Selections from archived “grim” poetry.

idiopathic endocarditis

12/20/2015

Grapefruit tongue

can't swallow 
the night
               anymore

can't reach for
the pen
               is disease

can't move 
the bones
                are foreign

past sanctuary is now nausea 

what was natural
can no longer be done
unless in a dream.

I cannot wait
to open my eyes in ocean--
that familiar body of salt

now

I 
  am too still to sweat

from the iron inertia--

is my jaw open or closed?

Detach it all.


I am the shadow. 

the body forensic

6/16/2013

glass bottles, glass jars
empty, slick, or stained
with acid dust or the tinge of port wine--

deep like venous blood.

stacked or strewn--
there is no chaos or order
to a laboratory-kitchen-bedroom-theatre 
that is home to tufty, moss-colored rats,
no more understood than people.

we are all creatures with four limbs,
minded limbs driven to consume. 

we too are flesh,
and then we are bone,
and then we are acid dust
coating the rim of a glass bottle--
bent, curved, or straight,
stacked or strewn.

we serve the rats
as we never did before.

(when we walked.)

as for each other,
we are united.

not as soft, bipedal skeletons
who speak and do,
but as bottles in a musty room.

we are united,
as a history of liquid freedom
and solid discontent.

flirting with air

4/16/2013

absence is a tangible dream.

in it I swim in antifreeze 
and breathe the acrid, honeyed stream
that sickens me as I miss
the mist of absinthe off her lips.

the faery--
ephemeral arms of emerald force.

her shade of life is only death's prey
or rather, the trance of limber fingers--
where am I?

oh, somewhere crawling in the shrub,
the dusky air, my head immersed
in the murk of milky green waters
as I fumble for the flicker of leafy wings.

what am I?
a child in the belly of Envy,
who silently hungers for the world
behind eyes of brewing toxin--
I am a trapped thing.

I flail in the coastal scum,
the melting pot of forgotten flounders,
only to chase her:
the faery who once fed my mind.

what is this?
I float, I slip
into cryptic holes of wormwood
'til I wake with her green on my skin.

'til I sleep with my branches
petrified in the Earth's black mud,
her wings threaded through my bones.

china bones

7/31/2012

the mugs and my teeth
are stained from the drink.
aging enamel leaves me in the sink.

but I want to swim--
that is, to sleep.
your solid creatine
could not pry me from these sheets.

note the universal wonder
that pillow dreams and cotton nightmares
plague my telescoping slumber.

yet I never turn my pupils
from the depths of violent psyche,
which drowns in Freudian monsters
and the riddles of my people.

--I dare you, sir or madam,
extract me from my tower
in which I float
and sip the bitter tea
and stack the floating cups
and fade...fade...
fade into a polaroid body.

I dare you, plant me back into the earth
and force my arms to sprout into youth
yet again.

You will find that time has made me immune
to mortal touch. 

synapse

7/31/2011

look--
I am still inside my head,
trapped like thoughts that are spiderwebbed
or cells nourished to malignants

slice--
and feel the connective, fluid black
slip--
and feel the fine silk snap.

feel the nanomoments age our bones
as they fight for oasis.