Once New Orleans was in the works I lost Luc.  He tried to slip back into society but couldn’t.  after about ten years people noticed he didn’t age.  For someone trapped in a twenty-one year old body it doesn’t take long.  He started hating me.  I went to Abita and crawled down in the spring.  The Choctaw tried to reason with me, but I was just too broken hearted.  When you share a body with another and give them a piece of your soul, then lose them it takes a while to heal. 

Jolie Holland croons “old fashioned morphine,” from the speakers in the dark bar.  The floor was laid three hundred years ago.  The tree it came from was four hundred years old.  It feels warm through my shoes.  The place is called Lafitte’s Blacksmith after an old friend of mine.  We didn’t start out as friends, but he grew to love me.  A piano sits alone craving attention along the back wall near the washrooms.  Candles light the room and cover the slate ceiling with soot.  Weekend nights are my favorite time here.  Everyone is too drunk to notice me.  Stale beer and sweat hangs in the air with tobacco smoke.  Tonight is Tuesday, or Mardi Gras.   I stop by the bar for a few bottles of beer and rum. The room is flooded with warm energy as the crowd trickles in and out like lapping waves.  No one knows why they’re drawn in, I love the rush.  He’s sitting in the corner waiting for me. Hat tipped back and a huge smile on his face.  Gombo rolls sweet off his silver tongue.

“Di moin qui vous laimein, ma di cous qui vous ye.” In English: (Tell me whom you love, and I'll tell you who you are.)

“I know who I am Cher and Cochon conne sir qui bois l'ape frotte.’ (The hog knows well what sort of tree to rub himself against.) ‘My friend flattery does nothing while you have a penis.”

“Oh but you are wrong my dear, you have a one inside of you right now, don’t you? And Dogs don’t eat dogs, what has this one done to please you so?”

“Ooh I forgot, well he can wait a bit longer anyway.”

“Good, good, I have a gift for you and it can’t.”

Zooline

Your house was dumplings with bones in it
Cautious hugs, fresh grass smells and gravel in my flesh
I was commended for my toughness
You were proud and I was your favorite
You hung me a tire swing
And kept him away from me
Your neighbor's orchard and mean Shetland ponies
You handed praise out with vinegar
And hatred with sugar
You broke my little sister's heart
Continously as you did with all the others
Without apology
But you never directly hurt me.
Sliced cucumbers on your front porch and swords from your garden
Christmas and the way my daddy loved you
Just like all the kids did until they knew.
You ruined so many hearts and lives you took them so early before they needed any guards from pain
You kept them there under your thumb, under the guise of mama or grand mama
You taught them to fight like the dogs you saw
Chained them to torment
Called it love
You spoke flowery, sweet words and wrapped them around your venom
Some never knew happy
A few saw you as you were
They fled from your grasp
A few lived to and through what you were
Blood stains, sweat, tears, bone on flesh and pure hate smeared lives
Left in the bottom of a bottle
Of alcohol, cocaine, heroin, pills, a gun.
Wasted breath
Wasted heartbeats
Wasted tears
Wasted years of love
Wishing it were truly possible for you to truly know
What love was
Wishing for you to love us.

E.

Maybe you and I could leave this place

We could just chance it and sail away

Find ourselves on a desert island in the Caribbean somewhere

Literally, literally find ourselves there

Maybe we could just get lost in time

Stumble around history and hangout in the trees

Watch the world turn before us then come back to these

Thoughts and these places that seem so familiar

Baby we could live nonlinear

Do you wanna run high into the mountains

And leave these low tides?

Build a farm house from mud and hide out inside

We could make love all day and plow fields at night

Rain dance under the moon and teach the stars to cry

We could can memories like pickles for when we get old

Push a spoon under the edges when the lids are too hard to hold

Taste the youth that we savored back in the day

Hold each other forever  

Curled by the fire together

Only we would be so bold 

disconnect

I miss the old days of color coded walls that facebook was born from

Scary chat room late nights that were mentioned in slight shame

I miss gay book stores and seedy adult places

Where push pins in note cards on cork boards

Expressed needs too dark to speak in everyday

I miss manners and shame

Shame was an everyday occurrence in some ways

I miss social accountability and human interactions

Some things have slipped too far away             

Now all meetings are in chat

Social circles are infinite

Now everyone lives in Warhol’s fifteen

All the bright and dark places have smeared into gray

Networking was once for business   

Networking was once for politics

Networking is now for all things

Buy me, fuck me, fuck them, hate them

Like the picture, like my idea, like what I do

It’s all so diluted

So empty

Not a novelty

Not a phase

Some things have slipped too far away

Now shame is a commodity

Now gay is a political stance

Now sex is on your phone

Now your phone is a part of you

Now technology is a fashion statement

Now food is a movement

Now disconnection is the norm

Now faces are found only in pictures

And voices are disappearing

And conversations

And art

And life

Are all online 

ch ch

Nothing is lost in the sound of a woman’s grunt
Breath labored, pushing sighs
Mounting you
Cramming fingers into welcome places
The surprise of the femme façade fading away
She is the aggressor
This would scare her ex-boyfriend
Maybe he saw a hint and pushed it aside
I remember when she first planted her seed

