that's mrs. mediocrity to you

.

and the twisting vine

of time

offering no slack

no reprieve

no consolation

but these brief fleeting bits

of astonishing

beauty

.

.

.

A week of up before dawn,

asleep far too late,

and the merry-go-round

keeps on spinning.

.

A moment this morning

of quiet beauty,

an intake of breath,

both of us,

solitary,

reaching for

sky.

.

.

.

and it’s always accidental, the discovery of light and hope and love in the midst of deep shadow. we want to be cooler than that, less trite, or at the very least, sharp-edged and angled, dressed in hard shells that cover our scars. we think that’s how to stay safe, how to survive, how to win. we think there’s an answer, when all the food is in the questions, hanging low and heavy with overripe nectar. if we’re lucky, one of them will drop just as we walk by, leaving splatters of wisdom on our long black cave of coat, and for a moment we’ll remember what it’s like to be alive (or at least we’ll forget what it’s like to be less than). the bloom is the destination and the growing is the map. have you ever seen what a tangle of thorn the rose tumbles from?

eventually it all falls down, rotten with seed and ancient mirror.

you must look
for the glimmer
of valor

.

.

.

Alice stood in the corner wondering why she’d come to this place filled with masks and math and prettied-up people.

Packages. That’s the word that kept winding through her mind, down dark hallways and out open windows. Packages.
She wanted to tear into them, rip through printed paper and agendas and falsehoods. She wanted to see their eyes, what they were made of, what lived below the surface. She wanted awkward honesty, or shy (mis)demeanor.

But no one ever tells the truth at a party, and secrets echoed through the room like a barely-there smell, perfume left behind from a visit three days ago, or mold climbing the wall in one corner. Fear, perhaps, and history, closed up too long in a closet of possibility.

She held her breath for a moment and stepped inside the circle.

There were cookies.

.

.

.

.

no matter

your path

it’s all forest

.

.

.

.

It was always there in the corner of her mind, and every room she’d ever been in: the power of words.

Some days she chose to ignore the sounds that rattled and clanged like locks and chains, and other days, the only thing she could do was listen. Every minute was a story, every hour a poem. And the nights, the nights were cacophony, which is why her dreams were always silent, like old movies.

Once she’d tried writing them down, every word she heard, every sigh that whispered, every sentence sailing past her extremely near-sighted eyes. But her hands were never fast enough, letters flew through them like birds and scattered across the ceiling in a murmuration of mockery.

Sometimes she caught an M on a finger or grabbed a Q by the tail, but they were never letters she could use, and she dropped them in a bowl that by now was overflowing with impatience, red and gold seeping out from a crack down the side. She wished she could hold them in somehow, or wait until she had enough for a story, but every time she tried with her glue and clumsy fingers, a question mark escaped, and she spent days looking for the answer.

When she got hungry, she tore pages from the books lining the walls of her house. It was never enough to fill her, and the only one left that hadn’t been tasted was the atlas.

One day she filled a bucket and started scrubbing. Her knees grew dark with ink and tiny commas kept catching in her fingernails. She didn’t stop until the floor ran black and the only thing she heard was her own breath.

She sat down then, and began to write.

and sometimes we find it
nestled in
between sanity and severance
leaf and litter
imitation and impostor

our hands
will always
get dirty
in the search

but that’s the nature
of atonement
and you know
what they say
about cleanliness

.

.

.

and we swam circles around each other
like shark or sunfish or skittering
pond skaters
because
neither one of us
heard ophelia singing
and what did it matter
so deep in the forest
of upside down
neverland
sky

.

.

.

in a sky mixed from paint and loose smoky cloud
sung by the song of ophelia’s left wrist
floating home on a river of chasm

we are built with such fragile temerity
says a poster on the wall of indifference

held in place with tacked-up tone diamonds
ripple-torn by the weight of overwhelm

it’s all too much and never enough

because cut glass and cold minded carbon
are futility’s intrinsic fossil

holding on to lost light with the fine-crazed frailty
of their own impetuous gleam

the stars will always hang high
in one corner of sky
but first you must swallow the darkness

.

.

.

in the middle of a day
laced with rain cloud
and robin

singing hymns to unseen
heavens

i found a grave
beneath
the tallest poplar

perfect circle
of blown-out feather

grey on white
white on grey

death
in the center

a ring to fit

a broken finger

a hole for grief

to tumble into

and the echo

echo

of eternal

narration

.

.

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