I fall into your mouth like  a drowning sailor,
seeking deeper seas of love.
I abandon life on the surface willingly,
without  regret.
Its colors are pale memories
of some one I no longer  have to be.

Riding the waves of your body,
I relinquish the shore.
You are all I need to know
of comfort and of home.

Your probing wakens me,
and I stream out  from my own center
like a lamp beneath the waves.

My singing is  muffled,
but you feel it in the small, fine bones of your ear.

I have carved my words on your shoulder
with my teeth,
but the sensations of love
run through my fingers
like glass.



THE INTELLECTUAL

I could speak my mind with my eyes closed, and frequently do  -
it is so soothing , this rustling of ideas.
It eases me out of my body, transfiguring pain,
making my head thick with comparisons,
squeezing the breath so no wind of anxiety blows through.

But you come, tapping at my window,
rapping on the floorboards,
thumping in the attic
and my skin jumps,
catching me by suprise,
pulsing towards you
with my foolish blood in hot pursuit.

The journeys of the mind spin far out beyond the galaxies,
and the universe is frozen in a thought,
but the body weeps at the cowardice of these adventures,
longs for the comfort of love,
and opens itself in secret.

You challenge my wanderings with a certain knowledge of my inner                           
   space
more profound than my dreamiest imaginings of desire.
“Here,” you say, “just here,” and I am with you, in myself, and all over             
   heaven.



BABY, BABY

Imagine needing the bee
so that for a thimbleful of honey
you endure a thousand stings.

Imagine needing the shark
so that for a moment’s embrace
of that powerful, shining body
you agree to bleed to death.

Imagine the desperate need for touch
so that lying in your crib,
drunk with the alcohol laden milk,
when he picks you up and puts the penis, not the bottle,
to your lips
you open your tiny mouth until your jaws ache.

Imagine the rest of your life
wrecked on the stony shores
of your need for love.


 

THE UNFORGIVEN

 

You devoured my life,

Cracked open the bones of my youth with your teeth

And sucked out the marrow of my beauty

 

You left me a shadow among shadows,

bruised  by the ones with sharper edges

who had turned their deadness into jagged spears of broken glass

 

I was a girl with no skeleton,

A woman without a spine.

 

My shadow gave a performance of living,

growing my nails and my hair,

pasting expressions on my face that copied emotions,

putting noises in my throat that sounded enough like speech

to keep anyone from hearing the death rattle inside.

 

And now, looking at the lines age has carved in my face

I see rivulets of sorrow where no tears flow

and I feel in my mouth the hot bitterness of a single question.

 

You and Mother struck a bargain to waste each other’s lives –

but who gave you permission to spill my blood upon the sand?

THE MORNINGS AFTER

 

 

In the morning you go about with your abstracted, professorial air

As if trying to remember some important secret of the universe

 

You act as if nothing has happened –

As if you hadn’t drunk my soul dry the night before

In my child’s bed,

Leaving me feverish and parched,

Burned and scarred by the probing and the pounding

Of your penis and your hands.

 

I am the secret you can’t remember

As you look over my head

To the wall behind me.

 

I am the darkness with no stars,

The black paint on your lens,

The reason your telescope is always blind.

 

The invisible powder you feel on your fingers

Is crushed bone from my spine,

My hips and my pubis

 

Not pounded meteor,

Not inter-galactic dust

But the record of a life being ground away

Under the weight of your history.

Of your hysterical refusal to know yourself and your wounds.

 

It is an ancient sickness you carry, marry and willfully pass on

My mother, your wife, stumbles about

Imperiously giving orders through the fog of her sleeping drugs

That allow her to survive the nights in her own way

And seek her revenge when she wakes.

 

And my mornings now, decades later

Carry the sour flavor of your studied indifference,

Your useless,  buried shame,

Your hapless denial.

 

I marvel that anyone

Could chip away at the life of a child

So steadily, so relentlessly

Working the levers of evil,

Turning the gears of annihilation,

Opening the canisters of gas

And walking away.

 

FLESH UNWILLING

 

 

The body remembers –

 

The ribs grasped beyond breath in the relentless hand,

Delicate cage of the lungs whose bones you later manage with horse and car to bruise and break,

 

The foot slapping frantically against the sheets

The desperate movement that cannot free,

Can merely distract from the pain,

Whose ligaments you twist and torment

Sliding off a curb

On your way to another crime scene.

 

The hip achingly wrenched into motions of reception

It does not want to make

That wakes you, throbbing night after morning after night.

 

The bottom of the spine closed like a fist

Because you cannot close what he chooses to force open,

Which you force open again

in the confused pursuit of “beauty” and “health,”

Fasting and enemas of coffee-tinted water,

Squirming in agony on the bathroom floor,

Driven beyond reason to continue the ritual.

 

(The craze for colonics becomes clear –

all those tiny backsides

lifted in submission

to parental battering rams,

and the longing so much later

to be “cleaned out,” made pure and simple again and again.)

 

The unwilling flesh whispers to you,

Screams to you when years of whispering have done nothing

To wake up your ears

And you crawl into position

Head in the pillow,

Rump in the air.

 

You last all of two seconds,

The foot flailing again,

Before you collapse in dry weeping

Unable to penetrate

The memory of penetration

Even an inch further.

 

As your bones vibrate with sorrow

The full weariness of half-done healing

Is upon you.

 

The self struggling to witness the self

Moves too slowly into the light.