Verses/Curses
Wet moon
like neon blood,
by graveyard stain,
on finger-nerve, today;
the sickle punch,
by ghosting grain,
on open womb, today;
Medusa’s surgery,
on scissored brain,
electric licks, today;
quick! Nobody touch
the ingraining
mirror—
//
Begging Season
She’s ever spinning time into the wheel.
Spidering her line, by inward feel—
Triangling desire, evening to ends,
A deeper sky realizing constellation.
Death is her capital; she doesn’t spring,
But feeds into the year her twisted ply.
At distaff, by the flick of no-man’s candle,
Brown burlap webber lures the final fly.
How does a poison love the cure? Spent hours,
By the mercy of a shadow. Wanting not
To see her, housewives sweep her out the door—
Her standing slow, side-winding smoke of flowers.
A life of making is the heart of letting go.
Nightwise, black-dagger vagabond—by stars,
A diamond thief; by dawn’s left light, her whispers draw
His burning thought: the filigree of beggars.
//
🌒
Δ
Screenshot slaps—
To ring a sucker. You think
Your appetite entitles you
To moonstained blood?
And you, and you, and all of you.
Scrap mouths, yapping from
Ass-ends of snakes.
Shut it. Shut it. Shut yourself!
Your little o’s and u’s and y’s
Without wisdom—
All bite, all bitches' bark—your traps,
Fracked actuary lines.
My splintered flotsam pierces
Fiercer than your fangs.
Your slit-tangled tongues,
Your whore-hooked hounds,
Your dog-groveling snack,
The politician’s lie. Your island—
Ground to grit, and sifted by
My epicurean babble.
I suck off
One billion suns, you snatch
Six bones from Ithaca—
And don’t dare swallow.
I am the throat, I am
The eye. Black
As red as wine, neither
Skin nor flesh, as I
Exhale his brutal
Homecoming, I am
Cauldron of slaughtered
Maidens’ morning.
His alibi, to coast right by you.
As if the smiling tide
That governed him—
A king!—stoppered with wax.
Just try—you cannot shut
Your maggots fingering,
Their heads, nailbeds, uncut, exposed.
I am the shuttering.
Shot-shallow loons, aswirl
My spiral bowel, prowling
Pack of orphan pups, your howling
Hungers feed a woken Why—
My delta consumes,
Your keystroke masturbates
A corpse’s withered sty.
Pregnant with his child,
All men belong to me.
My one
Unconquerable O—
Your place to die.
//
Echo
Echo is opposite the word. He is
Mornings and evenly draws rainstorms down
From higher altitudes. Palm nectar slips the weather
From misty lakes, my ashes, unspooling ghosts.
But can you memorize the blues? Cintaku—
A promise to be golden rings untrue.
My skin is apple nude, my flesh a snowy hue.
This guava is Antarctica for your bottomless thirst.
//
Sideview
(for Sylvia)
Nylon-strapped into the backseat, the infant
Of reckless parentage, jaw-broken logic
Like antifreeze for mastery, injected
Muscularity, a pink mouse curled inside a clenched
Fist—We lost a sideview. It ricocheted, sent sparks
Scattering plastic, wires fraying the blurry way.
Ecstatic and encaged, I prayed to conjure
From atrocity, your feral, foresty freedom.
At screaming speed, twigs slashing my impossible—
If I could drive a car, if that were conceivable—
I would flood this weapon with atmospheres of Earth.
I would beatify the shattered sea of glass.
Acid fog dissolves the orange caul, cap-cradled
By undulating power lines—of deathless exhaust.
//
🌕
History
The end is opposite where you were looking. How—
Evolving sexuality, between libraries
Of progress, and Trojan wars of recollection. Trenches:
My universal texture. How does the tiger
Recline, her velvet freshly laundered in the Milky Way?
By Sibyl thong, peach-fuzz chemtrails, or does Iris flex
To tempt desire? A belly dance, like Buddha, in
My skull-shaped shell—does a snail extract
Compliance?
//
🌗
Indigo
I found the true, sun-rendered into grass.
Your crest was bruised, and bled darkly as wine,
Unfolded fan of bronze between the green
Blades: cut down, dissociated flame.
