New Garden

My robot fucked the 7-11 chick--
she'd guessed the access code.
Amid disassembled hardware, I located and removed
my emotional investment.

New garden. No succulents. 
I bang the yield in walls with a hammer.
I erect abstract sculpture the neighbors hate.

I go on, exploded,
hating inevitable outcomes
and the rattle of my seed-pod heart. 
______

A flash 55 for my BFF.

image: from the sci-fi movie "Ex Machina" 

Interval

She only knew two things--
mice, and sky.

So, when she was injured and the sky scorned her,
the thought that she must now be a mouse drove her mad.

They had to wrap her. She wanted to kill them,
but had become a lesser even to pigeons; she was all fury and no effect.

Nothing in the sky is sick, but the ground is full of bones and graves.
She became feet without wings, dying of stillness.

Why did they touch without killing?
Didn't they know that, under her feathers, she was meat like anything else?

Days went by. She fought them. She lived. So what?
They brought her food and she tore at it. 

After forever, she stopped hurting.
After forever, they took her outside and the sky was still there.

She took a step, then two. She tried her hurt place.
For her, gravity had always been reversed, and so she raised her shoulders and felt herself fall.
________

The Spider Bride

I am Night.
I told you so from the start.
Half-asleep all the time, 
lit stars spill from my lips as I talk nonsense beside you, 
never with any notion of what I say,
not remembering,
but no less la magnifica noche for my failings.

When we make love, I hold a spider in one hand.
She is no bigger than a white lie,
and as light as a first doubt.
She is silent, something I can never be.
Perhaps you will choose her,
your spider-bride,
and leave me reading my empty palm by wick light.

A black cricket may linger in my hair to seduce you.
Duplicitous and sleek, she could show you
the way to loose silver moonlight from my red tangles.
Then, in the morning, 
dressed only in my blue silk robe,
I would find her set beneath the paving stones near my door,
as people appear and chatter until I can no longer recall my dreams.

There you'll be, low in the early sky, smug Sun,
ascendant and arrogant,
insisting that even my long shadow
is more your child than mine.
_______

Kitchen Girl

There are stairs,
scarce been used--

the smell of wood,
straight cut and new--

all of it built
quite recently, for you.

Didn't I tell you, baby,
I'd get you before a preacher one day?

Didn't I tell you, Lonesome,
that I'd find the words to make you stay?

I saw it all,
can't prove I lied--

in the case of those
who've lately died.

A ring means an unbroken circle,
a rope means a broken neck--

I knew one day I'd make you fall,
and dance, and turn--
first east, then west.
________

Izy at Real Toads says take her to an exotic location where you'd never want to go. All right. I think a gallows is fairly exotic and I certainly never want to end up there.

The title is taken from a traditional song of the same name. It goes, in part:

I never will believe what one man says
though his eyes be blue or brown--
unless he's swingin' from a scaffold high,
sayin', darlin' I can't come down.