Author: poetryfest

Cut the sleeves of my shirt,
Cut the petals off the branches.
Gardening six whiskeys deep
I accidentally sheared the tops off all the roses.

A dark excuse within the brambles,
Leftover thorns along the roots.
Truth elixirs and million dollar venoms.
Smoke rises round a white streaked hat brim.

I’m rare like a steak is rare.
The orange snap of fat on coals
Punctuates two backyards away.
Jasper irises and carmine nails,
Where the vines grow wild
She’s laid out on her lawn chair in the shade.

No matter how hard I try
my heart won’t thump.

It lays dormant, dead
comatose, silent
until a rare occurrence.

This desolate land erupts,
brimming lava inside
my dark chambers.

Most have active hearts
mine only springs to life
in its own due time.

Videos are portals in time, opened,
just to hear your voice again.
Because I loved you with primal abandon.
I followed you into the darkness and back into the light,
wanting you to know how much I loved you,

Wanting you to love me too.

I stare into the darkness,
Lost in the recording of a love that was
Your beautiful voice; filled with love of me.

What do I feel there as the tears track their way down my face?

My brain retreats to the comfort of words –
any words,
not necessarily literate words:
but words to ward off Despair’s dark kiss.

I made a promise.
My heart seizes, holding on to its pain tightly.
And my soul?

My soul just yearns for you.

This is true,
Life is quite sadistic.
Ripping you away from friends
And family,
Breaking your heart
And your bones
And your mind,
Killing the ones you loved
In violent storms
Of wind and
Water,
Or even,
Love,
Rejection,
And heartbreak.
Time teaches us nothing
But just how to live with
The pain.
The pain of never seeing your favorite person
Again,
The pain after loved ones are rescued,
But it’s too late.
I believe in a universe that doesn’t care
And people who do.

His poisonous words,
Dripping from his tongue,
Resting in your ears.
Your ears no longer can hear
The lies,
The lies filling the orifices on your face.
His hands slide up and down your body,
His lies pressing into your body,
Holding you,
Enfolding you,
Never letting you go.

I am unraveling
a calamitous disaster
pace, woefully languid.

I’d bathe in your sunlit eyes and dance
upon the freckles that decorate your arms.
so I’ll let it take me.
Crestfallen. Despondent.
Reduced to my want
for you, personhood carved away.

I look at the glow of
the moon and my stomach
has pits.

I’m furiously unwinding this carefully crafted knit as
the moon reminds me of you.
i’ll keep tugging, aching
with a fervent desperation. I can at least feel
your gaze until it runs out.
I’m curious how far you’ll let things go.

It will hurt.
I just wonder how bad?

I’m letting you lead, despotically.
Hand in my hair, guiding me.

My ears eagerly feign whimpers
I crave to know the ways that your face would contort with
strained breaths and an arched back.
vestiges of humanity.

I couldn’t imagine
my dad
saying the things
Trump said
about his own daughter.

Not about her body,
not with that smirk,
not on national television,
like it was
a compliment.

My father
taught me how to ride a bike,
not how to shrink under a man’s gaze.
He called me curious,
not curvy.
He said you can be anything,
not if she weren’t my daughter…

Trump said that.
To Howard Stern.
On The View.
To the world.

He never flinched.
Never apologized.

My dad never
looked at me
like property,
never spoke of me
like prize.
Never lingered in the mirror
of my reflection.

I hear what Trump says
about Ivanka—
and I flinch
like it’s my name
in his mouth.

We’re not the same person
every thought in his head isn’t mine
but different
there is evil in his
depths, some evil that is not mine but so foreign to ears
and his
and is him and he varies
he’s multiple paintings in multiple moods he is a room
he has designed himself.
Like me, he is an engineer. Though
a better one
he has carved his corner now he sits, he is a baby bubbling in his own bath
he knows this
place
better than I, he watches me, trembling
carve.

The wind comes and the apple sees its chance.
It pulls and tugs, heaves and ho’s,
But the stem is yet supple, green with promise.
The wind dies down, the tree chuckles, and the apple sags.
Next time.

The child comes, a little girl, the mother watching from afar.
As they climb looking for the reddest, most luscious fruit of all
The apple slicks itself back, bares its widest smile.
But just as the ingénue stretches out in its direction,
They are called back to safety, to warm, welcoming arms.
The tree snickers, the apple sighs.
Next time.

The fox comes by, chasing its next meal
That has scurried to shelter within the tree’s hollow.
Defeated, the canine looks upward, and the apple starts.
It stretches down, Adam and Eve be damned.
But the tree holds fast and the fox proves the more divine,
It shakes itself and scampers away.
The tree smirks, and the apple wails.
Next time.

The season passes, and the apple looks nervously
At the brittle peduncle holding it still.
The tree notices, and for the first time, speaks.

Why do you worry, my child, about where you will fall?
Look there, among the spaces between my roots where you will tumble,
Cushioned by my leaves, shielded by my branches,
Digested by none but the worms
Beneath my soil.

There you will be nourished by the sun I will share with you
The water I will trickle down upon your remains
Until your withered self finally gives way
And your rhizomes intertwine with mine
For the centuries to come.

The apple weeps silently at the tree’s speech,
Gazes with horror and longing at its promised land of rebirth,
And this time