Self Portrait

 

There's someone in here,

inside my

skin,

someone Frankensteined

up from a girl

I used to be or

never was

or

someone on a greased slide

to the boneyard

(yep, that was

me)

but she got

off at

El Paso

sweet little woman get along.

See, I'm living for two 

now,

preggers with myself

and way

overdue

but we're cute af

in certain light

or in 

my imagination

or 

in the sight of God

with a 

heave

and a

ho

I just couldn't let her go.

_______

Blue Train

 

Come on, we're taking the blue train.

You've tried crack, Coke, Eckankar and cans of spinach,

but all you get is dry sex with stick men

who babble all night about can't-miss ground floors in clown shoes you must be this dead to wear. 

Come down the gone escalator to the blue train.

Do a swan dive into a crystal bowl of beautiful doubletalk

and meet us inside the celestial suitcase,

lost between Rome and Bangkok but returned in the ice cream morning

to the hotel squirreled away in the pocket your spontaneous anthem.

Come in, we're just leaving to catch the blue train.

It's the overdose you can't find in stores, the big bass beat

the blood makes in your ears each time you dive off an ordinary Wednesday.

Nurse is here in case you faint, Electric Jimmy is here in case you don't.

Get into this, get right, get straight, get after it,

get in loser,

we're taking the humdingity third-rail high-speed no refunds blue train.

________

for The Sunday Muse #220. 

Itinerary On The Fly

Do not place

your piano on the tracks.

Do not bind to a base

A bird of any kind.

Still, facts are facts

and the unforeseen may occur

Without warning--without a word.

"I knew a tune," says the man.

"I knew the sky," says the bird.

And so they sit with what they know.

Man and bird at peace in place

with one stop left to go.

_____

for The Sunday Muse #74.

The Skull In The Book

The skull in the book asks me what I'm reading.
We both know that he only wants to criticize.

The train rolls on, works looms.
I had hoped to get in a few pages, but no.
The skull in the book won't shut his pie hole.

I tell him it's about a woman
whose husband has a secret;
it's about a girl
who hears voices from her closet,
and it's about a cat
who stays on the stairs in the dark, watching.

The skull in the book scoffs. 
He wants spies and intrigue and sex.
"There is, Skully," I say. 
He frowns.

For a while I describe the scenery to him. 
He hasn't got eyes, but he has curiosity. 
He tells me to kiss him, he's a Prince.
"You wish."

At my stop, I tire of it all,
and discard my book with the skull in it. 
I can hear him, fuming inside the barrel with the coffee cups
and McMuffin wrappers.

I think I won't go to work.
I stand there for a second, stupid and a little afraid,
like a woman who wakes up not knowing where she is,
how she got there, what this strange body is
or why she's inside it, casting about for a clue.
________