Come out and play--won’t you inhale me?
Let Sirens serenade us-no-longer under fig tree.
Silky-straight shagged sun-kissed
Tresses opiate enough for lips to snack on, scented
Papaya highlighted platinum
Locks soft enough for digits to finger some,
Best-when-blow-dried-upside-down strands
supple enough to set in curlers, hot-handed,
I’ve guillotined with a pair of shears
After dousing head in thinner, diesel, beer,
Attempting to slay serpents hissing,
Who nibble away at nape with eyes beady, pissing
Poison from flicking tongues writhing
Sinuously forth and back. Pulsing,
This veldt of Eden garden unkempt,
seducing shipwrecked souls, tempted,
Needs be razed, unlike curls bedecking Delilah’s delight.
Hush, lingering Flame--now, got a light?
Published in Stylus, Fall 2002
Running from shadow flavored heebie-jeebie,
I tear my heart out from inside festering cavity,
my bedlam, my blitz-bed, and hurl spurting hullabaloo
of spindly thorns, ailing arteries, bag of tricks at you,
irreverent irrelevance, with superhero force,
though not a smidgen of vim I find left in a corpse,
limped, panting, held together with week-old gum.
Remind me again why we happened? Numbed,
I'd forgotten, displaced my defense, my defiance, my dialogue.
Sugared saliva acids into vile bile agog
that I intend to spittle your way, ACH DU.
Please, no more ill-humored farcical boos,
swaying sham, outrageous displays of disarray.
Vaporize yourself, if only to enormosize the novas a-craze,
twinkling past the witching-hour,
hungry for flesh oozing with halfwit, lackluster.
If isolation is death, then farewell,
I, too, expire, exiled to liberated cell.
Want of kinship, everything to lose,
I consume the world's refuse.
Feed me, wearied wench,
the world, a barren trench.
Published in Stylus, Spring 1999
Drink up, thirsting rover and rest easy:
in absence of fear arresting restless soul
I bombast a scream soliciting
that which may steal
pains rooted in folds of restive
anima away to numbness,
clammy, stillborn.
Lake, black and seething as cosmos
are vast and vacuous, beckons youth sighing,
sobbing, gasping for what little air
attends to inquenchable needs.
Grey-green snake whose raspings silence
metallic powerhorse, puffs venomous clouds amidst
screened mews.
Pillar of leadened barrel top-heavy with
fingers convulsing, teeters against temple,
tolls uncannily like
deafening banshee babe’s lay.
Blunting capsules aplenty of magian sinew
slide down viscid tunnels, engulfed by stewing
gulf of acid.
Golden locks, twined, caress lily-livered neck as
geronimo! torpid stepping stone plummets down
tumbling cataracts, forthwith leveled by honed foam.
Facing glass smoked with thickened silence,
behold soot saucer-eyed sabine haunted by visions of
perfection unchecked, pretensions unrealized,
pupils glossed porcelain sheen, inebriate of
raw rue, athirst for Nothing save liquid-rouge.
Onrush flows seething sentiments of lip twitching sadness,
as close my eyes I shut in fleeting sanity
only to find you in the darkness that floods my vision,
once blithe with honeysuckle dreams and lotus buds,
now violated with humus droppings,
chimney exhaust, altitude sickness spewage.
Ripped seams in tatters you left me to bleed
rebirth of alone: misery, returns
with vengeance, roaring monsoons.
So away must I to deeply comforting grounds,
with granite nugget as ceremonial nemes crowning
careworn head, queen of half-hearts belied by Eros.
Funny how sphinx behind silver glass snickers when you pursue cupid,
knowing from the get-go blinders haze your twinkling eyes,
delusional hope stifles actuality by the fancy-noose,
rose-scented buds mask funk of rotting passion-fruit,
lightsome song drowns away monotone droning but for a jiff.
Somersaulting in cotton-candy heavens buoyed
by venus-sails, kiss horizons laced with springtime bliss,
poison more perilous than sugared cyanide on a stick,
for delusion milkshakes drunk by nymphs seeking flight
intensify delirious desirous thirst,
at once leadening gossamer-sheer wings.
Crystal shavings,
innocent, blank:
as pristine neo-manna
slip slice sliding through air,
mute visitors,
birthed by comets
weeping glass,
blanket earth for an
eyeblink,
only to vaporize
come touchdown.
Big with child like leadened balloon, my ton-pound brain pulsates,
Fathering shrilly ringing ding-drumming at ear’s door,
As eyes, wan and weary, weep wish-washy tears,
While honking nose in overdrive blows rivers out from dams.
Labored breathing, in in out through parched mouth,
Down ivy throat prickled with goosy swellings,
Encasing tongue turned pinkish shade of salivating green,
Knotted, lest froggish raspings out from hollow wind pipes.
Lips raw from friction grinding, cheeks aflush from delirium,
I generate white-heat snaking up from toe to head that makes
Me shudder in cold-sweat, chills down achy spine, seizing my
Heart, numb though beating still empty thump thumps.
Beholding essence of twilight’s Titianesque palette,
you tear out in winsome splendor my charcoal eyes.
Punish conscience for drafting oculucide
by slicing fanciful fingers from nail to knuckle.
Giving ear to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons,
you pare, scalp, husk, skin, flay, shuck away with metallurgic machete, flesh.
Feed me to schools of lissome lung fish
keen enough to estivate during heart of summer doldrums.
May famished fisher-of-men
hook pisce harboring my sins for his daily bread.
Reuse. Recycle. Redemption.
Fluid Coltrane croons in evening’scape,
as rest I mellow my mass upon bed
linen’ed with starched thought and iron feelings.
What is love but question marks in disguise?