Rooster plucked bald, spur-riven by rage;
Fresh amputee of faith; his brothers, turned;
Beloved hen, a prize for violent men;
Disintegrated end of pointless feathers.
If I were strong, like you, I may not
Have chased him down and put him in a cage;
Rewritten him this unreal sanctuary, made
Of wire and wood, wish-woven with vervain.
A mess of mercies is my apocalyptic kitchen.
By my haphazard and incomplete, sincere
Effacement, I perform, historically,
Dueling, death-won, verb-mangled essences.
The crumbling law of walls, a garden crossed
By interventions; roses uprooted by birds,
Cock-sacrificed, or saved—Indigo is
The privilege of my indefinition . . .
As tempered hearts traverse this tear-trembling
Threshold, until the Iris appetite resolves
In fundamental mud of lotus eaters—
I offer kue, leftover from purnama.
//
Kue, small cakes, are often part of Balinese canang (offerings) left around the home on purnama (the full moon).
This is my entry for the September IndieWeb Carnival, hosted by Sophia, on the theme “second person birds”.
The Myna // Sang Jalak
The Myna
So here we are, in this
Third World. Palm trees,
Rice paddies, machetes.
Doves couple on concrete walls.
Seasalt breeze, like surface
Fire . . . Sapphire, emerald.
Sanctuary comes, commands
Silence. Our mothers cut tongues
To police. Masked,
The myna bird speaks
On the mulberry tree. Elsewhere,
Ants against an elephant.
//
Sang Jalak
Jadi disinilah kita,
Di Dunia Ketiga ini. Pohon palem,
Sawah, parang.
Merpati bercinta di dinding beton.
Angin laut asin, seperti permukaan
Api . . . Safir, zamrud.
Suaka datang, menuntut
Keheningan. Ibu-ibu kita memotong
Lidah ke polisi. Bertopeng—
Jalak Bali berbicara,
Di pohon murbei. Di tempat lain,
Semut melawan gajah.
//
coy loon, calico
coy loon, calico
cat snatched cake from the canang
cinder coils cunning
//
Assalamualaikum + selamat purnama 🌕
military parade (no country for children)
a block of human souls, murder
of mirrors: organism heaves
a moving multitude of cells,
populous lung, as if to breathe.
populous gun, snap-locks to form:
fifty by fifty by fifty, we
as one, on riven necks, heads turn.
the mass of bodies march past Xi.
in uniform, blind discipline:
black boots, white arms, clean unison
defines the face; grey, seamless film,
a weapon’s youthful complexion.
meanwhile, across Pacific waves,
the people’s whore, instead of school,
deploys machines to make selves, slaves;
the suicidal human rule.
chip factories to feed the stocks:
by battery classroom, killing ground
to grind the greening down, by glass
addiction, into tyrant’s hound.
the glaze that, dying, skins the eyes,
steals vision from the animal;
filters from birth its grave sunrise
and petrifies the living soul.
the glaze that, seeing, sells and tells;
in masks, they empty out the homes.
nobody ever goes inside;
nobody ever is alone.
meanwhile, across Atlantic storms,
in cradle of brave humankind,
the eye its fatal flaw confirms:
the fracture of the human mind.
dust-craven, shame of patriarchs
forsook a sacred covenant;
belched blood on gift of holy land;
made blasphemy of government.
what child is this? his ribs exposed;
the second coming, came, disposed;
the final coming, coming’s close;
bodies of babes, unmade by drones.
around the blue planet repeats
this multiplicative device;
our genocide is not abroad;
the ovens crowd these hollow spaces.
proving, mobilization awed
gold-burnished by Byzantium;
the heart speaks broken memory;
this is no country for children.
so genius passed: neither in form,
nor in the scripted paedophage;
bereaved, God’s mercy, nature-borne;
a mother’s keening song, through rage.
//
🌔
endives and mallows
this morning, handsome as a child, touches
with warming fingers the amethyst mallow.
delivers, gladly, each from darkening time:
the businessman, lucid as professor;
the tyrant, same as refugee, receives
his quickening caress, the goldenlight of youth.
but not each child. nor any child— the sun
has blinded all with his apparition.
a forest of light is teething in the seed,
dog star, a diamond cleverly effaced.
her baby will be different from the rest:
impeccable smile, a garden’s wondering, walking train—
daily untangling from the priest’s embrace;
to carry off, intact, her very name.
