I miss my Claire :(

I counted the days until your vacation
for two months, like little capsules in a jar.
I held my breath and waited
and tried not to scare or scold.
Then the day arrived.
Your daddy knocked on our door.
I handed you over like a loaf of bread
with your bags and told you to "be good."
You, my blonde bubble,
my life's precarious gift.

I never exhaled.
Suddenly, your bed is vacant.
I walk slowly.
Like a ghost, I drift.
Lost without your squeaky demands,
searching for my beating heart,
I count the days like capsules in a jar.

suicide poem

Beware of these images.
In death, there is nothing tender.
Last night, as I dreamt of dying,
waves came in bearing photographs.
An army of stone statues;
they bind themselves with electrical cord,
looped and knotted in a suffocating chaos;

they are cut in half with a bandsaw,
two halves rolling this way and that;

they turn themselves inside out,
their guts coiling out like caviar,
settling in a neat bundle beside them.

They are the faces of hate.
The devil looks down on their severed heads, smiling,
their mouths contorted in an eternal last laugh.
Their eyes roll back like two glass marbles,
their faces a jumbled puzzle,
bloated and the color of ash,
in their eternal state,
still angry and pathetic.

Internet Pr0n

These images stick to me like hooks.
These pictures, movies, all emphatically unethical,
devoid of all artistic aspirations.

A hundred nameless faces
a million and one variations
undress for a race of ravenous men
who spend their midnights dreary,
on the prowl for naked skin
gravitating to their computers
alone
or in the office
or at home with their wives and children
in the other room, asleep with their heads slightly bent,
their innocent mouths, unquestioning,
as their husbands and fathers spend their time
typing out the letters:
A-M-A-T-E-U-R

Searching for "reality"
within the parameters of tripods
and vertical shots and cum shots
and angles and directions;

thighs breasts mouths nipples--
these cartoonish depictions projecting
as the hairless majority are thrown
from their domains into a fiery bottomless pit,
injecting their pseudo realities like an infection.

For my same-named scorpion friend.

Two Scorpion sisters:
kindred spirits--
like clasping a lost hand in the woods--
words
that worm through
flickering screens:
What potential lies within these dreams?
Our secrets, exchanging and devouring sameness
like candy. Sweet, poetic mouthfuls--
the wind in our hair!
In the sky, in the air!
The pouring out of our very souls.
Dead. Sexy. Escaping ghosts.
Beauty and filth both rise through the steam
over coffee as black as our matching clothes.

We give power to those that we elect as cause for the conditions we find in life.

You remind me of my father,
the way you punch holes with your words
in the delicate lining of my heart.
Now I cry out, the same helpless child:
Thief!
Someone stop that man.
He stole my power
and is running away
wearing that malicious grin.

But there are no heroes here,
only this crowd of regular people.
"Sweetheart," they turn and say.
"He has your power
because you gave it away."

Some Thoughts on My Own Writing

Born out of oppression
is a kind of poetic confession
that I cannot recreate
but resonates in my head.
My suicide idol, beautifully depressed,
my attempts pale and my words fail to impress.
Still...
I am slave to these thoughts,
annoyingly chained to my ordinary pen.
Every now and then
a tiny miracle bleeds through the ink.
But mainly I'm just scribbling out useless
and angst-ridden poems--
the kind born out of teenaged girls
who pass notes in the hall.

The Irony of Mothers and Daughters

My mother left me young,
in the dark. In not
much of a nest, my
child-heart searching to get back
to her forgetting arms.
My mother was the hollow-huntress,
starving for a love no child can give.
She took from me what she longed for.
Stole it back--
during the million nights of cold and black
that were my childhood--
her own girlish needs in mind,
not mine.
For years her "Poor Me" shrine
kept my wolves away.