Viking Funerals and Christmas Lights

And in the nightmare
my younger brother drank poison and whiskey
because he craved
to die on his own terms
instead of letting the cancer
turn him into an old man
at 25,
so he threw the elixir back
very fast with his eyes closed
and in true                          
viking funeral fashion
floated dead down the river,
his body aflame
turning to embers and ash.

I found it frustrating
that when I walked 
battlefields
I could always see
the blood drenched boys
running with their guns,
shooting each other
to fund some
fat bat’s purse
while their wives
cry in broken down
churches,
lighting candles to save
their soldiers
from themselves,
after the war
when the bruises started,
and he wept
as she held him
when he talked
of the stars falling
out of the sky
and burning his forehead
leaving a scar.

Isnt it funny
how those freezing nights
seem to crave
all the sad songs
until youre heaving tears
from what feels like the stomach,
til nausea sets in
and you cant seem
to get a full and deep breath?
But then I would go
for drives
to feel the cold air
on my face,
turn the music up
until I could feel
nothing else
but the melody,
drive through subdivisions
to see the twinkle lights
wrapped around houses
and the warm Christmas tree shadows
in kitchen windows

which always made me smile.

Lace and Teeth

Whew,
I couldn’t seem to write
how I think
because my thoughts
were those of a
angel-masked
blood bitch
who was coughed up from
the red boiling gates
of hell that it was my duty
to guard as
the hot metal melted the skin
off the sinners’ bastard bone
which I then lick off
my fingertips smiling sorrow.

And goddamn it
you talk too much,
casting nasty magic
with your hollow words,
raising coffins from the undergrowth
within the syrup sludge
formaldehyde mixed ego,
all phrased in one long whine,
pigs playing
peeping toms in
the windows of
my childhood,
and we got so used to
the ever-staring eye
that as we grew we
learned to self-censor
just in case hes watching
and wanting to be entertained.
We are told over and over
that we like it
until we believe it to be true.

Heaven’s archangel helped YOU maybe
but I fucked her in back alleys
exactly how she wanted it
and she liked it a little too much
for my taste,
but in the end
it was too rough for her
to admit to her
white wedding friends,
so she dragged me,
her almighty secret,
to the cellar,
and to hide her shame,
cuffed my neck to the radiator
with a one-two step
and a curtsy
as she took off her underwear,
throwing it in my face,
leaving me to rot in the damp dark.

Lace and teeth
changing the scene
to the boy next door,
fashion and raging out
to System of a Down
while he popped the heads
off barbie dolls
to make a necklace
out of their pretty
little lip-glossed faces.

Through it all,
my family weeps,
pleading with me
to write of
prancing ponies
and fields of fancy flowers
of which I knew nothing,
and it felt unfair and unnatural
to fake happy
after all the bad boy abuse,
the deaths of father
and brother
whom I still saw every night
as the medium gifts
became heightened
in my periphery,
and unfamiliar ghosts
turned on faucets in my kitchen,
scratched me in my sleep,
and screamed obscenities
at me through
my reflection in the
madness mirror,

And even after all this time
I STILL couldn’t forgive you
for all your taking,
taking,
taking,
always putting the drugs
before my heart space
and never saying you’re sorry,
like you actually mean it
for the bruises on my ass
that I never wanted to be there.
In truth, I hated myself for hating you
through the fog of the damned
that I felt I deserved
because you had told me so.

Thus what could I do
but be me,
in all my gory glory,
silence the
social pressures
of denial and
the never-ending
buying and selling of bodies,
so I took the shotgun
you kept in your closet
though I protested and loathed
the violence of it all
and blew the window out
of your bedroom wall
where you kept
your catechism
so I could get fucking free.
I must write the truth
of the horrorshows I’d witnessed
even if it killed me,
and regardless of the page that enjoyed my pain,
I seized my last gasps of air
before joining my
kindred spirits,
sipping bourbon and laughing loud
under the biggest
weeping willow

Id ever seen.

Bipolar in the Mayhem City

I know you didn’t mean
to break my consecrated silence with
your bloody teeth,
but I had spent hours before your arrival
opening my third and fourth eyes
to try to find relief
and yet all I could see were torture visions
from the astral plane,
witnessing mamas holding their dead babes
and the blood of the innocent running ragged
through the streets,
feeling then the tantrum demons rise within my brain
who then held my head under the boiling waves
of the underworld,
and I screaming for deliverance,
or at least one full night of fucking sleep.

