Forget Your People

All your robes are fragrant with myrrh and aloes and cassia;
from palaces adorned with ivory
the music of the strings makes you glad.
Daughters of kings are among your honored women;
at your right hand is the royal bride in gold of Ophir.

Listen, O daughter, consider and give ear:
Forget your people and your father's house.
The king is enthralled by your beauty;
honor him, for he is your lord.
The Daughter of Tyre will come with a gift,
men of wealth will seek your favor.

All glorious is the princess within her chamber;
her gown is interwoven with gold.
In embroidered garments she is led to the king;
her virgin companions follow her and are brought to you.
They are led in with joy and gladness;
they enter the palace of the king.

Your sons will take the place of your fathers;
you will make them princes throughout the land.
I will perpetuate your memory through all generations;
therefore the nations will praise you for ever and ever.
Psalm 45.8-17

Depression Soup

Start with a pot that has a hole in the bottom
Throw it on an erratic flame
Controlled by the fickle fates.
Build your base with ample tears
Add salt to taste.
If you spill the salt,
Better to rub it into your wounds
Than to throw it over your shoulder;
Luck is no lady tonight.
Chop up your hopes and dreams
Toss them in the air and pray
They find their way.
Open the door to your heart
And take a long, cruel stare at what remains:
The selfish savor of old pain,
Sweet kisses gone dry on your cheek,
Bone-in memory with dulled fatty forgetfulness,
Dumplings of broken promises your mother made for you
Abandoned peels of overripe resentment your father left.
In a depressions soup, it all goes in the pot.
The flavor is of your own making, no matter who you blame.
It will never sustain you
Or feed those you love.
But still, you must drink it.
If it starts to get dry, just cry.

Becoming

I finger your soul
Until you come to your self.
Sex is always better with a mirror.

why not

fuck it
fuck the cock tease
fuck good intentions
fuck a well meaning stab in the back
fuck expectation and dissappointment
fuck looking and not seeing
fuck hurting the ones closest to you
fuck using a day
fuck wasting a day
fuck the game
fuck waiting for others to change
fuck waiting for my life to change
like some two minute montage
where the fat girl gets skinny
the sad girl gets a job
and the angry girl finds her heart
fuck repression
fuck self-pity
fuck you pain
fuck death
fuck fear of the dark
fuck inspiration

Burn

Flames never fail to entrance me
erratic unpredictable dangerous
I find my head lilting and swerving
in a hypnotic dance with an elemental form,
it beckons you and me:
I dare you to touch it.
I can hold my hand over the lighter longer.
A whispering chilly breath
pulls swiftly through my teeth
cooling the heat in my throat
as my jaw tightens in ecstatic pain.
But we shouldn't.
And so we hover as close as our flesh will allow
sad hidden repressed longing
in a beautiful neglected emerging frame.
I wipe my hands along my hips to dry them again.

We offer reassurances:
I won't let you hurt yourself
well, nothing permanent anyway.
We all have our burns,
the minor ones never scar
and though the major ones do
they come with magnificent stories,
stories around the fire
epic tellings of those who choose to prove life
by risking its very soul
to feel alive amidst all this death.

To say: you cannot yet burn me
in your two dollar coffin until only mingled ashes remain
and bone remnants yet to be pulverized.
You do not ask me if I carry batteries
heart monitors beneath my sunken flesh for fear
that the grey waste will not return to the surviving
inside its plastic bag with a twist tie
inside its minimal black plastic box
inside the allotted five to ten business days.

Death is not like it is in the movies, they say.
Nor love.
That doesn't keep us from craving a ritual:
a physical representation of what the fuck we're supposed to do
when we lose what we love
and can't taste what we crave.

Where is my resurrection?
Fill my well with living water
for I have dug and dug deep,
let me feel that cool sweet wine
flowing down, down in through the aqueducts of my imagining.
I want to burn and be quenched.

Lucidity

Lucid dreams high on goodbye
And what comes next.
What comes next?
More grey hazy mornings alone
In the possibility of the day,
Evergreens refolding their inception
Until the looming inevitable at last
Collapses into a crushing shelter
Wounding the begrudging sparrow?

Feed me with ravens and keep the lions
From the mouth of the cave of forgetting.
Pour your seed into my mouth
Belittle me with your grandeur
And call me your own;
Else each new pleasure tempting me away
From each expanding sorrow
Will find its way into my morning dreams
As I watch him silently open and close the door.

Finishing

When time and will and inspiration align
Work becomes play,
But such a union rarely arises
And so work becomes fear,
Overwhelming and imperfect;
I am left waiting.
With idle hands and toxic adrenaline.
If, however, as I wait I fill the work
That has fallen out of time
Beyond my reach
With all the hopes of my inspiration,
Perhaps hope will beckon my will
And I will play in the sun once more.