Mermaid

Her soul was salt, her eyes
lit from deep within.
Her hair curled like shells,
stars crusted her ears.

One night the city boy drank
his fill of life, he was hungry
he was swollen with pain,
the ocean would heal him the ocean
would fill him.

He drove to Venice Beach
and ran beyond the sugar
lights of the boardwalk,
the black silk water
welcomed him.

She saw him from below,
a silhouette of boyish
desperation, saw his hunger
like an open wound.

Smooth skin on the wet sand,
her hair on his face,
salt drips in his mouth, she
left him gasping for more, and yet
satisfied.

Astronaut School

He got a scholarship to astronaut school
and learned to cloak himself in stars,
to wear the clear darkness of eternity.
He learned to fall into nothingness,
to unexist, to roll
in the waters of time
like a spinning planet,
to sleep with the stars.
His girlfriend wondered vaguely
during a Tuesday evening phone
conversation what was so dissatisfying
about rolling hills of corn,
sugary city lights,
and macaroni sticking to the pot
that he needed so desperately
to lose himself in deep darkness.
She wondered if maybe it was really
all about dying.
Why bother with bottled oxygen
and fishbowl faces?
There is no need to eat
freeze-dried ice cream.
If you want nothingness,
she told him mentally,
if what you are searching for
is a cosmos of dark clarity,
do not seek it within
the fiery machinery of a spaceship.
you will never find it there.

It Takes Two to Tango

so she tried foxtrot
bellydancing too, though it
wasn't quite her style.


(haikus galore!)

Cinderella

1.
She thought of herself as clay,
the neon colored kind you mould
into something exciting and carefully
wrap into plastic so that it stays soft.
He could mould her into whatever neon shape he chose,
she was malleable, she was putty in his hands.
She smiled every day at the colors
he mixed, the shapes he made.
Her happiness was tangible like powdered sugar,
light on the surface of tarts, breakfast delicacies
Soft and sweet and always there.
He gave her roses, she gave him kisses as the
sun set softly over the parking lot.

2.
He called her from a golf course in Florida,
she sat on her bed and looked out the window at rain.
The rotting leafy world seemed to
echo with things fallen, things lost.
She wondered where all the leaves had gone,
when everything had become so grey and moldy.
He said that he missed her, and she wondered
what it was that he missed.
He had become the voice in her head, she
collected stories to tell him, she
predicted his reactions to her everyday ups and downs,
the screaming child in the grocery store, the comment
her mother made while cooking.

3.
Try on as many Cinderella shoes as you want,
he told her,
there will be no fit,
no happiness in the ending.
After he left she sat alone at the table;
red linen cloth, white candle in a glass bowl.
The jazz singer crooned,
making love with the piano music.
Smoke rose lazily in the air over the bar,
slow thick spirals in the yellow candlelight.
She dropped sugar packets
one by one into the flame
and watched them burn.

On Death

Along the path Red Riding Hood stopped to see
crimson on her hands, congealed blood.
She must have fallen somewhere along the way,
daydreaming, careless.

At the door of the cookie scented cottage her grandmother smiled gratefully
and welcomed Him in.

the old black beamer

Sticking to the cracked beige leather seats,
faded like a desert landscape in the backseat of my
father’s old black BMW.
I remember the music,
Talking Heads and the Beatles,
his speakers buzzed and snapped like angry hornets.
I never told him that I had spilled
my cranberry juice into them one afternoon,
sticky redness slipping deep into the sound.
He taught us songs from “My Fair Lady”
and “the Sound of Music”
patiently, line by line,
a chorus of three, my little brother
next to me. We sang Christmas carols
too, loudly and off tune as soon
as the cold began to chew on our noses,
our exposed fingers and delicate ears.
His faded turquoise tennis bag lay
at my feet, canisters of neon balls
like exotic candies, fascinating.
When he drove to pick us up from preschool
we hid from the car,
shrieking with delight when he was
consistently unable to find us.
One afternoon I ran too far, I could hear
his anger, the roar of the engine.
Walking home that day, I watched
the Beamer reduced to dust ahead of me.

Blue Nude (Picasso)

what do you see with your newly mixed paints,
blue like hurricane waters,
touches of white and yellow?
in her back lines of pain, solid,
you carve them from sight,
but you cannot capture her fear.
you cannot get the tremble, the
twitching muscle in her shoulder.
you lay down the curve of her leg, protective,
folded arms concealing what?
pale yellow kisses her shoulder blades,
runs lightly down her back.
she turns from you, your
layers of oily pigment, attempting to
capture her, to keep her here with you in the paint,
when- can you not see?- all she wants
is to run away from
everything she knows.

Fisherman (haiku, woo!)

he caught the sunrise
in his net one morning, all
it took was patience.

Fairy Godmother

the story you live, narrated-
a pixie poet in the dark.

Because You've Never Been Fond of Gingerbread

For you a house of glass
trimmed with ribbon candy,
sand and sugar alike-
translucent sheets under my blowtorch.
For you an empty house,
filled with light and nothing more,
a safe space, a homeland
brittle and sweet.
But be careful no one knocks
at your door,
for (however small her fists may be)
the shards are sharp.
It would be quite a mess.

Cinderella

After he left she sat alone at the table,
red linen cloth, white candle in a glass bowl.
The jazz singer crooned,
making love with the piano music.
Smoke rose lazily in the air over the bar,
slow thick spirals in the yellow candlelight.
She dropped sugar packets
one by one into the flame
and watched them burn.