And when I finally
snapped out of my mind and back to the earth,
I told you in humiliated whispers
that I had been raped
by the devil
in the back of a red pick-up truck
that sat in your driveway, and
your response was to smirk
through your cigarettes
like my pain was a fucking punch line.
So I nailed my hands to the headboard
and swore to myself
that I would never let anyone
witness my
shape-shifting magic ever again,
thus to dull the phoenix burning within,
I spent hours taking shots of absinthe in the afternoon
and popping pills in bathroom stalls
to dumb myself down to “normal”,
whatever the fuck that means,
then sexing rough boys
who always called the next day and
I never picked up the phone,
instead sat in showers,
sobbing for hours,
rocking back and forth with my guilt
while razor blades and
bottles of asprin
sang me their sweet siren rhapsodies
all the way through the night,
into the morning hours,
rise and repeat.

But that was a few moons ago,
or maybe even years,
I cant quite remember,
and I know now
that I am getting better
at giving myself some grace
through the hard days,
bipolar in the mayhem city
(which I queried might just be
the Freud-fused American
psycho-pathology
of our modern day shamans),
yet either way these movements
flung me topsy-turvy,
deeply haunting me and growling loud still
within my heart and head.
In spite of it all though,
I am remembering to breath deeper now,
seek peace stronger now,
focus on my own healing and awakening
more fiercely so that I may
pass love on and heal the wounds of
whomever wanders my way.


Talks with Nightmares and Nature

I held your nightmares close
and we became like old friends,
drinking whiskies in rocking chairs
that my grandfather carved
before religion called him out
of the woods and into the concrete, and
we raised our glasses high and wild
whilst you waltzed
through heaven in your underwear
laughing at the people below.
So I took a deep
syncopated breath
to calm down the tide of suicide dreams,
setting the metronome
back to the beginning of time,
soothing flowed through me
as I held my palms skyward
to the moon
and thanked her,
my sacred mistress, who aided me
in remembering,
oh yes,
that part of me is in
the trees outside my house,
in the rain that falls
into the rivers
and flows
to the Ireland waters
from whence my family came.
I am also deep within the 
earthen ground
which heals all wounds
and culture imposed sins and
sighs to the
mourning morn
until laughter
cracks the sky again

like thunder.

The Devil and Cups of Sugar

I woke up
with dragon’s blood
dripping from my mouth,
remnants of the dream spaces that lingered
in which the mystics    
throughout time came together
in the forests forgotten
to argue over the best recipes
for old fashioned cocktails,
and to hold heated debates on which
witches’ brews were best to give soothing to
the dying and the dead
within us all.

And the tempests
that had so softly slept
in the clouds for years stirred and
now awoke coughing
with the ash and poison
of humanity,
winds and rains
growling anger and vengeance,
pouring down on us hungry,
and we then cursed the sky
because, of course,
our egos could always find
someone else to blame.

So as the rain started to whisper on the skin,
I was the Hanged Man
in your closet,
ever swinging and singing songs
that I didn’t remember
whilst still noticing a slight tightening
of my vocal chords,
scratches in the back of my throat
from demon claws
striving to crawl up my stomach lining,
trying to take over my head
which felt detached from my weary shoulders anyway,
and even so I could still hear my mind
floating down the river to the ocean,
which proved to be effective
in catching
the third eyes
of fallen angels
strip teasing in the streams outside my house,
crashing circus acts and white weddings,
watching humans and
their Hollywood heroes who beat their wives
and received generous tax breaks,
then to be running late to sidewalk rallies
protesting wall street religions,
sighing at stop signs
and popping pills like popcorn
on the way to after parties
and leaving heavy footprints
in the muddy snow on the streets of Detroit,
lighting cigarettes for strangers
and drinking wine with the neighbors
of serial killers
who hid their bodies
under the top soil of the lawns of strangers
instead of dropping by for cups of sugar.

Meanwhile,
I had given up on cancer cures
and your gods of mercy
since I had watched my brother
slowly slip into the afterlife,
my howls of pain and loss
ricocheting through the undergrowth,
splitting my soul in two
so that part of me could follow him
into the ethers and
the rest of my ghost wanders the world

trying to recall the pace of your heartbeat.