Folly and a chase after the wind

Shouting voices,
heckling laughter
peeling and clinking like pieces of metal.
My mind is full of breezing thoughts
and scents of poppies
and petals
stuck to my hot steering wheel
fried calously by the sun,
discolored, dehydrated
as wine seeping through
my fiberous body.
I am a song,
echhoing,
soundlessly,
winding in knots that
choke me dry--
beating cadences into the air
that stack as skeletal structures
sending me into the air--
high like popping petals...
I want to drink your lips for eloqence and transform into a princess.
I need to drink
--instead--
the challace--
blood-red wine to ink away
baligerance,
my humming interest,
and lull me safe to sleep.

Hope.

Hope may be a thing with wings,
but it is also a rusty dodge intrepid
that starts again
despite its empty tank.

Blowing a Kiss

It has been a while since I've written, and yet, it feels the same. Much like a worn glove remembers the contours of your hand and the ridges of your bones. I drove home from Grand Rapids tonight around midnight, and though it's been a stretch of two years since I was a commuter student, my body remembered the stretch of road with its every blinking light and curve. The night air felt soft on my face with the windows rolled down and the radio off. I like to drive in silence in the dark and to feel the glide of the tires over smooth pavement. The road home fit my senses like a glove, enveloping my hypnotized memory in nostalgia for the incipience of college, causing me to stretch my heart strings across the random spectrum of my Aquinas years. Ah, my youth! How it flits into the past...into the future...Let us--like Chekhov--dream of what life will be like in 200--300 years from now! I hope the night air is still soft and dreams, still fickle.

Democratic Republic of the Congo: regarding current events

Say Goodbye

Fingers touching
ringing
tasting of salt-sweat
and dust.
Fingers touch
and feel
this life is real;
this is the world.

A human chain
across the earth
extending beyond flesh--
the dirt on my feet--
that carries me over
deserts.
Walking on fire.
Walking over grassy fields
exposed
as massive graves.

Children lie below me
beautiful, black, babies,
innocent and trusting
reach to me with severed
limbs
buried under shallow dust--
shadows of rust--
like etches of eyes and faces
different races
racing to secure
something more
(machetes and gore).

I am helpless
beaten to the floor.
They step on my back
pull my arms
and bind me with
wire,
cutting like fire.
I
feel
wounded.


Words

These are some words
for the weeping fathers
and mothers
whose hearts have been
pierced.
Flesh of flesh
and blood of blood,
taken by harmful hands:
thirsty,
greedy,
blinded by scales,
blinded by rage,
blinded by affliction--
chemical and human.

These are some words
for those who
call on gravity
to pull their children
back from the grave of
captivity,
who cry to God to
make their daughters safe
from rape
and bitter beatings,
who cry to God to
keep their sons free
from mental manipulation
their eyes from devastation.

These are some words
for all who say
in the dead of night
"come home"
--through tears and
tortured dreams--
"come home"
--as morning pours
like streaming drops--
"come home"
as years choke by
like heaving sobs.

These are some words.


Stain

They say it's
magic oil
that they
slick into my skin:
across my heart
--to stop from feeling,
across my forehead
--to stop from thinking,
across my back
--to stop from resisting,
across my feet
--to stop from running.
Magic oil,
they say,
will make me forget
my family,
embrace abuse,
turn away and
kill or be killed.
This magic oil
will sooth me
into this life,
anoint me from the weakness of my
child's stomach.
This magic oil
didn't
work.
Because I wiped it straight off.

Riddle: What's my name and phone number?

Raindrops flitting from the cloud splotched sky
air
chilly breath from the earth
hundreds of icicles clinging
anticipating gravity's fall
everywhere still--
light lingers thoughtessly.

Pine needles break like tinkering glass
ice
nector of the season
enter into Demeter's bliss
inch the sun's rays, tilt the earth's axis
rake the earth clean
of everything frozen.

Celine Dion Irrationally Enrages Me

Drops on the window
Ice fills the
cracks of the sidewalk
the cracks in my hands.
The mud is soft
but cold.

I wear the mud
on my clothes
across my face
in my mouth.

I am a princess.
Disheveled--
Chagrined--
to the bone.

The worth of words
seduces and eludes me.
If alphbets tasted like crackers,
I'd eat them.
Up.
I'd eat them up.

An Excess of Voice and Ghost of a Flea

Something my professor said today kind of made me sad.

He described our society as the inverse of William Blake's society in pre-romantic England. Nobody expressed their creativity. Imagination was not a prized function of society--in fact, imagination often got people locked up. Had more people actually read Blake during his life, he most certainly would have been locked up--if not beheaded. (Blake would often stop whatever he was doing and gaze into nothingness, saying he was observing something--like the ghost of a flea--and then he'd quickly sketch it on his cuffed sleeve. See http://www.phespirit.info/pictures/patchwork/p008.htm for this sketch)

In our society, my professor pointed out, everyone expresses themselves. Everyone pours out their hearts in a blog and nobody cares. There is an excess of voice.

You might see why this troubled me.