Unfolding

Time unfolding, holds

emblems, signatures

as hair caught in

boar brush

smells still of her

the nape of her long neck

bearing sound

tugging through until end

before light has pushed itself

past dim cloud line

warming her hands a little

just enough

just enough.

Where she was

there are now white washed walls

clean and no longer redolent

of those hours, those years spent

would they know if they touched?

The plaster, holding some memory

or reverberating solace

how her wrists looked

playing piano in silent day

with open windows to bird call

hushed by her haunt.

Would they know, if turning

in sleep they saw through half opened eyes

a murmur of her, crossing the room

one black pearl resting against

her warm throbbing neck

how much of us remains

when we are gone? How to

evoke, conjur, return to

remain, stay just one moment more

by her side before

vanishing and eddying across

cold river with the sound only

of onyx oars spent into depths

her hair trailing, thick mist

veiling before long lost

only the sound occasional

a splash or dip into darkness

and then the ache sets in

like a hole unable to be covered up

or crime undone

everywhere she was

now absent in terrible

emptiness, we keen to recall

in desperate hour, when moon

is hidden behind glowering cloud

she walks the earth and is no longer

traces of ourselves built into effigies

I reach and I reach out and still

she is always further

the smell of her in my mouth and nose

the taste of her against my

broken arms

feeling like she were whole

even as she is ether and starlight

I sense her against me in gloaming dusk

moving with agitation, mocking life

forcing a cry

beseeching time and tall trees

hidden faces in darkness

their green heights impossible

as her return

she is gone and still

the clock ticks

orange cat whiskering through high grass

outside, watching with yellow

eyes, birds overhead, out of

reach

out of reach.

Within me a glassed place of a place

cast in silver, in bronze, in clay

the shape of her

a flute, a goblet carrying fresh

spring water as benediction on

hot day, her voice stroking me

from the marbled abyss

she cannot stay, I pull on the

scarlet thread it comes loose

and unraveling her skirts, her

soft blouses, the perk of her breasts

against my mouth, urging, reddening

nipples swallowed by cries

our hands interlinked

blankets and sheets disarrayed

by motion, moisture, light and dark

her candle throat thrown back

devouring a sanctuary of

secrets and thirst

she opens for me again and again

my fingers breathing her need

we are leaves fallen from trees

made into earth and grown

against the cherry tree staining

our lips sweet and bitter

for love is found in mercy

and grace, her sinew and

hunger, baptizing memory

I hold her locket with a slice

of her dark hair growing old

in want, a touch no more

as if she never painted these

walls or grew round cheeked

beneath me, her laughter

caressing the corners with

silver, we sleep our hands

linked beneath thick covers to

keep out Winter and by

Spring I am watching

crocus urge upward

through northern dark

soil, their fragile mouths

opening to sun as once

she took me into her

one by one

til all of me

was found

and

now

without her weight

against me, shy

smile coming from

beneath long dresses unbuttoned

shining hair, falling on

wrinkled sheets

the smell of her still in

my center a thorn

as I stand by the

window its metal latch

open and cold

to my

skin.

The fight beneath

if the act is on, full wattage

everyone sees a together girl, straight backed by taut strings

oh the puppet master pulls

them tightly in compensation for internal sag

they see a girl who has checked all the boxes;

education, polish, spit and shine, big smile, combed hair, thighs together

they see what they want to see

just as we read the truth and speak a lie

who wants to know the inside? The fight beneath?

Maybe at 18. When we still have patience, and time, and youth and romance

thinking it lovely to talk of emotions and breakage and pain

the beauty of those things when safe from death

edging closer, every year, less tolerance

until even your therapist has a break-down and can’t listen anymore

Covid 19 keep your distance? Aren’t we already alienated and disregarded?

She wants someone to listen, she wants someone, she wants to stop

this hole within her from growing out of control and taking her over

she wants to speak her truth to someone who gives a damn

it’s almost like wishing to have perky tits again and a hymen

it’s almost like hoping at the dinner table for love instead of silence.