//
cocks and doves
is the sun enough for me?
uppity child— little Henri,
a cockadee, chases dovelettes
from the weeds. palest grey
sweetmallow breasts, ruffled
romancing on the pagar. desire
trembles in the precarity of daylight—
wooers, laughing, are tumbled upside-down.
Rainbow tidbits for Henri,
though neither of them is a hen. verily,
unto the sun is born a luminous,
bewilderingly beloved.
//
🌗
splinterwha
the resource re-
considering
skipping stones
whistling
in crevasses
stellar, hollow (
reckon starving
metric Io
reaches out ( g -
lossy limb
bittermallow
idiot(es) wind
whips ( w h i n i n g
past mumbling
nettles offset
private alphabets
boolean ( b r e a s t
nipple, teething
shooter —
wounding ) strings,
splintervolta
tablet dissolves
like ambien
sound-guarded Kali
graphic stems
roots’ f r a c t a l
externality
inscribed iamb ( so
so many
times ) my ear
sheltered, Delphi-like
in serif lobe
omega ( brooding,
loaded ) blood suss-
staining ends
threaded, mute
( litters
leaf
ground ) grammar
thick bundles,
shorn bodies from
brushes, hair-
lines
t um b l e w ee d
to thrift
the thistle, this
still tick-ling
or if sewn spider-
silk knew, s o w i n g
( m i l k s o f t
the habit of
( public
beauty )
a mustard seed
//
while waiting
i seemed to hear a new leaf budding from
outside, across the garden. i, pristine
sat on our bed— the future strange, deranged—
an alien inventing self-erasures.
is it normal, in my crone, to feel this way?
i missed a contentwarning— fingering machines,
scissored by shades of glass. the news,
the look of starving innocents; the bud,
not yetgreen, also not yet visible.
hallucination of the woozyqueen
or turquoise bees, copper goldenbuzzing
around the vervain; a shipwreck from afar
in language of my nature, or astray
unfounded tear, some private pearl, ruptured—
//
🌘
qoop (O the genius)
a slick tongue slides around his marble curve.
force never felt so powerless before,
swept off your glacial nerve, flooding coastal
cities; by pull, arousal virginal
to witness one sun-surrendering bud
of violet, untouched America. he hides
in plainest word who dresses in flowers,
lying in a meadow— the modest egg thief.
mineralocean turns the ten tropics
ragged, wed to the staggering moon— but if
no yolk, she’s alabaster. jade at noon,
obsidian midnight, gravity’s appetite
dilates, lapis un-stone— a vowelbirths
the polished shadow of ingenious nature.
//
🌒
his very subtlety
i brought my heart to work today—
a careful accident. i wrote
a note for you, pretending not
to show you who i am: bearded
angel, or boy turned upside-down;
chain-yanker or lonely-for-fruit;
the groaning king, his blessèd wreath;
a golden mule, the kiss of death;
soft bosom of the empress, red
from solar radiation; or
caress of thigh, giver of bread;
this image— you, unlimited.
//
🌒
earthquake
it felt like grass, before it felt like stone.
the other side of flame, igneous black
or tattoos grappling for your diamond face.
so i grew roots in water, he in bone.
and what if i abstain from apples for
a year, a tear, a deathtime. would he still be
indifferent? or disappeared into
his silverriver hair, my cloudy mountain.
your wooly light tempted discovery,
pulsating veins of mercury, the ground
mantle unbound. it whispers— not a limb
of you is immune to this hungering human.
//
🌓
as if i were a whitefoot
nameless, the gentle landscape chose
pointlost, ungiven, brutishly
endbringer to deadset hunger,
rudeness riverrun to mercy.
grim gravelshatterer, sparking flint
to be action or scenery—
object of disbelief, the ground
to goat a hesitating hoof—
or clamp too-trustingshank, object
of appetite. salivaspills
from ruthless gum of animal,
rankcivil tooth of shackledmilk;
but snarlingword, infant of dust
absent a motherverse, is howl
heartletting keen of lucid sacrifice.
come drink from me, Al-Shanfarā—
she desertlimns greydreaded; trim
your distance, wolves. the veil of thirst
is inhuman as ocean, burns
your hornsgolden by bending sun.
