Keep moving or
feel the limbs rot
Better a little light than
none. You are
normal and healthy and
you have brave in your bones
Free yourself
And fight.

Run the sorrow past
Flee the wounds of the body
Escape the heaviness of night
Fight the emptiness that threatens
Grasp the living
Immerse the light
Gaze the daybreak and swallow it whole
Bandage the bruise, unparalyze, go

Overcome
Overpower
Overwhelm

and don't ever stop

(everything seems so small)

Me, alone
exposing my wounds to an
audience, healing myself like a
lonely magic trick.
Everyone claps, leaves and
I am left bleeding.
Will none see the scars? Feel
the crater of the cuts or
ridges and dents in the skin?
Canvas of colors, my flesh a
chameleon, blue with the bruise,
red like rage, multi-hued as
foliage, rotting leaves that are
forgotten as soil--to be stepped on,
swept up, and gone

I dreamt a dream and
you were in it

We were fighting, I
yelled, you cried
but they were tears for you
because you didn't
understand my pain.

I dreamt a dream and
you were in it

We were side by side on a bus
traveling to nowhere
your head on my shoulder
and the world was quiet and
we were whole.

I dreamt a dream and
you were in it

It was your wedding and
the only one I could talk to
was you.

Friend, I still dream of you.

Wake up at 6am
Everything hurts.
I have a stomach ache and
I am listening to "Fifty-Four" by Seahaven.

The mind is already bruised and
the heart a cyclone.

The world is blue and
I am blue and we are
all bent out of shape, we are
all haunted. And my mother,
and my mother's mother are
ghosts that live inside themselves.
And my father, and my father's
father are wounds upon their wounds.
And I, impaled on this misery, peer
out the window of a house on a cliff and
desire the abyss.

Perch the heart on the
fingertips like a tiny bird and
let it break the air and move.
Even as the twilight falls, even
as the sun sets, it will soar.

And maybe I am not so swollen anymore,
maybe I am not so lost anymore.

But I am still looking for home.

The Medic

I am doctor I
am nurse
I am ambulance and
stretcher
I am gunshot and gutted and
I must bandage my own

I have felt every swollen eye, rupture,
ridge, and tear, still I
float for the light like a moth
I can rise from the dust, reach
into my rot and
limp to a sunrise

i
still
can

To be born with a
bruise on the heart
--tender but breakable on
every edge--
I swear I was born with a
noose 'round the neck, rope
fitted for a 10-year-old
--it only grows tighter with age.

I wonder how much time I have
here before I die; will I
go out by car crash, cancer
--will I jump off a cliff

But the eyes can only gaze what the
arms and legs cannot do

Feel this sadness so sleepy, weighs
like a tombstone on the chest.
How can one breathe when the
air swims like water

Will I be scared, will I be proud,
will I be unfeeling when I
fall off the edge? Will I
sink quickly enough to escape the
reach of this empty?

5/27/18

Sit the sidewalk empty roadside
naked as the bones without flesh, a
story disembodied as if the
words of my body were
pilfered out my throat
made to float as cigarette smoke in
stagnant air

Curse the prayers made to hurt
damn the faithless faithful, grace as
thin as a page of scripture. I am
not a graveyard for the weary, I
am not a soulless home

5-27-18

I am the cripple of the
severed seas, an ocean
split between the polar ends of sad and
fervent, feast on stale bread and watch with
tired eyes the stars that wear its vision thin,
flicker then fade like dying

Empty empty empty
like the inside of a coffin never slept in, only
dreamt of death but still could
move these limbs

Felt like lead, like anchors low and heavy, like
weights on the foot sinking deeper to drown

Anguish worn like a bandage 'round the head, I
know the color of the broken and they are
blue but golden in the light, laying
still as the ripples wash like waves against the skin

Sewn into the edges of the bones are songs that
cling like fabric, slow moving but
sweet and floating. Mismatched patches hemmed at the
broken spaces, now glimmering, leak
stardust in the streams

Blink once and miss the whales that kiss the sky,
blink twice and miss the burning of the sun that
enlarges and prevails

Lean into the flowers and guide them

Cling to her skirts, a
child, a small thing, frail
fearful, not yet alone

But burdened mother be,
casts the kid against the stones
and she
falls and breaks her teeth

Grasp tight her hand, a
palm, tiny fingers, scared
shaken, not yet collapsed

But haggard mother be,
tosses the child to the wind
and she
snapped her wrists and bled the veins

Silver in the artery, slice into the
injured sky and it weeps like flesh that bleeds

Shipwrecked in the harbor, sink into
unsafe wood and
rupture like a vessel in the
body and the sea

My mother, with
poison tongue and foul word
curses me

My mother, with
stretched scars and bitter blood
loathes me

My mother, with
empty pockets and hushed name
resents me

My mother, with
tearful eyes and a hearse in the heart
disowns me

My mother, with
flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood
- a reflection of me

loves me, hates me
feeds me, afflicts me

My mother.

My mother came at 2am
descended as a ghost
and I lay bare as a stillbirth
My mother's voice is war sirens and I
hide beneath the blankets from the raid

2/27/18

Mother pays for
her sins in silences that
hug the throat like a noose

Eyes downcast and hands
wrung like twisted necks, they
droop into the wilted waist

Gunshot to the hip, I
feel it too as if I were
still in the womb

Wounded with the wounder's whip and
bruising while the bruiser bruised
she, blue on the outside and I
contused within

I'm begging you to leave but
stay here, I
hate you I love you I hate
You you
you