She used to fake it really well, used to know all the ways of getting clean and squeaky

People are kind to children and pretty youth

Unkind to those who are mentally ill and grow old in their despair

old before your time, before you stopped wanting to be wooed and still wanting to wear

tight clothes and push up bras, just because you can.

Now she understands why middle aged women read romance novels

or hate and never do

the combat of wanting to be desired and knowing it’s not going to

ever again, they only like those little girls in tiny clothes

whose bodies are barely formed

are you bitter? Are you scorned? The world belongs to men

because they stop loving at a certain age and women

hate each other especially the peachy ones, who remind them of

what they’ll never get back.

The fight beneath, the bitchy office manager who used to tut beneath her breath

every time she walked past in her best blue heals

she had a good heart then and it hurt to be treated so

now she knows the meaning of

the loss in their eyes

but she still wants to be desired

is she going to turn into one of those sad ole gals who keeps wearing too tight jeans

hanging out at less and less popular places in hope?

Or will her heart shrivel and dry like a match burning its sulfur

hardly holds its original form

just the dark wood left, stained by flame

never to be struck

again.

She would like to think someone would

love her at any time, for more than whether she has loosening skin or

sagging bits, she has heard this is something men point out unkindly in bed

she’d probably sock them if they did, and bite something off

who the fuck has the right?

It fills her with a fresh hell to imagine

how they think they’re entitled

but her young self will remind her; it’s we who let this happen

dear wolf

we lay ourselves down when they tell us we’re not worthy

and we either let ourselves vanish

or we stop believing we can be

desired for more than the price of our skin

imagine us hanging like pieces of meat

dear wolf

waiting for the flies to obviate our claim

to be equal or good enough

whilst they, rotund, graying, flacid

rule the world or pretend to

we give life, we carry the future

are we going to let this be or

become wild, something untamed and furious

with the thirst of a girl wanting to give her entire heart

and throw it into the furnace

watch it burn with all that you want

this love, this need, this impossible desire

even as your body dries and says; I am done

you’re never done, you bring life, you bring longing

within you is a timeless heart.

She wants you to know

she may seem withered to you or not

as once she was, but she needs as much as ever

that desire, so much so she may climb out of

of her falling skin and become

a butterfly in reverse, going underground

where in darkness nobody can tell

then it’s all about the beat of life

that eternal drum

and anyone can play

as long as they join

beating their need against stretched leather

in the ancient way before we invented

exclusion and condemnation

when those wisest and most sought

were not children

but their bright eyed elders

still with the pulse

of hunger inside them.

 

Mahogany

The train to my heart is very slow

Stopping at many stations

On the crowded platform a young girl watches her mother go

She never turns around, the mahogany of her hair becoming indistinguishable against fading day

A girl who since loses sight

Listening rather than seeing

Smelling the impression of movement

Folded like a Spanish rose on my chest, I breathe you in

How you form words with your quick violinist arms

Taut tense musculature, willing air demons

Those same arms clutching me to you, heart beating, no words

It rained that day all day from morning to night

“That never happens here” you said, mouth full of plum

“The desert doesn’t like to give up its ghosts. Come here to me, come back to bed”

And I

In my shedding evening dress, trailing thought

Confessed my sum;

The train to my heart is very slow

Stopping at many stations

None to embark

Stay the course

In our chalked circle

Tracing abbreviated land with invisible hands

Till cactus give wild her bloom and color reborn

Your eyes in darkness, catching light, like wine beneath glass

Foliage

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Ever notice?

