The Nightingale Sings the Blues

The shining eye of

that howling sun

left me parched and

pleading to the sky

for one more desperate

day in the lightning

that she covered my house

with,
in her

erotic holy

sighs,

heard only

if you were paying

half of your attention.

Our horned demons

of contraceptive clinical

controversy,

whipping and quipping whimsy

thick forked tales

and sloppy tongues

persuading us that

we were less than deserving.

I rose up to

exorcize fanciful fucks,

faking orgasms galore at teatime,

rhetorical subliminal

messages raking

breathing burned coals

on our delusion days,

skin so soft it

blisters in the long nights

of anxious waiting

for the world to start

its counterclockwise

rationale,

quick slick tilting of lands

beyond naked nursing sight,

but thundering in

sound and energetic brassy

magnitudes

with their sultry raspy chords.

We invisible astral bodies

quaking in rhythm

to each other,

bumping and humping

to the heartbeats of

earthen tides with

the moon in our wake,

we ache to be free of

the construction:

bars, cages, euphemisms,

sly manipulative beatings

and scissors sniping at

the staircases that we

wanted to descend down,

to the dripping dance floor in

glorious waves of euphoria.

I am a fucked harsh artist,

trying not to give a damn

about your cruel

dimensions,

obviously feigned

sweet salutations,

your wasted efforts

of arthritis and dementia,

mania lapped up like

dogs to lake water

on a humid day in florida

where you soak in sweat and

pant epitaphs just to regain consciousness.

Stop it,

enacting punchy pick up lines,

sleazy stereotypes scratched

down my bloody aching back in

the heat of the moment

left me deathly dangerous

on your floor that smelled

like post-vomit drinks and mildew.

I refuse to be another

no-name numbered girl

to hang in your closet

of accessories along with

bragging rights to

esteemed colleagues

of cool.

Fuck you, thanks.

I grabbed my weeping dress

disheveled

and got the hell out of there,

putting my shoes and socks

on in the car,

breathing deep down to

my swollen lungs,

heading off the panic

at first glace and second

sermon.

Marry him because you must,

the bruises are your fault

scoffs the dresser drawers

oozing their dirty diatribes.

Be her please

sneers the wives on main street,

snifters buzzing and swishing

their bent noses back and forth

to the ticking of the watchtower-

instead of just this silly stupid self of mine,

repeating the glossy sheen surround sound

media man.

Tourniquet temptress

has a hard time with trusting

anyone because experience

has taught her that no one

ever stays,

due to deadened eyes,

death certificates,

cold remarks

because it made you feel

better to put someone else

underfoot than

find glints of hardened

truth in your own fucking face

in the midst of rites of

religion and politic propaganda.

Thus I closed my

tainted eyes to

your twisting lies

and looked northward

into the moonlight,

awakened away from

the malice and

coffin banging hypnotics

that made snide

remarks in the echoes

of consumerism.

You tasted like sweet Spanish moss

after a hurricane,

damp and foreboding in

its voodoo swing,

halos falling off their filthy

angels,

floating downstream

to some new horizon

where the twilight

makes loves to the sea,

and I felt that warm

hearth sense of home

settling gently down to

my tingling toes,

filling me up

with reverence and

glittery glow as

the grandfather clock

waves goodnight through

the gloom

while the nightingale sings the blues. 

Stream of Consciousness- Fishhooks and Frostbite

This stream of consciousness was written by Megan K. Coleman. This was inspired by Helene Cixous’s call to write.

