Winter Jasmine

If you sleep with the winter,

You will move slowly through deep blue dreams,

Filled with pale lovers whose eyes are the color of ancient glaciers.

If you have the soul of summer,

You will want to wrap the winter in rose blooms, jasmine, and mint;

You will love her for her stillness,

Her self-possession,

And her very remove,

All the while unable to stop yourself from trying to warm her

With your love

Your body

And your ridiculous hopes.

She will be drawn to you,

And you will think, "Ah! I am the one to save her."

Woman, she does not need saving from herself,

And she will naturally go on, as ever, being who she is.

But you,

Having failed to change her with your intoxicating night blooms,

May find that you have succeeded in altering yourself;

And may wander for some time

Through deep blue dreams of impenetrable ice.

______

The Winter Queen

The Winter Queen, cold majesty,

So austere and harsh--

Will scatter your bones where the cat tails grow,

Down by the summer marsh.

Ice in all its forms

Are her wolves arrayed in pack;

You cannot love her and live--

You cannot seek her and ever go back.

Her hair is made of crows,

And January or June, it's winter where she goes;

She hates fire, she loves night,

And keeps her heart well out of sight.

Do you remember,

Little fool,

When the fluttering cardinal was her lips?

Do you recall

Her naked skin,

Her throat, her breasts, her ribs?

The Winter Queen, cold majesty,

Her favor gone frost instead--

Has scattered your bones where the cat tails grow,

Now frozen hard and dead.

______

Violent Squirrel

Violent Squirrel is on the run--

"They should have just let me use the bird feeder," she reasons, still peeved.

Leaving the carnage behind, Violent Squirrel perches on a tree limb and takes a moment to examine her resentments.

"I am denied access to major department stores and salons;

They say to me, 'You can't come in here. You're a squirrel!' and they chase me out the door with brooms or try to catch me in painful traps.

It's true, I am a squirrel,

But now I am Violent Squirrel,

The ultimate outsider, a revolutionary rodent!"

Violent Squirrel's agenda:

• Disrupt traffic and commerce


• Bring down the patriarchy


• Tease that one dog

Violent Squirrel hears sirens in the distance.

Violent Squirrel says, "I'm in your yard, eating your bird seed. Try and stop me."

You go, squirrelfriend.

_______

Lipstick

The world's most beautiful woman writes an apocalyptic message on the mirror of the bus station restroom in Hell, Michigan.

Some say it is written in blood,

But it is only lipstick.

Because it is written by a woman, in lipstick, on a bus station restroom mirror in Hell, Michigan,

There is no buzz;

It does not go viral;

The world goes

tic

toc

Balanced precariously like an unwatched baby on a diving board.

The world's most beautiful woman goes on tv with the intention of delivering her message,

But some little fuckwad with a five-day beard and a ponytail wants her to endorse salon products instead.

He hands her a plastic bottle of shampoo and urges her to toss her head and smile.

When the most beautiful woman in the world gets angry,

Cars won't start,

Fountains run dry,

And everything is like herding cats.

Other women say,

I hope she falls.

Men say,

I want her to toss her head and smile.

Meanwhile, the world goes

tic

toc

Like a ball bearing balanced on a paper clip, balanced on a gyroscope balanced on a seal's nose.

The most beautiful woman in the world writes an apocalyptic message on a plate with lipstick at Nikos' Coney island in Hell, Michigan,

But because it is written by a woman, in lipstick, near a kitchen,

No one pays any attention;

And because she is

The world's most beautiful woman,

No one can see her at all,

And the world goes on as it always has--

tic

toc

Like a blind man reading the news to his deaf wife by cell phone in calm and authoritative tones.

______

Longing

After the game,

The Succubus is with Chloe,

And being with her, after so long,

Is like

Being suspended in honey, through which powerful tides are moving,

Slowly,

Slowly.

She has entered the dreams of so many women, and yet,

This time,

It is she who is consumed within a dream--

And in the way of dreams, she feels the loss of control, the sensation of being carried deliciously,

Perhaps dangerously,

Along,

Watching herself,

Helpless.

As for Chloe, she is the same Finite Universe she has always been--

Calm,

Untroubled,

At home in the skin of anything she has ever done

Or committed.

Her eyes are now, as ever, the undisturbed center

Around which everything else rushes,

Like the turbulent air around the perfection of a raven's wing.