It means nothing to them?

those girls with peaches and cream, café au lait, peau de couleur foncée

their lush hair, plump calves, rosy cheeks

kiss us like they mean it with open mouth, little inquiring tongue

force of two coming together, chests heaving in sync

who knew straight girls could give so much in the heat of a moment?

unhooking bras, peeling underwear, knowing they’ll be kissed where

their boyfriends press with lack of ardor

for we girls are midnight foxes, we stay in places others only visit

fleetingly

complaining of neck pain, jaw pain, inability to know the ins and outs

oh we know the ins and outs, we know the inside curl and the convex

like a well drawn map

they pull their panties down for us so eagerly, we’d be fooled into thinking

they were of our same kind

save the removal of warmth, after all is reached and swept

beneath damp sheets for memory to play. Saying;

Goodbye, Bon Nuit. I must go now, it’s getting late, he will wonder why

I’m not at home with dry underwear

perhaps even opening herself to him, that very evening to atone

for her strung up, hidden outside pleasure

such is the girl who cannot love other girls and yet

finds only release in what they might know and give

surely one of the same mold knows, the key a little better

willing then, to bend and contort, stay for an hour in one position

without complaint

her breasts making dents of thin cotton, her fists curling like words out loud

the nape of her neck, slick and wet with her urge

she doesn’t reciprocate, her kind never will

she’s the impossible beauty, a girl who loves girls seeks

unattainable, disinterested, sinking to the floor in shame at

the concept of trading places

she’ll give you the time it takes to make her cry out

leave an imprint of her body against your mattress

the ink and glow of her skin a permanent reminder

she’ll never be one of you, nor wish

to lend you her heart

only her glorious body and all its angular expressions

only those afternoon moments

when he hasn’t pleased her or she

longs for your brand of deep caress, how you know

what to do to make her moan

fingers against fingers, thighs, hips, buttock

she is every shape of lovely from her arching neck

to the indent in her pelvis where she lets you stray

and play such secret music

things never to be admitted or spoken aloud

when you meet in public you are two women

buttoned up and indifferent like bleached wood

betraying nothing of her torn blouse or

the slide of her stockings from willing legs opening

how she pushes against you to enter her

fill with longing the bursting pulse within

you want to tell her you have loved her since

first meeting

when rain brought her to the library and shyly

you asked if she needed a towel and she replied

no I like to get wet, it never rains enough

her eyes grey and huge, like lamps in darkness

you think of teasing her hair from perpetual dampness

on her thin arms and how flung back they resemble

an instrument to be ravished

how you curl around her with your ardor and pressing

deeply fulfill your own needs against her loveliness

not shared, without return, a woman who will

pack herself away and leave by mail

like an unwritten postcard she is blank, unwilling

to be spoken

you stay in silence afterward

her breathing ragged, gasping you want to hear her

say I love you in every way, especially how you

set me alight with your touch and every time you

kiss me with your full lips I moan even more for

the core of your very heart

Lorsque tu résonne jusqu’à mon coeur

tu capture mon esprit pour le faire voyager

these things of torment

to a girl who loves other girls

and falls for a woman who is already

moving away

merely using your hands and your mouth

as if plucking leaves from a deciduous tree

to see if indeed they will

fall and stay

on the ground

 