I was post-lingual and pre- historic. Tainted by the underdog and seraphim I gave in to the way and the light and the message of community and communal. I wanted to forget the slain horses the inside of the women’s bodies burning and the cascade of the river as it drifts the sun into a new beginning. We all know that something is coming a serpent phoenix tiger eyed pig with satan eyes and drinking out of a bottle of dirty vermouth. It concerned me that I felt “my people” are dying quickly and without explanation.
Dissociative paradimes of condensation I want I desire I need something new that does not stick me in some hole that I did not dig for myself. coffins are for the dead and not for the undead you fucking idiot the jester, the fool the magus grins and smirks to the left of his face and the right side of the road. you cornered us in the parenthetical and sang about human trafficking like it was eating cake and drinking tea with the queens of England. It was a maze of most certainly uncertainty and I spoke upward in shouts and waves and heard nothing in return but felt a fish hook in my mouth without warning. red lights flash in between the memories that I remember and the ones that I could not remember though I did not want to in the first place.
ghosts seemed strange to me like root canals and cyanide mixed with hand gestures and profanity. the darkness covers the earth for a time when the prophets start to say what needed to be said in the third world in the new order of the cosmic migration towards the deep caves of the earth a shrinking of visibility and dissonance of the inner crust of molten forgetting. I came with frost bite out of the shadowy shutters and heard the screams of the suicide trees and knew of nothing but the red stripe of paint on the wall and the lamp that was the only thing left standing after the storm and the earthquake mixed with verbal abuse and crystal meth.
pussy and puzzle pieces seemed to go together nicely but no one would look at her in the face aside from me her kin and kind left her standing on the dock next to the goblet that erupted in flames. I could see you in your minds eye and you seemed to lift a finger and the world came down angels falling and giving up on those human kind creatures that take and never give back to anything and not even themselves. what sort of love is this that bleeds the already bleeding and sucks us dry of essence and perfume and sex and liquid energy as the rain tears at the trees flesh until I wake up from its shrill pitch. slow down and move to a beat in the head of the machine was this the best way to go…him and
hmmm and I don’t know the way out of this tunnel. give me grace and serenity to stop short and wrestle the angel again and again and again tumbling to my feet I land back on the earth covered in candle wax and feathers. dusk of the ages was wrapped up around me and light came through the bedroom window. the widow cries and dies in her own space and time stands on its back twisted and forgotten by the clock on the wall and the piano can play itself for all you care. ice streams down the walls of the bathroom and I shiver and I like that feeling of cold to skin and the pain that comes with knowing things that others can not see.
the man in the bathtub was looking at me as if to say huh, I did not just imagine you here and thus you must be here in another way than the way that I am here. and I reply aren’t you dreaming me awake in a reverie when you fell asleep in the bath and floated to the surface of the sky and back. watching the moon uncover its secrets was a graceful and violent repression of feminine beings and light and liberty and the means for commercial enterprise and capitalism was a fucked up thing. right the sky says to the sitting duck that was the man leaving his nine to five and wanting to jump in the lake and swim with the moss and fishes. animals seemed to scare easy and talk back and I was glad to know that someone was listening in moans and sentences and mind
fucks and sex in the bathtub by one’s self and the self excuses us from the divinity that she understands to be inside her. I was always thirsty and could never get my fill and I drank and drank and needed other and to be othered and it was never enough to just fall into the mirror to get sick and cough and spit up the liquids of life and decision and then go home and lie and lie down and sleep as if sleep was not awake and able to be the monsters that we really are when the sun goes down. listeners were symbols of mythology Horus and his fathers scoffed at hegemony and social control did not exist to them then in the era of the butterfly and bread and butter. triangles pop up in daydreams and people always want to know what I am thinking and writing expressing in waves of oceanic refugee. pull me out of the water and I just yearn for the sky that
drips and soaks us to show me that wet is better than dry. horoscopes were mystics way of communicating mathematics and I just felt there was more to people than cells and brains and waves of lifeless energy that helps us paint and create and deepen into the dragon. my mind works in mazes of chess boards and sex dreams whores on the street and stilettos getting stuck in the cracks of the pavement outside my house. and breath and breathing and needing to breathe and wanting someone else’s breath seemed a giant waste of time. and cancer is sweeping the earth of us and the demon under your brain in the space between your spine giggles and knows that the battle is already lost in the young david as he steps up to see the golith in front of him. but he does bash his brains in , david to his golith, the famous story of mind and spirit over matter but
death still comes knocking on the door whistling that tune you can never remember the name of. cats hiss and spit like adults do in church and it would seem to me that listening to the pitch of the organ was more important than the organ itself playing some damn tune we have heard forty times to different words over and over and over in a way chocking me out of my vitality and importance of art. muses came in different colors you know in the spaces between serenity and sleep. insomniacs must have it rough like a face scrubbed on the pavement when you sit in your chair and listen to dirty tunes about the stone age and posters being held up on walls with glue.
lust and angels and kundalini became a jumbled mess inside my head and no one wanted to dive in there and sort it out, not even me. the carpet scratched its head and gave up on telling us the way up the mountain was the dig under it and insight a volcano of activity and mist and heroines coming to the rescue of princes in distress in the tower with their hair long and their skirts down around their ankles. what?
does gender stress you out like pathological liars and re-gifting gifts that your cousin gave you when he was six and you were twenty and it seemed a damn shame to shame the hunted. did we not have enough trouble as it is with the water up to here and the breath staggered and did you know that you are not alone? the sunset will forgive your faults and give you new lifestyles to explore and try on like a new pair of shoes that you steal from your favorite store in the mall. I came up and saw around and shook my head, wagging like a dog on its deathbed and
I found light in a new day and darkness in a new night and that was just fine with me. and the truth is alright with me. this is for no offense and I just like to spit out profane and spiritual and one and the same and different and equal and separate like two trains running in the opposite directions.

Please research Helene Cixous (especially her piece titled Laugh of the Medusa) She is an amazing writer, philosopher, mystic, and feminist activist.