Category: Uncategorized

Dragonfly dreaming,
spirals lazily in sky.
Tattoo made to mourn.

It’s a cave,
and you’re dark and hollow.
I circle the walls,
but there’s no light to swallow.
Just echoes,
and the sound of my own breath
thinning.

I trace the same paths,
bleed the same questions,
until I hit a wall
or worse, a memory.
Then I start you over
like a ritual I never agreed to.

But caves are supposed to end.
A chamber, a crack,
a way out.
And still, I stay
folded,
breaking myself smaller
than you asked for.

How do I leave it
when I know it so well?
Is it still a prison
if I shaped the bars?

I’ve screamed underground
until my throat gave out.
Clawed at stone
until bone showed through.
Is it love,
or a bad vice?

Maybe I don’t want light.
Maybe the dark feels like home
because I know it will stay.

You never held me here.
I just forgot how to open my eyes.

Flashing eruptions
burn into my mind’s
eye

inescapable
empathy,
fear,

disturbed visions
of collective fates
seen before,
and again.

Immolation.

Immolation:

Underground,
in the forests,
in the desert, too.

In between fires,
seasons, court sentences
and hidden files, breaks
for monied-money
and brutal policy for Us,

clever slavers craft
more chains to tie
down wider lies: nets
and snares, new crimes
for you and I.
They push

us until we have
no homes left to flee,
no common ground
to lie down,
to piece back together
our hearts
or our minds
our ruined bodies

(corporate realty snatched
it all up for dormitory
look-a-likes; spaces filled
with indignant smiles on tired
wage-slaves tending lingering
chain-stores in the new plazas
off new lanes on the highways

we ourselves
did not arrange,
did not build,
did not permit.

We did not ask,

for our cluttered lives
to serve sick entrepreneurial
minds forever in need
of endless abundance,

infinitely higher
production,
consumption,
generation,

which must come
from somewhere
We own).

Now,

American hearts
Ache and beat
harshly for too long,
burning too hot.
Acid rising.

People rising.
Peace forgotten
under decades’

of hunger,
disaster,
defining the line
between apocalypse
and present.

Between the burning
red meridians:

Immolation
of the self.

Immolation
of the mind.

Immolation
of the soul

in revolutionary
fire.

I sit in this dusty hiker’s lot near Bishop,
California,
in this stupid GMC rental,
unpreparedness and mosquitos having flushed me off the mountain,
spilling me past patriotic larkspur and lollipop lilies
into the manzanita grove.

I wait for my party beneath a layered sand art vista —
a swarth of sturdy pine, beneath which the spade-shaped leaves of
quaking aspen lurch and roll like whitecaps,
whispering your name in a jerky cadence.
Each syllable stabs my heart.

Thoughts of your kisses sweep down from the panorama
of toothy peaks beneath the bleached horizon.
I can almost feel your knuckles brush my cheek.
My face presses into the hollow beneath your shoulder,
a landslide of teeth-sucking, that gasp,
every time you enter me.

Outside the car, I lay myself onto a bed of sharp, burning stones,
close my eyes, and invite the sun to fry my skin
until it shimmers with heat haze.
I exhale and say, come, mosquitos. Feast
on my body. Cover me like a blanket. Penetrate me
with your knifey snouts. Wound me. Pump me full of your saliva.
Drain my blood.

And when I am a leathery, scab-riddled carcass,
like human jerky,
an empty sack of hair and skin,
I say come, buzzards. Snake your ugly, bald heads
through my torso and limbs. Feast
on my memories. Rip out strips of weekend road map,
yank yuppie coffee shop menus, liberate
the lemon twist from an artisanal cocktail.
Sail away and scatter every scrap,
til I am no more.

The first conference I went to was on fandom.
He told me that he liked my poster although it was smaller than his.
Even though my avatar was taller.
“Oh,” I responded in tandem.
Was this normal?
Let me get this straight, there was the possibility of oral!
He was flirting…
Over the internet…
Undeterred by being
Slowly turned into Nekhbet;
Eda Clawthorne.

Dance we me tonight
We may not see tomorrow
But we’re here right now.

You were always too big for this house. Too much breath in your lungs. There was always too much to be afraid of outside. Too many roots in your carburetor, too many trees in your eyeline. There was always too much house for you.

The vibrations were always too big for your soul. Too many divinations to be gleaned, too many whispers in your ether. Too few words for what this was. Too many doctors, too much silence, too many answers for no one. Too many times that I just missed his eyes.

You were always too small for this house. There was too much unaccounted for, too few reasons adorned
in a straight face. Too little to share. Too few pistols holstered. There was never enough runway for you to take off from. Never enough closets to hide in.

Often you picked off the currants spelling EAT ME and broadened anyway, wearing this house as a shirt, wearing this house as a hauberk, clasping locks, awash in quietude, in gentle sobs. New houses were built inside the house. Too many stairs. Too few connections. Too many different baseboards on that one stretch of wall. Too few knobs for the doors that it came with, too little passion for adding our own.

I wonder who’s wearing the house now.

Virginia Woolfe, wore pockets made stone
tried walking on water, walking alone.
an imperfect god, in his image made
one broken sparrow left nothing to trade

forbidden in love, nature denied
passions forsaken for self-imposed pride
sharing her visions, dreams to set sail
had doubts about fire, was certain of hell.

a soldier of misfortune, wounded bird
bottomed out soul, praying prayers, unheard,
word made flesh, philosophers stone
light in the distance, in a room of her own.

shadows gathered, knew her by name
‘The lighthouse keeper,’ tending Gods flame
that sad eyed lady, an Iris, in bloom
adorned Gods Garden, neath Jacobs room.

I love in color, not black and white,
Shades of light, not day or night.
I fall for souls, not sex or skin,
Not her or him, but rather from within.
I’ve kissed with fire and cried from grace;
Searched so many people to find my own place.
I flow like water and gush like the falls,
But I am not ashamed of where my heart calls.
I dream of guys, girls, sometimes more,
And I no longer hide like I had before.
I’ve shed the shame and unlearned the lie,
I love in purple, pink, and blue — I love in bi.