My brain swimming
There was no confusion
But I was taken at the time
She waited, so did I
And all things end

Her hips help press her wrist to work
She enjoys her position
As I do mine
Her status is top, alpha, yes!
She giggles at the slip of her lube
And palms my breast in it
I’m lost in the swim
In the viscous reality
In the scent of her sweat
In the way she presses tired, against me
She is insatiable
She can’t be long enough inside

Her makeup is smeared
Her façade non-existent
She smiles sleepily and giggles sweetly
Then rolls me onto my belly
She tells me about her toys
I appreciate the threat in her tone
But none come out
Only organic
Only fingers and flesh and tongues mingle

I am enamored
I am obsessed
She is straight………
yeah right

second draft-poetry

I danced on the door of my own self-conscious

Overflowing the flavor and capacity of my palate for dreaming on those shores where food is love and sex is magic

With smoke stained eyes and drug filled brain

Strewing my beliefs into what ever ear was nearest to my breast

And heartbeats drowned out my desire for connection to only a superficial thud

That was made in the shoulder joint that pushed cunts to oblivion

And heaven dripped from my fingers and chin

Down alleys of discontent where my father lived with a gun on his lips

And said who are you

I strolled down Las Ramblas with gunpowder in my pockets and a knife at my throat urging me forward

My own captive mind screaming for release

From the psychosis

Then blues then flamenco then wedding marches

All feet stomping a cadence familiar flung home

The pith and knot of muscles ripped and blood disgorged

To hear what breath meant to hear those words that are just a symbol

For heaven for peace for all good that means nothing outside

A false sense of understanding

Humans or trust

or the goodness of man

Now dowries

to the man on the hill

whom we were promised to

at birth and follow like voles in light

arm on shoulder, arm on shoulder, arm on shoulder

to death

Souls of this America

lie broken and question what sisterhood

or brother hood can exist without this demon

that led us into traps for

oil fire and death

we carry hope in a knapsack tuckered like children

and reflect on our fore peoples mistrust and embrace

what ever is here now for it cannot be

as bad as it seems as bad as it was as bad as the dreams

that lead us chasing snakes through our sleeping hours

 the forests of grass that blanket our conscious existence

then wake seeking wholesomeness in

a ten dollar tomato on Saturdays and weekends

while chasing all things green and inedible

everyday of our lives

 and lovers kept at arms length

and wives looking for our shoulders

or screaming in the faces of whoever is still paying attention   

Now evil women dying at arms length and fingers stretched as far as I can

 run from our love because its pity

wrapped in guilt

wrapped in hate tied up by a life of lies

 whose ribbon sparkles like the chains of genes

in pretty pictures that remove our “GOD”

because we know something

 if not by touch then by sight

Of mountains and land and farms and farmers

that breath each day and kill to feed our fat bellies

 miles away and sweat and toil not for their own existence

but ours because we’ve grown too tired and far

and simple in our own belief that mind

is represented in paper in transcripts in words

from those we pay to count our worth

Whose families wonder what frames their existence

 all is lost and dream of the people

and lands that have existed

in lives the same for thousands of years

but gadgets make us smart

and money make us whole

and our self-importance makes us worthless

and these words are worthless

worthless as any and every that escape from your lips or my own

for words mean nothing without action and action is an idea that died with our hippy parents ideals that changed into drug riddled bodies to fund wars to divide peoples that mean nothing to us.

Nothing who reside in our parents basements knees bloodied with thanks

Nothing to who live off accounts that fuel and are fueled by a false idea of the worth of things and bring an identity of nothing

No struggle Nothing

who write poems static and undefined

whose unframed perception is crumbling before eyes widened by

an exception to the concrete finished rules

self-imposed ridiculous doubts

and un-composed sense of worth left on a shelf

at the back of a dark and empty closet for years

opens

bursting

blood and cum and snot

disease riddled, once fluid bones on fire!

On Fire!

Built by frozen and crumbling undisturbed dreams

Cast aside in indifference

Whose cracked knuckles and ripped backs jerk

In unison for once. 

a nose taste

Dusty cotton mouth adjectives stick Alia’s tongue to the back of her teeth. The scent swims in her head and she stumbles drunk on it.  Mushrooms and candied apples, warm spice, and iron all familiar, but when combined it dances across the synapses in her brain with feet like hammers.  She buckles from the pleasure of it. 

Alia isn’t unlike every other girl crammed in this bar. She hasn’t bathed for a few days.  She likes the smell of her own sweat. She likes the smell of most things.  Quarters out of the change machine at the laundry mat remind her of her piggy bank when she was a little girl.  The produce section at the grocers always familiar, everything mingles into a crisp sweet then bitter earth crunch her nostrils chew and ready for her brain;  Digest digress, digest digress. All scents attach to memories. This one does not. She lights a cigarette to kill some nose buds and walks to the other end of the bar. The rolodex of images spins through her head. Nothing.  She sips her beer and wipes her lips.  She doesn’t do drugs, she doesn’t need them.  Life is drug enough. Her senses tickle her body and peak its interests. Her memories are as real and present as her breath.