Accidental Burial at Sea

I lower cased until I CAPSIZED
Adrift and split
Eyes narrowing
It drank me like tea at sunrise
Abyssmal kiss
I stared too long and fell in
And whole!; descending…
The ephemeral throat could gargle me
Salt sterile
We’ll find out which beastly fish are feral
I’m a feast of goo
Scraping the floors of liquid limbo
Sway dancing in my gelatinous ignorance
Dismantling one bite at a time
Just like all my days before
But now,
I’m already gone and don’t care
This is the last meal

Give me coral reef ribs
And lurking crabs in my skull
I give thanks to
The pall-bearing aqua layers
That buried me soft
And the pinhole of light;
My last sight
When I made peace
With the deep

Given Up

That Saturday morning Dad went to rest
forever on his old bed
and that old mattress,
I was in the kitchen
cleaning the waffle iron.
It wasn’t as much a mess
As I was when I learned too late
He’d Gone

The heat of the Tucson sun
blasted through the dining window
scattering to the walls from the chandelier
turning the room into a frightening scene
of fleeing spirits rising
like lava lamp ghosts,
invisibly higher
and I wondered if the sun
could just be a crystal in
a bigger chandelier;
another light source behind it.

I cried in the closet that day
with the Samurai sword, old leather jacket,
boxing glove, and bowling ball.
The grief took me too hard
to realize that I now had to find homes
for all these orphaned possessions,
But not hard enough to realize
I would never find
home for myself again.

I am a paler blue than you are used to

I am a paler blue than you are used to

I am milk from the breast

The blind man’s eye

The morning sky

 

 

I am a paler pink and it’s not like you think

I am the dead man’s skin

The winter cheek

Wheezing life, oblique

 

 

I am twisted spine wrapped in barbed wire and twine

The clink on dinner glass

The old barn in the wind

Weakened, thin

 

I’m a softer gray than I was yesterday

I am the abandoned school’s window

The late autumn fog

The belly-up pollywog

 

 

Trapped beneath ice

I am a horrid last gasp

The precipice teetering boulder

The secret the dying man told her

 

 

I am all that fizzles

The last millimeter of wick

I am the faint sound of haunting

That is actually nothing blowing in the wind

 

 

I am the last straw the cow devours

In a land of famine

Digested four times before

The final feast is never more

 

 

I am the fraying shroud

on the cold slab

the scratching dry quill

the unfinished words of the will

 

 

I am the ruins

behind the undergrowth

I am the ship on the ocean floor

a splinter on death’s door

 

 

I am a palor of green

A mold on the cheese

I am the child that floats

the hanged man’s throat

 

 

I am a gutter of leaves

after four months of rain

I am slime

I block the drain

 

 

I am ash on a bonnet

the clay on work boots

I am the broken ax

the recipient of forty whacks

 

 

I am all that decays

I am all that stops shining

I am all of the hues

of adieu

Our Lives are Unfolding

Our lives are unfolding
Like origami

Creases are undone
We are returning to
Simple paper
With marks that show
We were once beautiful cranes,
Fancy napkins,
Cootie catcher fortune tellers.

In the end, we are all the same.
Squares of paper, blank slates
Mere cloth on laps,
Open maps

After one bad bend, turn, and smooth
There is a groove that beckons all future moves
Actions that make wrinkles,
Our mistakes, lines in our palms
Spelling longevity or brevity.

Our lives are unfolding
Like picnic quilts

Snapped open
And drifted to ground like fall leaf parachutes
We find a simpler time
To be alive
gleaming and gnawing
On rinds and bones
In an open space far from home

In the end, we are all the same;
Patchwork patterns,
Loose stitches
Laced by ancestry,
A beautiful barrier from feeling the earth
And a tool for getting fresh air.

Our lives are unfolding
Like old love letters found in hope chests,

A careful dumping of heart-wrought ink
That eventually fills us with longing or grief
Such simple paper
That echoes in the halls of memory

In the end, it is all the same
We fold back up,
envelope ourselves in long, cedar boxes;
Mere parchment etched with
Sequestered confessions,
Our crow’s feet biographies and laugh lines
Denied light or wistful gaze
Forever tucked away.

Octopussy

I’d swim right down in
to your inky den
and let every writhing tentacle in
nevermind the oxygen

 

It’s time to get literal
The lighthouse lit the littoral
and aquatic path for clittoral
lapping octet limbs so visceral

 

Knots I’ve swam for that naughty, nautical nymph
and sank below the dismal depths

He takes me and each lack of breath 

ravages me with enzymes till nothing’s left

 

It’s getting graphic, oceanographic

preferring the aquatic over plastic

pleasures derived from drastic

measures steeped in superficial tactics

 

So, I want to squirm with serpentine squid

them putting in and pulling out again

squeezing air, not there, and then

assimilating my flesh until I meet my end.