Ethereal

Come.
Here, where leaden birds have broken all the windows.
Here, where the wind is a wild thing gotten indoors, thrashing.
Here, where waiting is more like living than anything I did before.
Come to this place, Love.
I promise, your kiss does not shock me into seizing insensibility as it did the first time.

Darling,
I savor it.
I beg for it,
Prideless.
I am sick for it as others are for white powder, sharp edges, or the dark cards.

I have waited all night.
I waver, I do not eat anymore.
I wear your clothes, surrounding myself with their emptiness,
Willing them to consume me.

Come.
Here, where reason has slipped away.
Kiss me.
Pull me down into your root-home.
I do not mind your throat with its silenced pulse;
But my own, quick and ceaseless,
Drives me without mercy to insanity's bitterest edge.
_____

for A Word With Laurie at Real Toads. ("ethereal")

The Lemon Laughed

I cut a lemon in half, and from its heart

Came a spray of words, vulgar, stinging.

The vile fruit stained pages full of poetry,

It outstripped me,

It published obsessively.

It left itself everyplace, like some sort of acidic gospel.



I said, well,

That's just fine.

I picked it up,

Used it for an eye,

And saw a crazy dandelion world through the burning.

I tell you,

I wept.



The lemon mocked me.

Each half claimed to be more than I was, whole;

It insulted me,

Because that's how it rolls.



I said, listen,

I don't have to take this from some bald, jaundiced little turd who can't even stand up.

How dare you?

Who do you think you are?



At this, the lemon laughed.

"Rage on," it said.

"You, with the knife in your hand."

__________

Haunted House

The wind is absolutely howling tonight, freaking me out a bit. I decided to write a tongue-in-cheek haunted house poem, but it went where it would, and in the end only freaked me out even more. Here it is.

The wind was talking smack against the window frames

When the knock came.

She looked like you, could almost be you

The way that smoke could almost be ink.



I showed her to the wide stone staircase lit with torches.

The mastiffs could barely be kept from falling upon her,

Or me,

So like nervous rabbits did we seem.



She looked so like you, turning her back the same way,

That I saw each step as we rose to be a tarot card.

I asked her a question,

But she spared me only the same answer shades give

Albeit draped in dark inflections,

Inviting me further into my own house as she gained strength and I became more lost.



There are places no one should ever go--

The greenhouse at night;

The lawn on Hangman's Tuesday.

I offered her a room and she suffered me to come inside,

Undressing and bathing me as if I had died.

She loved me as moths do,

Lightly and unthinkingly--

Again, she was almost you except without the iced white roses you always carry at your breasts

Or the melody you sing to keep me tethered.



I placed my desire in a velvet pouch and slipped it into her pillow case

As one slips poison into fresh dough.

She rose

In the morning

Like a black sun,

The half-interested new Mistress of the Manor,

Shutting my eyes inside a bone locket at her throat so that I might always see

How happy she had become

Devouring the desire

Intended for another.

_________