poem: confessions of a teenage elitist

i like being misunderstood. but i am not that complicated: i think am better than you because i think about grand things in the shower and you only stare and smile, your eyes drained out, your mind running clear and fast and going nowhere. i have various complexes: childhood trauma, childhood poverty, childhood isolation. i…

poem: too long for her twitter bio

art inspires art; like fire makes fire and sex makes humans making love making sex, dipping their hands in red and painting cities. I met you when I was a conquerer, I met you and you tore me apart. I was making grand endless forests and populating them with leopards and crying when I was…

poem: those people are like art, dead but beautiful

little girl, in the red skirt, in the impressionist painting outside my window: the sky is thick with cocoa beans, the clouds are wild.   her mother picks at the flower-dust in her hair. they have halos, they are goddesses spun out in starry nights, relics from when the world was young and girls waited…

poem: you can publish, but you must use a pseudonym

they call me no-name, little ghost and spirited what-if that runs and dances among the has-beens and will-be's. i have deep holes where my eyes should be, i have a pulsing sticky heart where my mouth should be: I cannot talk, but I can bleed.   I can not even claim what is mine as…

poem: fire water

hello local burned out millenium i don't like the way you look like me in the mirror, the way your indian eyes glow red in the city, the red urban city coming out of me, when I sit by the highway, the cynical parts of the world cut hard into my thighs and my old-legacy…

poem: matrimonium

for very small moments my life is beautiful. there is Paris in a mason-jar, girls kissing boys on the sidewalk, rain coming like piano jazz. the baby is crying for me, lisping Maman Maman; he is like his father. And we were like staccato-ed beats: small carnivals of mirth, small hollows in the neck, your…

poem: but I’m almost twenty

just before the dawn i am always ashamed of the impossible things i dream and i wake up crying for men unsaved and for my ugly impossible ego. Because i, of course, am going to save the world.  

poem: what is not (lost & found)

I am looking for him everywhere but he is not even in my dreams he is scattered over the snow in kicked-up footprints he is the smudges on the windows when I breathe against the glass, watching my loneliness fog into my fingertips, watching him always not appear.   little girl (asked in broken english) why…

poem: romantics, on the subject of race.

the black boys stand at the edge of the plantation, bleeding nervously into their palms and their psalms. there is a dreadful sweep of fate around them there is something righteous, holiness salted in the plain cloth and the pink inner smiles. the girl, watching, from the shade of rome says how wonderful it looks…

poem: picture of someone else, told like this

did you look in the portrait today? she shudders and pulls away she said (bitterly/violently/desperately) NO she said i am damned to hell and back she said it comes out in the books like blood from a knife; disconnected, but members of the same party, all the same.   did you go out tonight or…