Persona is Born (1)

(Persona is born at the intersection
of concrete and white-winged butterflies.)

Remember when cities were gray; when buildings
loomed over the sky and belched decay
into the face of every passerby?
When they waded through bile (holding
up their pant legs, if they even had any at all)?
You could look down from the moon and poke holes,
sucking houses and little plastic figurines,
you could blow early-morning frost and cigarette smoke
and worm holes and black holes and giggle
when little girls would hold their noses and cough.

And remember when the city turned white.
How the butterflies couldn’t keep camouflaged anymore.
And they died off, and it seemed like ruin was slithering down
upon you.

Well, that was really the grime of hundreds of years slithering
off.

Persona kept a jar full of white butterflies when she was born,
drew pictures and pasted them inside like
the walls of a glass house;
Persona walked outside and let the butterflies taste air.

Foyle

Let the games begin.

 

Imtiaz Dharker is awesome.  I want to go to London.  I’m going to start writing poetry again, eventually, once I get over the whole screw-poetry-forever phase that I’m going through.

The Infinite Lives of Bug

So, awhile ago I wrote this short story about Bug, a girl who was born from… actually, I don’t know, but she’s not just a regular girl.  As her introduction goes:

I live alongside the riverbeds that have never been touched by human hands. In lives past I have belonged to a man with no ears and a child with no dreams. I have been taken in by a snake with one tooth and an owl with three thoughts. I have an abundance of days but a drought of wishes.

I will die inside a poppy seed, in every life, for I am Bug.

And then she goes on to tell the reader about how she met Rabbit, and how they became friends.  Well, I meant to write more but never got around to it, so that story just sort of sat around until yesterday, I wrote another story about Bug.  I haven’t finished an actual short story in ages, so it felt wonderful to finish this new Bug story.  I actually really like it, too.  And that got me thinking… what if I wrote a novelette about Bug and her infinite lives?  So, that’s my new goal.  It won’t be really a consecutive story line, more like a collection of stories about her, the people and animals she meets, and eventually… well, I won’t tell you that because it’ll ruin the ending 😛

So, that’s what I’ll be doing.  I’m taking a break from poetry until April (yeah, I lost the Pre-NaPo thing, but whatever.  It was just practice anyway).  And I’ll be writing about The Infinite Lives of Bug.

 

P.S.  Wasn’t this supposed to be a strictly-poetry blog? Oh well.

a list of things I have to recount to you (10)

1)  this list is written by me, for you, and I hope by the time
you read it, I’ll be gone.  if I am not,
do not read on.

2)  in june, the flowers seem duller, colors muted in the soft haze
that lifts from the ground like fairy mist, and I can remember
when you asked me to stand in the circle of mushrooms.
it all seemed so much whiter, the air that is, and there was this chill,
like some slime running over my arms, that froze me to the spot,
though my feet ached to feel the grass again.  don’t deny me
those simple pleasures.

3)  two winters later I couldn’t see your face through the window
of your car.  it was fog, draped over the glass like silk, maybe before
I would have said milk, but now I would say  ().
there was a birds’ nest hanging in the branches above your roof,
and I watched the wind tear it down and crash on your windshield.
you stuck your head out of the the sunroof and didn’t see me,
because I wasn’t ever there at all.

4)  you kissed me when I didn’t want you.

5)  I want to leave my fingerprints across your body, and maybe I did,
because when they found you, you were dead, and the only clues
were the skin cells stuck underneath your fingernails.

6)  I’m not sorry, but I am sorry, and I’ll keep the dried roses
under my mattress until you claim them.

Hera and Heracles (Part 1) (8)

Scorned wife, wide in your eye sights,
set a rolling stone down the mountain
where your son was never born.

Sixty-eight knots in her clothes, and cross-
legged on the hearth, womb squeezing
with violent heaves until a tongue loosens her distress.

You thought you’d rid yourself of his suckling,
didn’t you?  And what to think, knowing he nursed
on your breast, and where was your Athena?

But the delay has already been, he is no
High King, and for the next dozen deaths
there won’t be any pounding in your envy.

(Except for your little vampire-pets,
sent down to his chamber, where he sits
with his brother and plays with the knots in their throats.)

And Alcides, Alcides, don’t spell your love
in the dirt, it’s already spelled in your newly-
bestowed title, Heracles, but you are no son to her!

what i have left of forever (7)

I kind of fell behind a day, so I might have cheated and written this in three minutes ^^

 

 

there’s a hole burned
through my stomach.  every bite
i take of you comes right back out; i realize
that i don’t have much of my forever,
but for what it’s worth
(not much)
i’m handing it to you.

chocolate truffles (6)

there was a boy with no feet,
and he learned to walk with stilts
strapped to both legs.

there was a girl with every limb,
and every feature in perfect submission
to her body, but she wouldn’t

lift a finger, just sat on her chair
of plush boys and listened to their courts.
a jumbled mess of envy

dissolved her away to bones and rags.
with no one left to love her, she set off
the left way, and left and left and left

behind the discarded chair, painted
in discarded mascara strands,
until one right away

she met the boy with no feet.
he stilted over to her and gave her
a chocolate truffle, and that is how

they fell in love.

labryinthine dream (5)

marriage wedding, six months late,
one room schoolhouse swathed in lace
made from a now-blind little girl’s prickled fingers.
wooden bull, carved from merlin wood,
perched upon a hill of discarded lingerie in purple prose.  pregnant
with one twin.

I would ask for your hand in Sobriety
(the carpet’s warm under your feet, and in this one room whorehouse);
I doubt you would find the altar.

the second twin has her face in the water,
breathing drown into her nostrils
and lapping numb through her mouth.  each holds a bottle cap castle
in their palms, and crossed around their breasts are labels.
bankhouse.

the rose on your lapel is spotted white-
let me just color it in with the blood on your face
and that way you’re kiss-worthy
for when you stumble up the steps and mumble do.
you can say in the center of every flower is a crackhouse,

but I would disagree.

wife #3 (3)

lagging steps to the front door, and breathing welcomes into your ear
from the slip on your finger.  one third it’s size.  and shrinking down
every monday, tuesday, wednesday, friday, sunday (His day) until
somewhere along the wrinkles in your sheets and the knots in your pillow
(wet from kissing) it cracks off and there’s black there in your pen ink.
two girls have their hands on your thighs and are pressing squares on your belly,
covered eyes
in the discarded hair
you picked out
of your brush
in the noontime
when all you could
hear
was three sets of giggles
and you thought one of them
might be yours.
but there’s always that inch
between her fingers and
yours and her toes and
yours and the only skin
burning is
dinner.  made by you.
every night, with a spoonful
of apathy.

opportunity and staying the same (2)

without faith, and the girls would dance along the edges with singes on their feet,
but the boys would watch,
consuming, every little cell until all that was left
were their clothes in curlicues
and cutouts
of the shapes where they had once filled out the curves of the point sides
below the beach line.  sinking.
the girls with the clothes but no skin are ragged little dolls
with broken nails and cuticles bitten bloody;
the girls with no clothes but the skin have the road underfoot and will travel until
they find a place where sinking doesn’t hold water, and it’s all