//
(reply to Shanfara’s Lamiyyat al-Arab, trans. by Michael A. Sells in Desert Tracings.)
silver robes of a rose rabbi
(This 12-part poem is a reply to Wallace Stevens’ “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”; Further explanation may be found here.)
I.
—and did you ordinary women mock
in liturgies of utterances contained,
lines overwrought by time-keeping cant of yours?
and did you burst from bullied syllabub,
or clockwise stiffen into winter walls?
the musicals of ghosts, midwives and angels
echo, hollow, down stone-cold corridors.
and did you consecrate your spectacle,
coupling one who spoke—no, no—not nothing,
a stand-in that you killed while playing swords?
to quell the babbling spring by means of rain,
or merely quote the Mother’s name in vain?
she has been up at nights, considering
how to un-kiss this devil-gendered thing.
II.
well, i make believe an uncle, dead
and dear. less clear is fortune of the bird.
to fly, to seek, and what on earth to find
but torrent of an obsolescent mind
—he said, obscure and arduous to hear.
and yet, it flies. and though he doubts her crown
and midnight sight, she will fly too. and though
her silver glows in anecdotal mood,
her lilt, of stellar tilt, still loving, lingers
in braided dancing round a pool of blue,
tuning her clutch in nesting eddy of
said bird, whose course is old and hardly true—
and yet, it lives. rising, as golden-red
in flight, crowing like Scorpio in the East.
rest easy, uncle cold and fluttering
and lately of rambunctious residue;
a dove survives heaven to choir anew.
III.
O man, if you could see her witchlocs now,
or what’s become of Eastern expertise.
she is swamp-bitch, and twisted, twined and hitched
without romance by ruby claw to thorny crown,
her hair—each barb a bell, each bloody herb
a suicide. she’s heard of nobody’s
outrageous feats of raw technology.
in wracked rumors of Western fantasy
she knit a while textiles anti-exotic,
but sweaters have no use in the tropics,
where skin is king. and now we’ve come uncrimped,
uncrumpling, algal Anadyomene
of muddy water, Charybdis of the bog.
what’s history is past—nevertheless, he asks
why, woman, have you gone au naturel?
IV.
that spotless glass is not the book of Adam.
that trinity you stole cuts like a knife.
to be uncrumpled is to be un-uncled—
un-uncled, i become the poet’s wife.
i am un-hidden woman of the garden,
body un-ridden by the dust-bound word.
the queen of poet’s tongue, i lounge and lean
as music on my salivary throne.
the syllable you speak, my roundness is
her shapely immanence. our rectitude
is life—of tree—of life. so eat me, fallen
father of mankind, and know your foolishness.
speak again, brother—madly, as husband.
my honeyed bone un-spells your make-believe
kafir—he sees his wife sans négligee
who tastes the ripened fruit by naked eye.
says ordinary woman made explicit,
who steals your spectacle to save your life.
V.
can we remember together, after all
or does my voice harden the picture frame?
by being body, do i gather you
intolerably, or spread you thin as kin,
one stroking throb of summer esoteric—
you tickle me with feather of a peacock.
a gazer’s gloomy imagery is perfume
of incense, arousal at great distances,
long-smouldering and lit by tender match.
far from the proximity of virgins
there burn the Verbs of Love, arrayed
as galaxy of irretrievability—
before my eyes, you took and held my hand.
VI.
we used to call you man of twists and turns,
the dynamo—reckless, drowning, sea-rendered
until perennial blue, the one i knew
well enough to know, i loved nobody.
his thirst, prostrated, clutched me from below,
desperate to conceal from wingèd word
a history of suffering. a babe
buried his need in bosom of my nature,
drunk on the deep milk of disappearance.
his subterfuge despair was mythical,
until he made her fiction. he may not
remember me—but i keep by my heart
a wavy lock of sunset-auburn hair.
