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.