Category: Uncategorized

Turtle doves
with bleeding hearts
on a Christmas tree,
that sing a swift song
like midnight swallows
for this world washed
in blue sadness,
that drench this December
in their snow-pure
drops of love;
raw & red
like the saint
that froze his tears
and descended from the sky
with his diamonds
into the silver ashes
of gold fireplaces;
growing glimmers
of crystal rivers
on his face
and his fate
to keep this
forsaken– forgotten
cold world–
welcome & warm
like the home
only he alone
will always carry.

They called me a coward, said my words would hide,
Too scared to face the storm, I’d run and confide.
My thoughts were shadows, secrets locked tight,
In silence, I fought my own fucking fight.

They wanted thunder, loud as hell,
To shout like lightning, break the spell.
But my voice shook, a flickering flame,
Afraid the truth would tarnish my name.

They spread their bullshit, twisted my life,
Throwing stones, cutting like a knife.
I carried my truths in whispers, not screams,
Afraid to face the pain, caught in my dreams.

So call me dramatic, call me what you will,
These scars are mine, but I’m standing still.
I’ll find my voice when the time’s right,
And when I speak, I’ll be ready for the fight.

When the earth opened and swallowed you, I know now I should have left you
to be purified in Lake Michigan waters, baptized by clumps of sand, the tiny pellets
I later tidal combed from your hair, away from you. Like Jupiter, nostalgia beach ate you up
in one gulp, in one flat-bottomed step torn through the edge that beckoned to devour you whole.
You sank quicker than I did in our union, anchored to the turf that tricked visions of security
until your weight was pressed above it, bending to you like I did when you pressed me
to that bed bug bed when I didn’t want to have sex but didn’t know how to deny you
without a fight. I wish I could say I hesitated grasping at you with that twisted driftwood
life jacket, wooden oar, leaving you to swim in Princess Bride, Lightning Sand,
my childhood film favorite we watched the night before.

In up to your shoulders, sinking in soot, mouth gaping like some dead fish, wretched corpse,
or the hollowed out skin of myself, I saved you from any crisis you had and you loved me
the same, screaming, slurring, tongue wagging until I caved. Your pupils always darted around,
akin to an animal trapped, they did then too, when you were descending
the Wisconsin dune restoration divot. If I deserted you to your saccharine lips daring survival,
would you have died half in, half out? Grit under nails, claw marks surrounding you, posed
in my familiar struggle, with the abuse of abandoning me in sliding your limp body
from that crevice, I was condemned to clean up your mess the same as when you weren’t doll-full
of dust, grains taking up residence in the pockets of hunger
from all the meals you refused.

Maybe, your mistress would have still confessed to all the ways you filled her
while you finger-ripped my soul away from its vessel by each pink, thready tendon.
Would I have also died? Forever in love, buried in your pocket next to your keys and the phone
that you whipped across the dew bitten lawn while hollering something atrocious,
with its holes that I prodded an unspooled paperclip inside to pull out each trace.

You made sure to never hit me,

but you always got too close, like a dog waiting to snap
its foamy jowls, clicking your broken enamel pained jaw until I surrendered
to some everlasting tug of war— familiar hands clasped around that branch,
the same ones that circled my neck while you orgasmed runny and thin,
slipping to safety with a sigh of release, but I couldn’t heave you from the pocket of ground.
Leaving you to dig ten deep lesions in gluttonous grit, mimicking the addiction you granted me,
the Newport crystals in your teeth that dully glimmered when you wailed for my hault of help.

I never knew I’d someday relish in realizing you cornered, astray in your power
of being too lucky, grabbing at the soil beneath you in the a rough way you treated me with,
not in the skilled way that made you shiver when I butterflied my nails along your back,
hauling yourself out of the pit that satisfied my guilted craving of finally being rid of you.
Craving the deposit to hungrily suck you through its straw,
to pressure drag you down
with a rip current’s twisting and turning,
as a predator does its prey,

where you’d dance with the hellhounds,
just twenty-two inches away
from digested, perpetual banishment,
where the silt would have settled,
righting itself in a clean slate,
as if you had never existed at all,
returning to the unbelievable calm of being lonely,
but this would be just one more thing that would be my fault

The gun is good…Go forth and kill!

