ex-boyfriends pinned us to the wall and unzipped his pants.  We didn't ask for it by dressing like a slut or being a lesbian, just like you didn't ask for lung cancer by having a daddy that smoked his heart black. Dear mothers, cutting is maladaptive, but do you know how angry that word can make us? When all you can say is that it's a sickness and there'

I can see hard-fought fire in your eyes wrapping you in curling-irons' cords and mascara stains. You know I am introverted, I feel it in your bones as they carry you across snowed-in roads, the words 'retarded' and 'not right' wavering in your head. I can hear the whispers on your cheeks coiling around exhaust pipes and machinery. You think we are all made of star dust and that honesty is synonymous with hostility; I hate you and your idiosyncrasies, your tiny tics and twitches. I can see the red light district's claws twisting your hair into its braids.  We are all whores but you sell yourself in a new kind of way, flaunting what you've go

curves are captured by the harsh serenade of a chisel, and the apprentice pauses to face the moon: the well in the yard and the owl crying softly guitars are suspended like hanged men dangling from walls and a ceiling just above the heads of broken violins too far gone to ever sing the candle chokes and is silent, hurling the boy into unnerving blackness and the instruments that shine in the morning become grimly lit from the moon's anemic light he curls under the workbench and closes his eyes.

It is 21 degrees Fahrenheit outside and the air shudders in its icy grip: pine needles frosted in fairy dust and breath lost in the elegance of silver spiderwebs. Ice, white and black, coats sidewalks, sliding dogs' paws out from under their owners and disappointing children in its solidity; ponds drip like spoiled milk onto the pelts of voles burrowed in their homes for the winter. Harrowed birds flutter and squabble over the remainder of seeds lost under a bench by the rats' nest. They wheel and peck above summer-flung stones hurled on a day when a different kind of pond froze.

You are not a wordsmith whatever you might like to think. ('Smith' indicates precision and coldness and fire: words are softer than that unless you mold them strong.) It's a difficult road to follow, and not many make it past the fork.  Choose a path, Janus says, whirligig keys spinning on his shoulders: I am a wordworker, with my tools too crude, forming rough-edged carvings painted with pretty imagery. Notebooks scattered across the landscape of a child's room, to be stumbled across, read, red-penned, in the thick and choking breath of night. When the bough breaks a hanged man laughs.  He carries typewriters in his pockets, and cigarettes

New heels with two left feet.