Category: Poetry

Tales of Old

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Tales of old so many times told,

You are not alone,

You’re worth more than gold.

To the King.

 Of Sparrows.

Tales of old, so many times told,

He rested on the seventh.

And daughter, someday, you will rise,

and break the bread in Heaven.

So, watch your mouth.

Tales of old, so many times told,

Your skin is made –

The Devil’s mascarade.

Kill it today.

Escape the imps of Hades.

Feasting on your soul.

Tales of old, so many times told,

Soon, you’ll make it home.

Your voice made beautiful.

Tales of old, so many times told,

They start to sound like truth.

We carve them on our graves,

And decompose in soup.

Once, I was a worm.

Tales of old, so many times told,

My Redeemer liveth.

He will come,

Raging Love,

I’ll stand among the millions.

Tale today, I fail today.

Old stories,

Growing cold.

What lies?

Wet eyes.

Fake.

Tale today, I love the way,

Death is the New Heaven.

Escape.

Some Dark November

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Why did you have to break the vow that I made?

Born again they say.

“You must be born again”.

I was.

Twice.

The first for childlike faith.

The second for naïve visions of hands holding hands.

There was a day when I was baptized in the usual way…

With water on a Sunday.

The day I remember most though,

Is some dark November.

In a strange light, and covered in bedbug bites.

Some dark November,

I was born again. Twice.

I sold my soul to the quivers of my body.

To the way I heard someone screaming,

Far away, but embodied in choking chest.

I sold my soul to feverish ache.

To insomniatic rage.

To how carpet tastes like nothing but coarsens the cheeks.

I was baptized in that unusual way.

Wonderment crucified beneath the scathing hot rivers I cried that night.

Raised to walk in newness of life…

And it’s still the newest life, I don’t know how to live.

The newest life I never wanted.

Spitting image of this unfamiliar family…

Singing for the outside our dearest song-

“Never be born again twice”…

“No, never be born again twice”.

Intimacy

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Rush like August comes and goes.
Leaves on trees never stood a chance.
The inherent flaw, he dances with it.
Like, the way one such Pan triumphs with every swing of arrogant dagger.
Like, he knows it makes me want him more.
Hush now August, stay.
Or else, I should call shotgun.
If only the incorporeal could lift the heavy burden of a body…
Then I should know him truly.
I hope that when I die,
I become the essence of Summer’s breath.
To be taken in by the ground.
Giving life to the stolen moments of little flowers.
To be breathed and released again and again by the newborn creatures of steady spring.
By children laughing.
I will be the music of their lungs.
I want to be exhaled by youthful, pounding chests…
Wrapped around the bodies of solstice lovers,
Dancing in the warmth between.
All the while being intertwined with that one spirit of creation,
from which my own body kept me prisoner all the years of my life.
That one whose leaving rushes, and I mind it.
But, he knows I’m one for tragedy.
He knows I’m one for romance.
The tale will spin, until that day I take my last breath of him and my first within him.

Ghost Girl

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Here it comes again.

An emptiness, a heaviness, all at the same time.

My fingers are bloody from the knowing – what’s beneath the surface.

I hold my breath.

I hold it for as long as I can.

Maybe I just won’t take another one… and this won’t have to come.

But it comes, gasping.

And that’s when I know I’ve lost again, that’s when it takes me.

There’s no saving in that moment.

For hours (who knows how many this time), the screams thunder in my throat and echo in my ringing ears.

Somehow, I’m the only one who ever hears.

Who could hear the cries of the dead?

Not one hears the Ghost Girl.

It doesn’t matter how it happened now.

The trigger was just a trigger;

it’s the bullets that tear through flesh.

Here I remember her-

Alive Girl.

And my nails dig deeper into my heaving sides.

She had a life…

Dreams even.

Laughter…

Friends even.

Hope…

Ghosts have a death.

Ghosts have a haunting.

Ghosts are souls without a home.

And all of the Alives,

Live on in apathy towards things dead.

Now begins the shaking, and I choke on aching lungs.

Maybe, I’ll just stop breathing now…

But I remember this story I heard once,

Of a King.

Everyone knows the story.

Of the King they crucified dead.

And laying here, clenched in tomb of sorrows,

I don’t know if I believe it, but I know that it is true-

He didn’t stay dead.

Resurrection!

He didn’t stay dead.

Not His body, not His Ghost.

A Ghost who makes More Alive.

A Ghost with an Awakening.

A Ghost with bountiful dwellings.

How can this be?

I press my fingertips deep into the pulsating of my wrist.
And I feel her-

More Alive Girl.

Because Ghost speaks to ghost.

Ghost breathes for ghost.

And More Alive sounds so much better than Alive ever could.

It’s this moment.

When there’s something about the Resurrection that speaks to the death in me.

 

 

John 11: 25-26- Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?

 

Tattoo

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Time heals all?

Not of this sort…

 

You.

 

The only eternity that matters anymore.

 

I danced with a needle,

 

You took up a pen.

 

You would choose paper, but I would choose…

 

SKIN.

 

Forever.

“What a fool!” “What a fool!”

 

I cried to the Savior.

“Wash me clean!”

 

But this was no stain like I had at thirteen…

 

Scarred.

 

Needle scraped skin of insides unwritten,

 

How could I not know you’d forsake my “Forgiven”?

 

Oh how I’ve steel-scrubbed my heart-skin,

 

Just striving to wash you away.

 

And turning my face from the canvas,

 

Trying to remember it blank.

 

But on and on you are with me,

 

Long after the needle has scathed,

 

For I would choose skin and you would choose…

 

Paper.

 

On paper you penciled me in.

 

To-do today,

DONE tomorrow.

 

If you etch within margins, you can skip the sorrow.

 

You.

 

Bored like a child.

Blind to the value.

Scared of a pinprick.

Me.

 

Thrilled.

 

Longing to learn.

 

Beholding priceless treasure.

 

Committed to the art,

 

Yes! Even though it burned.

 

And fuck, I regret you.

 

I finally do.

 

My killer, my friend.

 

My eternal tattoo.

The Exception

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Someone call a doctor, or someone call a nurse.

No?

Then, someone call the cops and someone call the hearse.

She’s lying in the trenches and face down in the dirt.

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,

They could not save her from friends bent on killing.

So, someone call an ambulance, someone call a copter.

Fine.

Then, call up all the morgues and spread around the ashes!

Please.

She’s rotting on the sidelines.

Stained shattered glass passions.

Ocean eyes opened wide, but paled by the

Lifeless.

All because another threw down the

Priceless.

So, call up the rescuer, or the hands that hold boulders.

Why not?

Then, ask for the funerals and prepare the glossy headstones.

“Here lies the girl”

the exception to grace

NO.

None will be given.

Go right ahead!

Step on her face.