The Succubus has entered so many dreams,

But now she is the dream,

Aching to enter Chloe

The way midnight rain joins the earth and seems to disappear.

The Succubus knows by now

That she is incapable of waking herself from her desire for Chloe once she is inside it,

And the never knowing

How Chloe feels

Or what Chloe is thinking,

Cannot stop her, any more than shouting at a falling stone would suspend it in mid-air,

Or magically return it to stillness, at the top of things, in the time before it began to fall.

The Succubus knows that Chloe will leave again, that she can't possess her as she does all the others.

Chloe claims that she never even dreams,

But,

That's just a trick of memory--

Because,

Chloe does dream, all the time, but when she dreams

It is the Succubus who remembers.

______

Photograph: Jordana Brewster

Exciting Sports Story #51

In the graveyard, there is a baseball game--

The Righteous versus The Damned.

The Righteous wear crisp uniforms as white as a new Spalding,

And they carry themselves like archangels in cleats.

The Damned cheat like riverboat gamblers--

They doctor the ball and slip heavy files into their gloves.

When they apply a tag,

Someone will soon need a dentist, regardless of the umpire's call.



The Righteous lead five to four in the bottom of the ninth.

Clergy fill the first base stands and cheer, but not too loudly.

On the third base side, women exhort the evil to rally, screaming,

"Smack one, sweetheart!" and they make kissing noises.



The pitcher takes the old horsehide in a right hand that has never been lifted in anger, nor stooped to self-abuse;

He delivers a pitch that is straight and true, like a sermon on Christmas day.

It trails glory behind it and a terrible reckoning ahead of it.



The batter, a snide little bastard if ever there was one,

Sticks out an elbow and is hit with the pitch.

He turns to dust, but is awarded first base anyway.

The pinch runner mouths insinuations about the first baseman's mother as he takes his lead,

And the women on the third base side are making all sorts of rude promises, if only The Damned will score a couple of runs.



The pitcher, rising to his task like a revival preacher, fans the next two batters as if they were naughty children,

And he the schoolmaster.

The clergy on the first base side nearly smile, before catching themselves.

The women opposite them greet the failed batsmen with enthusiastic cries of "you suck!" and shower them with whatever junk they've got in their shoulder bags that might hurt upon impact.



It is all up to the last batter.

The pinch runner takes his lead and digs a sharpened spike into the first baseman's toe.

The hitter, looking like a sooty locomotive in his black uniform, launches a line drive over the head of the fallen first sacker.

The clergy gasp and the women shriek as the ball rolls all the way to the Danny's Coffee Shop sign in right field, like a little bunny in a children's story.



The runners for The Damned move around the bases as if the very Hounds of Hell were pursuing them--

And they are! They are!

Just as the Righteous right fielder gets to the ball, a woman comes out of the stands, wraps her arms around his neck, and lays one on him in a way that no obedient wife ever could.

His arms flail as she kisses him and the ball just sits there,

White and sweet as a June bride,

While the tying and winning runs score.



Disaster!

The Damned have won!

The women on the third base side chant "Chlo-e! Chlo-e!" for indeed, it is her who created the diversion.

The clergy retire to their pulpits, to weep,

While at Danny's Coffee Shop in Norman, Chloe is everybody's darling and she consents to have her picture taken with the waitresses in their ball caps with the red letter "D" on them,

One kissing her on each cheek,

And the Succubus standing smiling behind them

Like a Cheshire cat.

_______

The Afternoon of Lost Opportunity

The Stone Jockey's career is going poorly.

He is from Argentina,

But everyone always assumes he is from Easter Island.

When he approaches the horses,

They panic;

And even though he regards them with only the tenderest affection,

He can never get near them.

The Stone Jockey sits on a bench in the park, trying to relax,

But there is a problem with pigeons.

A woman walks by,

And though he regards her with only the tenderest affection,

He knows it is hopeless--

He will never get near her.

This particular woman

Is a part-time fashion model.

She lives on Diet Pepsi and cocaine,

And speaks only Romanian.

"If I had one wish," says the Stone Jockey to the pigeons on his head,

"I would wish to be the lightest feather in the wing of an angel."

He imagines this angel to be the coked-up fashion model, who is hurrying away to meet her connection, a man named Raoul.

If she had come over and kissed the Stone Jockey instead,

His head would have split open

In an earthquake of happiness,

And his soul would have risen and fluttered

Like the mane of a white Arabian

In the wind.

________