12:16 am

This is my late night poem,
written after the dusky pink clouds have faded,
after the half-drunk boy has stopped calling,
after the parents are asleep,
after sense and nonsense are separate entities.
In the haze of a summer night come
epiphanies,
one after another like
jumping fish or
headlights that crash by your eyes.
In the leftover heat of the pavement and
the wet grass and the
twisted sheets
the meaning of life is discovered.
Love is clear and simple,
ripples on the black water,
animal rustlings in the night,
mascara on the pillow.

paper

Sometimes
she thinks about the paper dolls she used to play with.
Even then they were old fashioned,
she bought them from bizarre stores full of dust and
necklaces of shells and wooden beads
and painstakingly cut
trench coats and
headscarves and
trendy heels
out of shiny paper
and dressed the dolls.
Once all was cut and dressed, there was always
a moment of loss. What more was there to do?
Redress? Rearrange?
Though she had a wild imagination
the paper dolls never were animated,
merely surrogates,
a shiny colored world of time worn glamour,
paper hearts, paper eyes that do not tear.
Paper smiles that do not fade, paper ears that never
ever have to hear.

Resolution

I am going to
write a poem every morning.
This is my morning poem, written at two
in the afternoon.
The dust of time coats my throat.
My life is reduced to knickknacks, doodads,
useless bits that fill empty cardboard boxes
from the liquor store.
My mother sits broken and teary in the livingroom,
I am helpless.
Disorientation, reorientation,
life in boxes, life in dust, life in mold growing under the bed.
Resolution: I will redefine, I will make it
worth more than the sum of the parts,
the broken necklaces and old PEZ dispensers,
used lightbulbs and empty pens, decks of cards missing
the king of hearts.
Not that he is worth finding anyways,
he always seemed to win the game and leave me
lost.

PMS

Flopped in my flimsy black
computer chair, spinning in slow circles.
Tears close to the surface, dashed hopes.
All I wanted was some mint chocolate chip
ice cream. That’s all I wanted.
Damn you for eating it all.
Damn you.

on why i love treadmills

Its something about
running without actually running.
It seems all so effortless, and yet forced. There is no
slow down option,
I watch the numbers grow in front of me and feel
Victorious.
The black band forces me onward,
techno nothingness runs on in my ears,
and the time slips with my sneakers on the
endless forward whirr of blackness.
Something about
running forever, a sort of dancing in my brain,
Something about
the sweat running down my back.
A constancy, a rhythm I cannot find by myself.
A dance, a race against the machine
which is my driving force- artificial because I have none of my own.
It’s something like
proving myself, a competitive urge, I am saying “Hah!” in the face
of something invisible that did not believe I could make it
another mile.
Something like a race with reality:
sometimes my destination
and sometimes my opponent.

This Familiar Sense of Nonsense

It’s kind of like how
when I was little I could fall asleep to my
mother banging around in the kitchen,
making dinner for my father when he got home.
Not a lullaby, but a sort of lulling, crashing noise.
This nonsense, an aching sort of clattering in my brain,
meaningless meaning, alphabet soup,
scattered possibilities. I know that if I tried
I could make words out of it all, but why bother?
You’d just eat it anyways.
Familiar in an eerie, déjà vu kindof way,
the sense that there was at some point sense,
but now there is only non, nonsense, non-meaning,
non- importance, non-words.
You’re talking, but all I hear is blah blah blah.
Its so familiar it puts me to sleep, in my dreams
I solve the world’s problems all while feeding you
alphabet soup, the words seem to spell themselves
into your mouth without any effort.

a passing thought by the train tracks

These days that roll on,
an express train from D.C. to Boston
passing through late on a hot June night.
Seemingly endless-
but when it ends, oh how quickly we forget.

Entropy (the better chemistry poem)

Entropy: a measure of disorder in a system

Tropical starburst, seltzer water.
Headlights in the darkness,
tears that turn your eyesight into bursts of color.
Dried flowers, ancient paper crown.
Duct tape, thumping base.
Screams released into the depths of a pillow,
hairspray, milk left out on the counter.
Books scattered, an attempt at
productivity.
Sunburned lips, salty tongue,
acoustic guitar, sleeping girl with running mascara.
Je ne veux pas travailler.
Her parents are hippies, they collect
egg shells and banana peels to recycle-
over the year they will become soft dark earth.
The banana peels, not her parents.
A crown of dandelions, a third grade skill never forgotten.
Lists written of things to do, places to go
people to call and to see.
Lost somewhere in the wild cartwheel of it all,
the memory of what it was she came here to do.
She is a loosely bound molecule,
her electrons bounce between energy levels.
Her potential is minimal,
her disorder immeasurable.

This is how it works.

This is how it works
You try until you don’t
You work until you won’t
You dream and dream and dream
You walk into yourself
Until the day you know
There is no more to know
That this is all you need,
The past will always bleed
The cage will always close
Its up to you to sit
Or force It all to grow


(inspired by lyrics from a Regina Spektor song)

Equilibrium Systems

Entropy: a measurement of disorder,
the degree to which I am held together,
loosely bound, zooming particles.
A measurement for everything,
even love and darkness,
the kinds of things you carry deep inside.
I daydream of equilibrium systems,
the double arrows implying balance, stasis.
Le Chatelier came up with the idea
of these systems adjusting-
no matter what you do to them
they return eventually to equilibrium.
Their flexibility blows my mind,
like a navy brat who moves to a
new town every year, always changing,
always returning to equilibrium, stability.
My system is imbalanced,
headlights in the dark, tears that scatter your
sight into starbursts of color.
I have no stasis, no equilibrium to return to.
My disorder is immeasurable.

Don't Think Twice, It's Alright.

So long honeybabe,
where i'm bound, i can't tell.
But goodbye's too good a word, babe
so i'll just say fare thee well.
I ain't saying you treated me unkind
you could've done better but i don't mind
you just kinda wasted my precious time
but don't think twice, its all right.

-bob dylan