Present and glad

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We talk about the past

I used to like talking about the past

it was a favorite drink warming my hands

when Winter first called

this time what has gone before now feels

sad and heavy like wet wool blanket left to dry

in insufficient heat

it leaches the warmth from my lavender bones

I feel sorrow and weighted down by metal reminder

who was that girl? Who absorbed

grief and laid it on her arms in shapes and symbols

to be read years later by Rune interpreter

did she really? Think she had no worth

so much so the days became years and the pain

soaked so much of her blood she longed to eat

meat

you craved her up and steaming you fed on her

badly wound lassitude

she forgot herself as she pretended

love means forgiving time and time again

she forgot, she was worth something

that girl who didn’t have hands uplifting her from

the clamoring downpour

lost her way in cavorting storm

the spooling moon, a snake wrapped against tattooed branch

this way and that, the even keel of life forgotten

some days it took everything just to stand up

she mislaid the memory, she was not there to be crushed into

tiny pieces of herself and thrown for white breasted sea birds

to swallow whole

love should not force you to your thin knees

it should not destroy the tender parts of you

capable of feeling

fingers playing fiddles with tempura emotion

love is not a white flag of surrender

at times it needs to be a pirate ship

fast on its feet, answerable to nothing but

the truth of vanquished things

torn and shredded in haste

we talk about the past and

I used to like talking about the past

comforting me like a one-night-stand

until I became tired of hearing how I accepted

less and took nothing

raging against the dying light

life is after all

short and painful and full of unexpected turns

do not add to it by self-hate or diminishment

if I could go back in time, this is what I would say

to the girl who got used to having empty pockets

I would take her by the hand and remind her

you may have been broken or forged incompletely

darned with a yarn too coarse for fine needle

you may have been told this was your lot in life, you did not

deserve equality

but just as it seems true, the world will be submerged

when rain comes down pitiless and hard

it is not so

we rise then

we always rise

for one more chance and when it offers itself

hand in your bad habits and leave that moth eaten coat behind

take the tall steps upward

feel the sun on your throat

smile even as you don’t know

what lies around the corner

present and glad

for your very existence

Our dark house

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Step high into your shoes remember 1997

religion is in the wind and the climb of dark

you swoop around me like fabric and rage

we dance in weave with each other my eyes are

closed and see

how you want and how i want and how neither of us

shall never get what we need

i am loose shouldered and my hair is indigo in

the winter time where people close their doors and

you hammer me open against cold grass

lattice clocks pressing their time

henna tattoos, a marriage of dark and light

the sight of you in circled moon glow

our motion and our resurgence

the way young bodies climb and fall against

the future

bare feet on splintering wood you say

look how your shape echoes against that glass

and you take a photo in your mind as I hear

the fast train we missed, rushing past

leaving its tossed exhaust

I held your head in my arms you talked like

people do after they are spent

we pretend we know everything when we know

nothing

whirling silently in space

the fabric of the world is torn and gaping

like clothes ruined by a furtive need to

be pleased against rage and sadness

proffering bouquets of need hidden behind

retreating shorelines

it is the chemical of your blood and mine

swirling behind our eyes lying to each other

and the stones are hard even when you

spread a blanket on them

just like you said it would be mama

gathering my hair and watching it fall like

words cut from meaning against shadows

breasts that hold their secrets press against

the burning beneath

and the world is raining

and we are missing

cut out silhouettes

rubbing their imprint

in memory

Sunstroke

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Oh love

Your dispossessed erstwhile vowels

My clamoring for meaning

When we are both, slung over a giants shoulder

Soil carried to replace the old and build future

Timorously and then bold, holding bit between teeth, gritting and grinding down

Sensible molars, well protected in childhood

While voices of reason chime midday bell

We hear only the inside out sound of skin and bones
Our own scraped bare-faced challenge

Hot in the sun captured in bottles without secure tops

Ready to burst, I observe in the minutes lacing themselves forward

The steeped joy of owning this private glance into your fickle heart

Where many times it does not rain but still you never age, nor

Run out of the substance making you strong and bright

Like hammered silver bends only to the implement and wears its
bruises well

You are well. And I am well. Deep down. In the stir of our marrow.