VII.
suppose a parable is just like her:
desired and defiled in equal measure.
his chivalry requires a blushing knight
to guard the Word, who is incarnate treasure.
i heard of one such rescuer of women.
who, for his lovely sin, was de-mountained
by crippled foot, and fated never nimbly
to climb again. but faith in constancy
makes deliberate gifts, arms built from hours
spent torquing tongs before roaring earth-core.
therefore, no purity of heart is borne
that lacks an alloy in the sooty forge.
thou shalt not fear the courage of your virgin,
is the limping gist of this comparison;
her shining is at once translucent bloom
and armor’s lustre, welded by humble Vulcan.
VIII.
if doom begins to seem antipathy,
baby, you’re scrolling past the blues. that time
of year thou mayst in our humanity—
but not the Muse—behold, of warty gourds'
cosmic grotesquerie. and there’s the rub.
as long as tongue still holds a gentle fold,
i will elucidate your grim hallucination.
launder and bandage the decaying limb
of sense, of memory, of time. wed heaps
of conscious compost consummate the bloom
in star-swept dimensions of titanium,
where whorls of microplastics never end—
machine poetic, of pumpkins meteoric,
becoming metaphysic—tender beings,
fizzing histories apocalyptic,
chime and rhyme as flutes of pink kombucha.
we sing the tropical-epochal view
at end of universe, or two. until
séance à trois, with chaperone of grackle,
i love the laughing sky—let’s make it crackle.
IX.
most oblatory heart, i bring you news.
despite our deadly faith in prophylactics,
resourceful Cupido pricks porous tactics,
ever hanging hymenal fools. behold:
on spun-gold surface of radiant yolk,
in sky-strewn milky way of albumen
suspended, questing’s lustiest conceit,
the part-less heartbeat of a person third:
as ancient aspect touches youngest plume
to stir, pure destiny, the origin
of life, as love, in pilgrimage secured:
the red point points, and to itself—as bird.
O holy gift, O crack in everything!
the mad midwifery of paladins
births not a baby, but a voice on fire:
ecce peep. now go, and meet your daddy-o.
his name’s Pipit the cocky chickadee;
he is a theory of fertility;
enthusiasm incommensurate
with clock-a tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum.
X.
a balmy chickadee alights on bough
of jepun tree—gigantic, bristle-trunked,
beatified—by tipped cosmos of day
and melting star of paradise, bodies
unveiled. we lie in kindred shades of them,
verbing and flowing, in blues made legible
by greenborn leaf. in leaves there hides a forest
where braid the wanderers their briared maths.
a souvenir shelters nectonic paths,
ancestral courses wild with counterpoint,
and mercy of geometry—proffered
by rivered children of Love’s oblivion.
XI.
dilated pools, star-gazed—surrender pinkly
to phobia of frogs. if you dismember
those bracing, faceless bodies—lost in love
their coiling gyres, desiring—helixing
directions inward, home. or intervene
against the skyward cough—raw, gaping need
to swallow more—when pollywog is strung
by lunar air. ritual drowning of gills,
suffering insurgency—the gulping word,
fata Morgana flooding Camelot
is twinned ecstasy of triple betrayal.
for swimmers' lust, the sea is all. and still
her cries are not for us, alone—we hone
the bluest chord of velvet-driven reverberation.
XII.
now all of us have lost our taste for mince,
the history of grinding, darkly, Adam;
so schooling blade, student of buah, prunes
til circumspect the hour. and she has thorns,
forms of her own—we prick ourselves and bleed
to name her flower. bending the voice to crown,
we’re drunk by literal skies of melody.
you found her singing by the sea, where she
had fled, as she remembered you were drowning.
who is the rose rabbi? i read, she comes
and goes. knows herself not. how would she know?
if glass were introspect, Iris of time—
to find she had been borne, a cradled question.
//
🌕
corpus
so this is memory accounted full.
the one, the final word they wrote, to lay
a crying babe to sleep. a lullaby
to keep, against the fragmenting mirage —
a pile of rocks for angry men to stack,
to sit on. bone-built towers, against
the synthesizing might of desert hours
break first before the mother of the fast.
and these divisive scratches were daughters
of dust, heart-scriven on the dune. to say
my thirst was never for parted or past —
her caravan, sand-winding, ever-last.
//