AP Stray Cat Yawp

 

Think of a time when you embarrassed yourself

and the cold wet sand of your heart 

dropped in clumps down 

through your stomach.

Start there.

Fetch up a memory of raw-throated sobbing,

when you beat the sofa arm or the floor

as if it were responsible for the

wasp's nest in your heart. 

Open up, little glass, fill with it.

Leave pretty sunsets for painters or postcard publishers.

What we're after here is waking inside a coffin,

falling from height, the whole empty belly

lonesome lack of it all.

Don't shake your head like you don't know. 

The thing you cannot even think is the thing you have to tell.

Will they consider you crazy, the only one

who ever did/felt/wanted/made love to

that?

Behold the mute tongueless many saying you spoke for them.

The poet is the person who threads out their own veins,

stews their every experience, fears nothing,

stands on one leg on a high wire,

all because they can't not.

Otherwise, they would just be cross-eyed babies

waving bright toy telephones to nobody,

and calling it art.

_______

for Desperate Voicings

Music: DJ Dero The Horn 

Reanimated Lavender Granola Switchblade Nun Rides Again

 

Halloween is fun but it's over and the 

candy-scamming spooks

are back in class.

Turkeys wearing pilgrim hats are taped

on the windows and the President

pardons some tom

who has no idea what these talky apes are laughing about.

He'd rather be out in the woods,

eating fruits and nuts

and taking a run at your car on a dirt road when you blow by

for cider and a donut.

From what I read, pilgrims

were a pretty constipated bunch.

When I was outed, the family holiday invitations

dried right up. Poof!

After Halloween, the faux dead rest, but when real people die,

sometimes it takes some time.

Some make nice

some get high

some find a new family

some suicide.

Me, I survived, hanging out with the fruits and nuts,

and my blood and kin?  

Dead to me as if they'd fallen on some foreign shore.

_________

for Dverse Poetics: Epiphany In The Time of Holiday

In Late Afternoon

In late afternoon,
daisies bloom from the tea kettle.
They lure a light rain 
causing the ends of my hair to curl like child ballerinas.

In late afternoon,
I open your letter which arrived by bicycle.
A boy from the town 
who stared at my breasts as if they were loaves, cooling.

In late afternoon,
a mourning dove perches on the stone wall outside.
I remember a song,
our bed, and November snow we watched like lazy tabbies.
______