The Effects of Skin

Losing tissue, I fold
Into bandages

Clipped and
Contained in my plastic

Wrapping
You arrive and say

Can I touch
Does it hurt when I touch

Does it
But to breathe through

Skin, piece together
Windchimes

My baby
Bones cry to be held

Long
Into the night

When the click
And sighs of machines

Sing

Piecing us into a
Careful covering

You wear
Normalcy like biding time

Here
Where recovery sleeps

Family

Emile and Marie

The Human Being

Life ends in sepia.
There are buttons to be sewn,
empty stomachs to fill -
the stars to imagine
as falling soldiers
coming home to mothers
and girlfriends
who would not lie beside
them in hotel beds, lick
their tears off of dirty pans,
ease aches or
pretend.

Life is perfect timing -
behind your eyes,
stolen moment.
The passion picnic,
fingers like sparks, all silver and
gold.
Under glass
you feel me as an entomologist
touches bugs.
You float in Paris, an offering
- how you
opened yourself
underneath mothy sheets,
suspended
metamorphosis.

For Women Who Use Storms

Storms are not metaphors. You can’t conquer the bolt, not
the thunder, the masculine desire. Stop riding the lightning
instead, or blow your candles out so that darkness
hides your true self. The music will not cover the years.
Your withered hands cannot block the storm, can’t
kill the lying or the prayers. You can’t get clean by
throwing one small human body into rocky crag. When
you stop being pained by storms coming in over
the harbour, rain will come – no dance or feather will
cure the wet garden, or plant the root deeper.
If there is weather, there is weather. Women as
wanton witches trying to fight the natural predicament.
Let him blow through the pantry, rip open the last
window, so that when the storm comes, you
will be ready. You will be waiting.

New images for Death Follows

Choice A

Choice B

Choice C

I am putting together a chapbook or mini-book of poems called Death Follows. I want to use one of these for the cover ... which one?

* Thanks to Dave B. for still keeping this great old car around.

Creepy

I love this time of year - the way the air smells, the way voices echo in the cool morning. I've been known to be fond of Halloween decorations, but living in the city has curbed my enthusiasm a bit.

Maybe it is my fondness for the creepy and macabre, but I woke up this morning w. this poem 1/2 formed. Look over your shoulder. I don't think I will ever look at neighbours the same way again.
-----------------

Candid

I watch you waving your arms in the sunshine,
at a parade with your daughter, both peroxide,
brutally blonde so that light and hair seem one.

You ignored my signs, first the blue-green beetle then
the tuba I placed in your driveway. Vintage.
Into the trash it went. But I forgive.

The years have stopped you from crying.
Three children will do that - remove feeling,
make an actress of a woman lost in moment.

If I revealed the truth over coffee - the neighborhood
without crime - and you in the mirror
mouthing disgust and confusion, perhaps.

Old movies aren't enough for the modern
girl holding years,
holding back her basic yearning.

I watch you and swim in the unseen,
the small things you know me to be -
a quiet, unassuming gentleman.

When she left her body for stars

You stood for two hours between the door and the world
knowing sorry won’t disrupt the girl who has left
both of us
hoping for something
The worst kind of mind can tell you how you can change
it
Stop it like gravity or
return sanity
like some shoplifted lipstick
to its proper place
But it is the fragments, the shards of happy
that’s the worst kind of ugliness
And being solid for the fractures
----the little glass of mercy
You hold the balloon strings w/out balloons
a heroic gesture
Look up and let go

In Eden

It began as dialogue.
Bite. Apple. Vulva.
Yours and Mine.
It was a rainy day, just before the drops fell,
the autumn incense thick in the air.
I peeled back the first – the orb
of knowledge.
Hear me echo.
Jesus is the crash
and the abandon.

Adam was always the innocent
one, sneaking peaks at male
genitalia,
coveting back hair and testicles
like they were of him/
from him, a gift.
I grew to despise the
Y chromosome, the fur bearing
male
dressed for the hunt and the thrill.

I was blamed for the downfall
of men, but no one knows
the way Adam fell
like a perennial in winter.
Or how he spent nights
charmed by
length of dancing asp,
Natrix atra,
tasting
temptation.