Tag: poetry

Diebmädchen

I saw you across the street today. You dyed your hair red. The lines in your face are so much deeper now. Your determined gait remains unchanged; the same as last I saw you when we were just twenty three years old. I was surprised to see you, but somehow I’ve always seen you. This afternoon it just materialized for those few moments. As I watched you walk away, I tried to think of some catalyzing memory but all I could see was your naked body on the floor of my rented room at Columbia. There wasn’t a bed, not even a mattress. But you were there and you were mine. And later on those nights, the descending sun and cool breeze coming down on the Hudson would have us retreat under the wool hitchhiking blanket that we bought from the Indians in Arizona. And you whispered sweet lies to me. And I believed them. Because I thought it would never end.

Tell Me Ness

Do you know who I am?
Because I’ve been dying to know.
Sometimes our place in paper.
Sometimes our place in sound.
Tell me all your broken secrets.
Tell me broken haste to know.
Tell me your regrets tomorrow.
Now distills the never known.

Sand Between My Toes

All of my reprise and expectation
Tangled in my lies of omission
Brandished in my curt confession
Sounding broken chords to hear
Your requite
Your reciprocation.
Hoping
Your face
Your voice
Your elegance
This persistence.

Distance

Today’s light fades and counts its debts away.
The cars and shadows between our velocities.
Mine blurs in tunnel, yours blurs in overpass.
Stop this time to listen.
To the friction in our momentum.
To the spaces between our places.
You hear it’s here.
Where it never ended.

Angelica Turn Me Off

That mistaken night I fell asleep in your drunken arms.
Your sleepy soft embrace burned into my body’s memory.
As though my starless soul had never lived before.
That night I knew I loved you.

I scandalized your name to my friends, strangers in bars.
I wrote your name on bathroom walls and alley ways.
With black markers and neon spraypaint, I defiled.
I told anyone that would listen what a filthy slut you are.

Midnight stolen car through the storefront where you work.
I broke into matriarch’s penthouse through the skylight.
So I could sit on her plush couch in peace, looking through her glass walls.
And dream over the city of that fragmented night with you.

I climbed the city looking for your embrace or your revile.
Scoffing all the lifeless fools and empty hearts that desist me.
Shattered outside the streets and broke the windows of your family’s home.
I vandalized your name while constant whispered in my heart.

Abhorrent in your starlit eyes.
And I don’t know how to stop.

Wendell Phillip

Pitch beneath your fist and fork
Toil of fields was my dark refuge allowed
Where I grew strong and calloused
That boy’s dumb just like his momma
I heard you say at the feedstock.

I would wait and work
Your grain in scythe and sickle
White knuckle snath and bound tongue wrath
Keep my eyes down flights inside
Until the days that you fell ill.

I found you in your room
When momma left for town
Bled you out like a river of snakes
Your throat babble a gurgled whimper
Like when Kelly caught in the combine.

Now the fear is in your water eyes
I stroke your cheek with crimson oil
My gentle way you tried to damn
I wish I never become like you
But I finally become your son.