Category: Poetry

Apology for the Divine Masculine

“And the ship, the black freighter,

disappears out to sea, and on it is me.”

 

Wetlands become one with the rising gulf

as oil rigs drink the earth’s secret juices

and phallic man-made things do other rapey things

to things to which we have ascribed yonic features

and so forth in a pastiche of sexes assigned

to things that never asked not to be sexless.

Does Mother . . .

A brief history of misery

Among the stones, there was a flower that reached out to me.

Many years ago, I dreamt of the Arabian Nights

When I woke up I found myself laughing

Nothing wrong with the laughter

But we shouldn’t take history seriously when it turned into a big joke.

I sat at the edge of the battle

Dressed like a warrior

I am not a half person anymore

No Matter how my society categorizes . . .

The Watcher on the Wall

Lured by the first snow of winter,

my dead father managed to struggle out

of his grave on the far hill, managed to stagger

down into the walnut grove to meet me

as the heavy flakes fell.

He did not look bad. There

was a grandeur in his features in the half-light of

my torch.

What is it the snow does for the soil, again?

he asked me. Fixes nitrogen, I answered. No, wait

that’s . . .

Tied

try to keep yourself—somehow—

tied: to the earth, perhaps—find joints

and sinews that echo your own in

the tree across the water, discover

home in the shelter of hedges or trace

a life down the edges of the river.

please, remember to stay tied:

maybe in her tender touch,

or in the glance shared—across an

expanse or two meters. above all—

i’ll keep repeating—be tied: . . .

Carcinisation

a comforting thought: that

the arc of the moral universe

is long, but it appears to bend

towards crabs. one day, our

exoskeletons will protect us

from the rain, and from the end;

as the seas rise and fall, we will

find homes in the tide pools, or in

the remnants of buildings left empty

by humans. we will build

a better world, as crabs; they say

crabs can’t feel pain. we’ll . . .

We dreamt once

in unison,

the wind beating the fence

surrounding the giant intaglios, where

you told me there was nowhere to step

anymore, that the whole

desert started miraging as a geoglyph.

 

And what was lost

before by time

or destruction returned

 

in the form of a man etched

on the desert floor,

and you chose

two lucky stones to take home

to remember the black desert— . . .

Snuffing the Night Candles

People talking about the phases of the silvery moon,

the Peter Pan brightness beckoning in the stars—

I haven’t seen a distant sun in months,

and the fairy tales have shimmered away.

No celestial pin pricks in the darkened cyclorama,

no blazes from back in a time before my tiny self

tried to sparkle into existence. I live in

a perfect night, bundled beneath the

suffocation . . .

Onions

“Men argue. Nature acts.”

—Voltaire

 

Palm trees wave their heavy heads,

canna lilies rise brilliant and bloody

in their beds, and the tide floods the streets.

They call it sunny day flooding, because it hasn’t rained

for weeks, and still the water comes.

I haven’t cried in weeks, and still—

 

I hear the polar caps are nearly free

of ice, that the sea will . . .