Despair

I.

you.

Alone.

Together.

There was nothing

to say. Words failed

us. Hauuuuuuh.

Me in the chair.

You on the bed.

Life is not

fair is

what I wanted to say

not cough and

swallow.

You didn’t even 

look 

when the nurse said 

it's a beautiful day

outside.

A Chewed Up Old Pencil

Perhaps I am a chewed up old pencil
but this body had once wrote beauty,
against the page had once sizzled,
a silhouette of seduction satisfying
the white face with sounds so tender
they melted into memory’s honeyed fountains,
had once tickled the pages with laughter,
once filled them with insights of such richness
no books could contain them nor hearts without
whispering them among silences of wonder―
dazzling celestial bodies in the darkness.
This body but I mean that I also
wrote masterpieces even, my
own Malvina and Vanessa.
Here’s something I have learned in my long life:
Whether or not it is turtles all the way down,
it must be pencils all the way up, for we write,
get written, and we’re the means of writing,
and words that move through our chewed up
bones, will have our signatures too somewhere
deep inside their marrow.

Fingertongues

On the paper I walk on my fingertongues
this is no way to live I wish I didn't have to
hunt for words all about me
and jump from one to one as though a frog on a pond
my fingertongues projecting to swallow the meaning
before making another jump
here on a lotus leaf enclosed by stagnant waters
of unconscious white page I fear
falling in.

You Said

You said
Wish you
Were dead

Your mouth had opened and the words fell out 
Your tongue the launchpad of guided missiles
Your lips the gates of your inner prison

Each one feeding the same shy blossom 
of suffering, reopening the same wound in me
with their alphabetical poison, sinking like ear drops.

It was much later, at five o'clock in the evening,
sitting on my fast rocker, pouring wine, enough
to wash the brain, immerse and suffocate it....

That I recalled you never said nothing to me
except with your eyes and left corner of your lips
that raised enough to let out a sigh full of dead words.

News of an accident

The father is alive, alert. 
The mother—doctors say—is too. 
But not the Skylark: it is wrecked. 
A nameless something else was killed.    
"The children," we regret, "are dead." 
And grandpa?  Grandma?  "Too," they said. 
But flowers, pastries, hats...intact.
The onyx colored dress, untorn.

The causes here remain unknown. 

Although the bones are red,
and smoke has spread,
beyond the dark I see
that serrated skyline, 
with same array of peaks—
but now to me they seem
exact and bleak.

But life ignores our pleas. 
So sway, the willow trees;
go on, the roads, as laid;
the Earth, as cold and gray.
While it spins and revolves,
creatures evolve and learn,
and skies around it burn
and spit, the Earth's no more
a pit. But still portend,
spoken words, and express;
observed are facts, they're named
and claimed; machines are made;
money produced and paid;
memories form then fade;
poems are measured and penned; 
Yet life‒my own‒can't be,
ever again the same.