Poems

Orchid
For John Andrew Wilhite
 
Cavities:
 
they are filled
 
to brims,
 
my orifices,
 
clogged,
 
but now a platypus:
 
in turn its arrival.
 
I know
 
just how you feel
 
deep inside,
 
come on,
 
probe at my
 
soggy claws,
 
my nippers…
 
but still a dullard
 
set soggy, ululate,
 
and that's an order
 
of strapping young
 
thai food, oh fuck,
 
how you looked!
 
I am so aglow
 
just spitting on you
 
with your sexual organs
 
all soft between
 
the velvet of my
 
outward pointing
 
appendages,
 
I'd like, yes,
 
to spavin touch
 
out of old age
 
into your bloviating
 
maw filled with
 
my red semen.
 
This was once
 
my favorite
 
flower
 
now
 
no more.
 
 
 

Lotus
For Zachary Horvitz
 
He consumed the Lotus without teeth
 
and sat in delight over its leaves.
 
He chose not to sip from the spring
 
but instead turned his gaze to Nature
 
or the materiality composing wit
 
that compiled with layers of tangential points.
 
He vomited the Lotus up in glee.
 

 
 

Peony
For My Father
 

Harsh spark in the lack of day prompts close, beg of warmth, quiet secret.	Come across these happy busty beams concealing desire of more in nature than exact petals.	Cradle me into your lacking scent which is undone by the full embrace of similitude.
Nothing quiet in your present presentations unless the bud’s secret counts.	A contagiousness like clandestine monks scathing perfections in chant and script.	Don't crease in but blaze out the sun's namesake of showiness.
You ask for all attention like blue pines wishing to be indifferent sky.	Don’t mock me with your glee in my sadness over lost paths where I find you.	I won’t lie to you; this impersonation does please me, to imagine you could be animate.
You think I care for a flower’s teeming feeling and solid angst over sessile rot?	I wish I did care but it is a crass reminder of my rallying losses in potential motion.	It doesn’t matter because at least and at very most I won’t forget how I’m not inert.

 

Poppy
For Myself
 
 
I've heard the words before
 
over and over inside my head
 
until it hypnotizes me, mollifies
 
my unctuous sadness
 
into something more palatable
 
than this sharp, sublime salt
 
or so they used to say.
 
Let me cry sugar into my coffee
 
so that the bitter taste
 
rolls and lolls around my tongue,
 
tapping out verbiage as élan,
 
as the word beauty might imply.
 
It isn't so much sadness anymore,
 
it's just the molecules of sugar
 
get so stuck in my aqueducts
 
that I can't help but be reminded
 
of the solace salt once brought.
 

 

Bluebonnets
For Linnea Blank
 
 
I.
 
Your voice, no more than a whisper.
 
You cling to the idea that you aren't good enough.
 
I come to realize what you mean and you are
 
a fixture in my sky of the lips of twice scarred cracks
 
and teal tokens of twice chosen sea-glass, like water.
 
I didn't know you until I saw you hating yourself
 
and then I knew too much, how, and really,
 
I'd always be a part of you,
 
maybe not the better or best parts
 
but certainly something that would stick
 
like my eyes through the glass of the car window
 
onto the fields of raspy growth inspiring you to speech
 
as you showed me Texas haunting Western Oregon,
 
“Babes, it just looks better this way.”
 

 
 
II.
 
I still don't really know what a Bluebonnet looks like,
 
aside from how you memorized and recited them via maw, here;
 
a polished ocean, one that chimes us our solitude in blues
 
that are mourned for purples. I'm watching your eyes trace
 
like bumblebees the wildfire of wildflowers teasing us,
 
the speed of the car pulling irises in our eyes from clump to clump,
 
quietly, like a lover, and playfully mocking our attempts to undress
 
that which is already nude in perfection like your make-up lined lineaments, Honey,
 
where you're set outside yourself to see in drowsy slang and scandalous arches,
 
in order to cause unrest in the viewer and only casually to imply anything human at all.
 
 
III.
 
I’m trying to avoid the cliche but all I can think to say is this:
 
“They look like bonnets that are blue.” Genius.
 
Though in all actuality they look like you to me
 
or me to you, rather, like something Nature made
 
after Nature was made, an afterthought to the fuchsia-fucked
 
Bleeding Hearts always outside my parents’ house in Michigan
 
as I talk to you on the phone, chain smoking and rattling off details
 
of our love lives in different hues of our skin and tongues
 
or no such color at all, or Schiap, or some magically unnamed
 
(because don't all tubes of lipstick have some silly-assed name?
 
(Apparently not)) gradation in nuanced degrees of holy shame.
 
I shall dub this color “Linnea’s Lips” from now on.
 
And here you thought I’d say something clever.
 
 
IV.
 
Instead I'll settle on something loving, as I know you would have it, my pigeon.
 
You were never color me once, but i'm trying to work you into that mold,
 
instead I should go for something natural, like the way we,
 
in my head, floating and broken in your field of lush, turned hungry.
 
You turn off my self-indulgence, self-awareness, and self-consciousness
 
so that the sered shame might not hinder my logorrhea about him,
 
whoever he might be at some moment in time, or who he
 
has always been, where I thought he was living in the body before me
 
but somehow realize he is somewhere else, out there,
 
but I’m left to track and trace his vanishing tracks like dove’s feet in the grass.
 

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