walking in rain:
the wind
is quiet in trees.
a sixth sense
guides me.
a rustle of wings
and a tangle
of vines and leaves.
hipsters with
spiritual anorexia
block crumbling sidewalks.
i am tuned
to the earth’s music
and voiceless ground.
fantasies like glass
bubble to consciousness.
small sharp rocks.
colors are like
vibrant crayons.
perfectly
wet grass.
8/28/2016
9/21/2016
Chicago
For a Fellow Beast
To you,
with the voice like branches,
crisp throat and bird-tongued:
isolation took you nowhere
except sprouted limbs in the roots of your scalp
and grew resentment to the big man in the sky.
I’ve always associated you with thunder,
with windowpanes, borrowed rain,
and the occasional telephone cracks
that carried our voices past Nevada and Kentucky.
I became fluent in silence years ago, but you still heard me
seas away, and we washed the night with dilated pupils.
I wanted to hold the moon,
milky rinds like my plastic bag flesh –
pliant and flimsy and at the edge of blooming wings.
We were only fourteen, with hairline cracks
seamed across china glass skin,
you were chipped in the most beautiful way
and I thought if I carefully engulfed you
between wrinkled palms
like the nestled warmth of a newborn bird,
you could be fixed.
It was the summer I grew a year
in three months,
you showed me sun-kissed wrists
and the art of shrinking
through whistle fingers and teacups.
We were skins of ocean water,
bodies woven from hurricanes and cherry-lipped horizons,
half empty with a belly full of stones.
You, with the stomach stuffed with graveyards,
churned oceans of crimson corpses from your esophagus.
You were always the one with the best stories,
the loudest laugh, the biggest smile,
you said you liked the feel of adrenaline
draped across your shoulders
at five in the morning,
you said you never felt more alive
bathed in a thousand shards and veins and blood.
What were you thinking
when you scraped a silver blade against your throat,
were you scared?
Did you forget how humans weren’t made
to be sliced, were never chiseled statues
or fistfuls of organs from gutted fish?
What was it like to forget yourself,
to not recognize the angles of your limbs, your ankles,
to watch your knuckles wither, curl like dying leaves?
Maybe this is what death tastes like,
squeezed between your irises like unwanted pearls,
polishing an artificial smile,
maybe this is where we first began to decay –
between visions and illusions,
medusa in the mirror and distorted appendages,
eyes grow old after a hundred days of interpretation.
It’s that time of year again –
when crows cease commentations
and clouds roast themselves until burnt,
I am still clasping onto one end
of this yellow diamond sky,
half bleached with your mayonnaise bones,
the moon screams hunger, hunger.
I can imagine your wild horse eyes
capturing every motion of wind.
We are breathing, we are alive
but our faces wilt under indigo light.
This is how we’ll grow –
sleep-deprived,
but forever dancing.
13, a deadly age
He was a boy.
not a criminal
not a monster
but a boy.
Tyre King.
A boy shot down
a black "suspect"
who didn't deserve life
or so the whites say.
She was a girl
(it seems so long ago now).
Not a slut
Not a woman
but a girl.
Maryann Measles.
A girl raped and wrapped in chains
dumped like litter
into a river
who didn't deserve life
or so the rich say.
They'll always make an excuse
defend their own "respectable" people
who terrorize.
Content
while the rest of us
scream in showers
and grow up without sisters.