From Zardoz, a dystopic film by John Boorman

(The reader is surrounded by a chorus of masked youths dressed in black.)

They tell me the gun is good,
That it has never harmed anyone
Through its cold, mindless steel,
Its potent powder and ruthless point.

It is the beast that kills,
The beast whose myriad carpals
Evolved into a fist, a means to grasp
Stone, fashion deadly shafts,
And from these beginnings, an endless
Armory until even the ether is harnessed
For Armageddon,

The same hand that fixed with breath
And mineral spray vast murals
In the darkness, visions of migrating herds,
Of equine flight and creatures long since vanished,

The hand that now builds sprawling arcades
To house dreams etched in stone,
On framed canvases, or in projected light,
The embodiment of our better selves,

A hand that creates and destroys.

Chorus: We embrace the flower of youth,
Open our petals to the sun:
A dream of things to come.

I hear the distant lamentation of mothers
Made immediate by wonders unimagined
By the old ones.

Our chosen elders, still robed like priests,
Pour over an icon, barely three centuries old,
Somehow archaic against our frantic pace.

Surely the wisest among us
Can break the impasse,
Quell the waste;

They will hear great argument
Through the furrowed brow of sincerity,
Fingers crossed behind the back,
As fear masquerades as preparedness
Fetish, disguised as freedom.

Do they hear the lamentation
Of the mothers?

Chorus: We embrace the flower of youth,
Open our petals to the sun:
A dream of things to come.

The world is in a stupor,
Stunned by a poison apple,
A plethora of diversions –

My flesh, fragile against these forces,
The delicate conduits easily rent,
Can only unleash this threnody
For the mothers and fathers,
Sing like an anguished bird
In a fathomless mine
That enough will heed the warning
And survive.

Chorus: We embrace the flower of youth,
Open our petals to the sun:
A dream of things to come.

How many lost lives are acceptable?
Humanity is a constellation;
An extinguished star changes its complexion.
What might have come of its light?
Chorus: We embrace the flower of youth,
Open our petals to the sun:

A dream of things to come.

(The members of the chorus remove their masks, one by one, and say what they might have become in life.)

A healer
A mother
A chef
A poet
An engineer
An artist

(or each may speak a profession of his/her own choosing)

Our vestigial fangs react to blood in the air:

We kill for avarice,
In anger,
In jealousy,
For territory,
For ideology,
For sport.

If we cannot control the impulse,
Then we must limit the means before

It
Is
Too
Late!

[BANG!] (The chorus stomps the floor in tandem.)

(Each chorus member pulls out a length of red cloth which has been hidden in their fists and
places it over an imagined wound, as each strikes a contorted pose as if shot, and should have
expressions of fear, anguish, confusion and despair on their unmasked faces. They freeze until
the reader moves.)

Robert René Galván

The telephone rings
Rain fell on the interstate
“Are you sitting down?”

The light’s betrayal

The bright moon highlights
Creatures concealed fearful of
Brute discovery

Unexpected Encounter

What was it like for
Explorers to discover
Virgin land settled

Born, a sweet sour mess,
A soul submerged, without zest.
Let the lime boy rest.

1.
Star-crossed lovers meet,
Passion burns, a forbidden love,
Hearts forever joined.

2.
The void within, a chasm,
Echoes of loss, a haunting song,
Existence feels surreal.

3.
Star-crossed love has passed,
Fate’s cruel hand has torn us apart,
Farewell, dearest one.

4.
Eternal slumber shrouds,
A lifeless flower, once so bright,
Love’s tragic requiem.

5.
A secret heart yearns,
For one forbidden, a taboo,
A dangerous path.

Ah! The broken heart-
but then, a new acquaintance,
attempts Kintsugi.

Death comes first in love
Love for dreams that flit taunting
Above the sickbed.