Thursday, July 28, 2011

strangled in ritual

strangled in ritual



 incessant hungry obsessions
pregnant with chaos

   labor through my brain            sweetly disinclined to surrender
                 to your old midwives’ tales heard
                                                                       
  again

     and                                       and
                                                                          
    of

                                             again                           again

                                                              and

   the black sheep’s scapegoat
               perpetual compulsions
   fertile with imperfection
 giving birth to

 hide hands

                                            and                                 feel fabric
                       
                       
again                          safe skin
                                                           
      safe

Sunday, July 24, 2011

untitled (a.k.a. this girl)


This girl
who stands before you
with just as many fears
as she has holes in her jeans
hates what you have made her.
Lost in a crowd of catastrophic connotations,
other faces see her as nothing
more than a shallow, self-absorbed
20-something who prefers drinking
to dreaming.
Every day, she finds ways
to slit the wrists of stereotypes
so that tomorrow
other 5-foot-tall blondes
can feel beautiful,
unmolested by the media
that force-feeds fakeness
into the mouths of unloved youths
who’d rather be robots
than revolutionaries.
Caught in the death throes
of another
deadbeat town, she
longs to leave
a literary legacy to usurp
the archaic ideologies
that breed anger and apathy
into the genetics of
future generations.

She is the hope families
brought across oceans
when all they wanted
was peace and possibility
before the fear became
making less than 90K
in a year. And one day,
this girl who stands before you
with just as many fears
as she has holes in her jeans
will show you that
pens are still
mighty.

Monday, July 11, 2011

no more idyllic daughter

Inspired by Lorine Niedecker's My life by Water.

no more idyllic daughter

my life
   in words
      see

girl’s
   first failure
      or fulfillment

on her own
   alone
      thriving

mother
   smothering
      bitter

no more
   idyllic daughter
      Woman

walks
   away
      child

hood
   forgiven
      future

simple
   serene
      shiny

her own
   and wonderful
      life