Blood, wine, and Hope


Blood and wine
intertwined 
as broken hearts
mended in the midst
of hurricane season.
My body possessed and murky.
I surrendered my
shadowy light
to the new Aeon,
and coughed up
the rest to the end of the world
monster and mania,
that swept over
rough surfaces like
bare feet pacing through
glass fragments
and the nasty scent of
chemotherapy.

I missed rough sex
at six in the morning,
handprints on
freshly bleached white walls,
sultry syrup and juicy
awakenings,
long deep sighs lingered
and transformed,
ever so delicately,
into moans that
called the moon down
to join us high with pleasure
in the early daylight.

And Fuck it,
the sex was just that delicious
that I could’ve
written,
slurred ravenous nuanced
syllables together
to try to explain the
drug of your sexuality
in my pumping veins,
but I decided to
take hold of my tongues tight
and run away with
your cum still dripping
from my bleeding feet.

Then the Memphis bound
tornado hit
and the land-scaped,
skewed and fretted,
pacing and twitching
with tears dancing
down cheeks in hospital
bathrooms,
IV drips make me sick
and hell waited for us
outside the stain-glass window.
Cancer will drive us all mad,
make no questions, or answers, statements,
concerns, gestures, rolling of eyes, vibrations,
stanzas long enough, harpists, drugists, singers of great odes,
witch doctors, schizophrenics, seers, believers, hopers, dreamers, makers
of wishes, witches, vagrants, flagrants, bleeding hearts,
vampires licking their wounds, angel light flooded with toxins,
freelance writers, smiles in the midst of great pain and grief.

I wept while dancing
and felt free
for the first time in
a month.
Nothing is quite as it seems,
especially me,
Ive found,
the raven sings its
sullen lullabye
in my nightmares
and then in my waking visions
I saw sweet spirit gatherings,
Healing hands,
Soft touches,
and great laughters
even in the midst
of the darkness to come. 

Confessions of the Burning Phoenix


Angels in archways,
I ran my car down the
dirty ditch road and into your
peripheral vision,
bloody and bruised,
crawling towards the air and earth,
my hands dug in deep,
and freed myself from crunched metal,
warped screaming seatbelts,
tire track stains,
upside down falling to the gravel
as the headlights race by.

I don’t mind resting here
for a time,
seconds had strung me out
like new meds
mixed with liquor and crushed ice.
Watching you popping pills
was boring me and so I slept instead
and tried to forgive you for not
fucking me every night and morning.

Damn it,
things were swimming and going well,
and then that
cancer sickness spread and
left us lurching,
back and forward.
Through late nights
of hysteria and tantric consecutive visions of
death and sex,
as hours drifted over
our weary heads and
we felt we were losing it all.
The battle degrading us further
into silence.

And with that flooding
of trauma,
back into my bloodstream,
I began to awake,
once again,
in the middle of the night
with dreaming of past hauntings,
that man taking my little innocence,
over and over,
with lies and cruelties,
without asking first,
a violence so brutal
it left me numb for years following,
I cried and wanted to
bleach my brain for thinking
of that year I danced
with the devil
and he grinned and giggled
at my bloody suffering.
Id love to forget
all the acts of anger and aggression
that he played out
on my bare bones,
but the senses and memories
stay and like to linger
in the morning.

And so,
though the abuse still
faces me in the mirror,
from time to time,
I remain breathing
through the pain,
living love and better,
forgiving louder,
dancing and
performing my sexuality
with vibrant beats of my heart,
and stamping feet on the ground,
shouting,
I survived,
and Im still staggering forward.
Phoenix burning
and yearning a revolution
to its knees, at least,
looking and howling in the moonlight.