Where we recognize that weather vein casting our fates together

Your pianists fingers crisscrossed against my loss of inhibition

Who am I kidding? I’m never absent from the purchase of passion

Long it has been the fiddle that gets my jig

And the moment is stretched long and elastic against mutual want

We breathe the same, dissimilarity leaving her clothes in the doorway

I cannot say after this long staring into you

Where we leave off being separate

The whisker and fall of our mutual song

Sprints ahead into unpaved road

And I am left with pictures

Of the young girl I was

And the woman I became

Beneath you and running through you

A river without dam

Claiming her hot land

This is dying / This is living

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Don’t say / that word

case we defame / or endanger

this moment / and the next

cresting night waves against recumbent shore

your arms molded from sand rise and fall

to my perpetuate weave

and we are

like flowers awaiting sufficient light

to open fully

a miracle each time the pallet of

senses born over with each song

held in my chest like women who wet their lips with the sore

chaff of flax before threading it into life

we make our reality

each elbow gracing air with untrained response

ballerinas finding satin undercoat

beneath dance

if leaves covered us, they’d say

Fall never ran out of color

your diminishing form as you lean away

gasping for air and back again into

perfect vision

there are only circles, nothing is

straight lined nor willing to beg for its supper

we two have earned our share of peace

many years of violence

the thrum and rub of pain is an ever

present crystal, hung against day

a kaleidoscope of far away places

we both realized that ache lying

just one layer beneath fevered skin

for you are

this enchanted place within me

a mirror of sea water washing over

the hardness I tried to place in armor

in lieu of a heart

your beneficence and the

arch of your neck bent in sleep

a field mouse of russet and dream

I would gather everything holy

pour the past down trilling drain

vanish with you into wings of night

two stars indivisible, our energy tracing

electric center of the other

this is dying and this is living

neither of us can mouth the enchantment

no longer necessary to verbalize motion

as birds gather their passage to dusk

swooping like dancers ushered from stage

and after everyone is gone

our love shall endure

a hidden thing

blazing brightly

in memoriam

Seeking us

Some prefer before it happens

that exquisite wait

predating intimacy

a languor of instincts

long nights imagining

how you will taste

can reality ever compare?

with the violent longing of what is imagined

a teasing elongation of want, unfolding

into one outstretched blossom.

I had closed down that part of me

craving clawing keening wanting

put a ‘for rent’ sign on my dancing shoes

hung up the coat of neglect where it belonged

still damp with tinge of youth

you told me it was that way too

with you

when the calendar said – you’re now beyond the hour

to feel, to need, the touch of age too close

resigning yourself to occupations of the mind

swimming in your stifle

…

we found each other

you were the girl I’d been seeing when I closed my eyes

I had this pendant about my neck called fate

it seemed to be firing blanks

there was no chance a lily pond girl with shining cheeks

would step my way

but I have dreamed of everyone I have ever taken to my bed

that night as the bluebird stayed wakeful, clacking into sepia

I dreamed of you, sitting on the mattress in my mind

turning your perfectly shaped neck

and in that turn I saw my beginning

again

as if you were waiting in many forms and only one

for me to pluck up my instruments of courage

fortune favors the bold

your blood already coursed in me

I knew your lips, your eyes, your shoulders

as if intimately

we had begun that deep warbled song of desire

I heard the sound of your violin mouth

closing and opening on warm rushing air

perhaps I was watching from afar

perhaps I stood behind you, our senses enveloping

the proximity of chemistry

kissing without touching the pulse in your wrist

in time you would start to look my way

stay the true course of our wandering

I heard your voice calling, I ran as fast as I could

as if all my life I had been training on needles

for this very moment to come around

languid and slow motion half dream like

before it happened I was already seeking us

in the needs I had, told to no one but

my imagination

who painted at night

the shape of you

Wordless & Spoken

I looked for you

as my eyes squinted into fog

I saw your luminescence

a beacon lighting way forward

unwittingly becoming life raft

I tried not to cling to the wreckage

but swim deeply through water unafraid

did it matter what direction or where

I would end up?

without you there is a drowned map of the world

made of hide and slick with oil

if you look carefully you can see the outline

of where you drew your location

like a red circle with closed eyes I can

feel the pulse

drawing us ever closer and ever apart

a wave upon wave in an ocean of sadness

there was a time when I believed

we were separated only by

our will

and if we so desired

nothing could really keep us separate

a chain of silver running through water

linking us irrevocably

it helped to feel less alone with you at the end of myself

as if we were bound and raffiaed like Viennese masks

waiting for wearing to bring them alive

you possessed the key to my firmament

you lit beneath my intransigence a fire

through your eyes I was alive

my skin burning for your touch

driving fast down empty roads

your fingers playing splendor beneath my skirts

the bruise of hours

ellipsing sense

you my patchouli girl

rendering me senseless with your unexpected strength

painting our together with shades of unfolding passion

as if we were Bedouin and all we have is the tent of us and our journey

deeper into the delta of the other

where secret streams convey a woman’s urge

wordless and spoken

lying beneath the way to heaven