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This life, I am curating 

echoes, shadows. Ghosts. 

Rooms full of porcelain dolls

and flapper dresses.

A crystalline menagerie 

of glass deer. Old roses

and anything vintage.

Flower petals perennially 

fall from my lips.

On my walls,

Louise Brooks holds her pearls.

Robert Smith wears lipstick.

I want to be

all that I am, 

something softly floral. 

Softly haunted. To play among

the gorgeous bones of darkness.

*

HOUSE OF SWOLLEN ACHE

(a first draft)

We learn to listen closely. 

How the light drips wet 

and strange through the windows. 

Pools into a silence 

we try to survive in. 

A sanctification of tears

and folded hands.

Here, there is 

an eternal caesura of motion.

Still, we collect things. Witches’ bells 

and plastic containers. Chaos 

always seducing the house. 

We sit on the floor,

one continuous glissando of defeat,

wrestling with the memory 

of sweetness. Our eyes

wide and staring. The TV 

a perennial elegy of want.

Everything is unraveling. 

Feathers crashing up 

through the pillows. The taste 

of peanut butter in my mouth, 

sticky and rotting. 

The taste of yearning, 

feverish and hot. 

A perpetual canticle of ache. 

Every door closed. 

We are irrevocably alone. 

Today was wasted.

I was sick. Nothing was wrong. In fact, everything was going well. But inside… Something was rotting. I took careful pains to hide away from the people I love, isolating myself. I’m not just getting better at editing my poetry. I’m getting better at editing my own self. The sadness flickered in me like a candle that wouldn’t burn out. I was scared and hurting. But I did not want to burden others with it. I tried to write, but the writing wouldn’t come, it seemed too futile a thing in my state of mind. I think that’s the terror of mental illness: one can never predict when it comes. A sudden storm out of nowhere.

*

READING HERO

He barges in,

fresh from recess,

the Texas heat. 

It is cold 

in the school, austere. I stare 

at a plastic plant 

while parents and teachers move silently 

about their day. 

With solemn deliberation, 

he sounds out vowels, consonants. 

The double “e” gives him pause. I say,

Think of the two e’s as staring eyes, 

saying, “Eeek!” 

When he grows frustrated, 

I tell him gently,

Look at pictures for clues.

Time is something precious. 

Sacred. Beneath his small fingers,

we examine, curate sounds. 

They elongate, grow wings.

Alligator becoming 

something beautiful and strange.

I want to somehow articulate 

the magic of language. 

How someday 

stories might become 

his greatest friends. 

Instead, we talk of video games. 

Of Fortnite and Roblox. 

But he has taught me

that even words can become new.

I am humbled.

I am learning to listen.

Again.

Again.

I was poring through my archives and found something I thought was interesting. An old poem, which was an oddly combined effort of an obsessive love, and my undying fascination with murder mystery mythology. I don't know if it worked. I tend to be very critical of my work and never know when a piece is good. But I thought I'd post it.

CAMILLE 

In this scene she's crumpling

to the black and white checkered

floor. Her French maid's uniform

soiled and torn.

*

Before him, she lit the prettiest

candles, all pink lace and charms.

The bowl of purple ornaments,

their glittering shiver.

How it filled her, the sight

of those white marble counter tops.

Only the barest, most delicate

finger of dust.

*

There were the velvet curtains, red

as the scarlet woman’s dress. Red

as her sex. The giant feather boa

while a tiny finch fluttered 

in the cage of her ribs.

*

She would tongue the chipped tooth

at the back of her mouth, the morning

a perpetual taste of blood. 

A black velvet ribbon 

round her slender, white throat.

*

The gilt clock on the mantel. 

The cut crystal goblet 

with its faint lip of arsenic.

*

She memorized the intricate pattern

of vines in his carpet. His eyes neither

blue nor brown but a murkiness

in between.

Her hands, pale instruments.

of ache.

*

Always rain outside. 

Thunderstorms and dogs 

licking at the windows

while corpses waltzed 

in the ballroom.

A piano playing itself

in the conservatory 

while a leg of lamb

rotted in the kitchen.

*

In shadowy rooms she could hear

her desire. Soft. Panting.

How it echoed in corners,

the inherent sadness of doorways.

The fog at her lips. Under blankets,

the dolls moaned.

*

There was the sweet perfume

of paranoia. They all wanted her

or they wanted her dead.

*

She was a little too much in love

with objects. With lavender journals

and chandeliers. The Haviland china

and the Exacto knives.

*

The man in the smoking jacket.

The library with its books 

of empty pages. Always the cook 

vanished before the meal 

and everyone starving to death.

*

The well-water in her hair.

Glass buttons on her shirt.

*

The butler coming up behind her,

his gloved hands, their swarthy heat.

The glinting of the knife

before the shocking bloom of red.

(Image courtesy of Getty Images--Darya Komarova)

I am something

sad. Yet passionate.

Bipolar bitch extraordinaire.

Chronic with the melancholic

and disastrously demeaning.

*

In her dreams, a mountain of peaches.

A blue hobby horse.

A drafty house, and outside, the English rain.

*

My perfume. French lavender, pear blossom. 

Golden vanilla.

A million synonyms for the word ache.

*

The trees are memories.

Their leaves a shivering pink 

that matches my dress. 

The wind whips 

furiously in my hair. I can hear

its voice, trying to call me back.

Trying to make me stay.

But I am leaving. Leaving.

And never looking back.

*

And maybe it was the way 

the white sheets rumpled 

sadly across the bed. 

The black satin bodice 

of her gown and the rose petals 

that leaked from her mouth. 

I am not a woman 

but a porcelain doll 

draped across a chair 

in a forest. A reflection 

of the floral lampshade 

multiplied eternally in the window. 

I dream of giraffes and marionettes. 

Of trainsets and old postcards. 

A pirate ship where my face should be. 

A swarm of dragonflies 

in my finger waved hair.

*

The sad tilt 

of my father’s boots on the tile. 

You could always hear a woman's voice 

from another room. The soft 

cadence of her crying 

falling wet on the stairs.

Dogwood, lavender.

This tiny kitten heart.

The flash of a red heel in the street.

LOVELESS 

When you left all the gears went tumbling from my mouth. My body so heavy even the birds couldn’t lift it. It was hard dancing alone in the bath tub. I was the butterfly trying to pull all the anchors. It was always like this when you were gone, trying to harness the clouds but they just kept scattering away. Sometimes I’d go looking for you but the grandfather clocks kept spewing up through the earth. We always knew it didn’t make sense but somehow it did. The umbrella I carried turned upside down and catching dark water. I was plagued by gaslights and giant keys, the men coming to capture me through the fog. We’d go diving in the swimming pool in the wheat field, chlorine and forgotten saints rotting the skin from our bones. I’ll dream about my father, his pupils dilating and widening madly. Eyes changing color like traffic lights.