New Year

White, dimensionless sky reflected on
bland, white building rooftops.
Even all the reds, greens, & blues ,
the glitter, lights, & glorious Christmas bullshit
are concrete under this unicloud.

Driving 95 down a state road, I'm independent
just like my car's bolts & hinges revolt, rattling.
The Christmassy dots of the city turn to lines,
silence fills my soul w/ all answers,
& a New Year seems promising as this
erected middle finger rushes past it all.

My New Year’s resolution simply this:
no New Year’s kiss.
So I don’t have to think back
next New Year’s Eve
& remember stalemated fantasies of storybook
ending w/ someone who broke my heart
next year.

No. I’m perfectly content kissing
the midnight unicloud.

Freedom, Flower.

A love poem for myself

Written 02 Dec 2014

Feeling cold without a heaterbox, but
free
now, too.

I was anxious at first.
It was cold.
What would become of me in the future?

I’ve been here before:
there were flies buzzing ‘round my head in early hours of a late night
but now I’m really a sunflower, warm & brilliant inside, & alive.

Now it is the future
and apparently I’m just fine—
warm under blankets that were mom’s, are now mine.

Narrative of a Demonic Possession

Written August-December 2014

Possession of the Host

The latch on his chipped white picket fence jingled & a gust blew it open, overgrown vines on the door like moss on river stones. I walked through the fence, down the steps to the entrance of his underground house.

I stood breathless, shaking, disoriented, then shimmied sideways through ivy & sharp, prickly bushes to a window. W/ my sleeve I wiped a peephole in the dirt layer of the unscreened window pane.

Looking in, I saw him there. Only a single, yellow-stained lamp bulb revealed the figure in the shadow, & the neon blue of the screen reflected white on his focused grimace. In an overstuffed chair, he was cold & hypnotized by the the fluorescent figures coming from the screen who touched themselves, w/ red O’s taped to their faces like used car advertisements on telephone poles.

A plume of black smoke was emitted by the screen, wafting into his orifices, subtly, perhaps he didn’t even notice. I looked closer at the smoke & saw it moving in an unnaturally narrow line out of the images on the screen & through his face & hands & through the pores of the stone walls.

& out the window. I realized I was breathing in the smoke stream that was interspersed w/ bioluminescence.

Spread of the Parasite

Didn’t belong anywhere, so I hid in shadows in corners outside homes & w/ the lens of the internet, creeped. Unable to interact & invisible, I drifted around, a specter, a spectator watching other people live & watching unrequited loves love others. From the sidelines, life is a detective game, a sociological experiment of reading body language, grouping personalities. Standing on sidewalks looking into homes w/ families around fireplaces, I made stories up about how other people could possibly feel comfort & belonging when my only feeling is a hole in my chest, which grows daily, where a being lives which makes me question why I’m even still alive. “Alive”…relative to…dead? Really: nonexistence. The chest pains & clammy skin & split ends, although unpretty, are signs I’m still alive. Living? I’m a ghost in a flesh shell, still a ghost. People caught glances of me out of peripheral vision. They’d think they’d seen someone there, but looking straight on, it was…air.

Destruction of the Host

I carry a cumbersome body bag, overbearing shit pile containing the corpse of a young female, approximately 8 years old.

Managing my way through the waterlogged, clayey soil is proving difficult in four-inch pleather platform boots. I insisted on wearing them, even down stomping in the swamp, a stupid girl.

The boots are my new identity as a cold, living-dead demon whore who only knows sex & begging & screaming out in a shrill guttural howl but never truly being seen or heard or loved.

This isn't me.

This isn't my voice.

I was born into this world as something else.

But I killed & buried her a long time ago.

Someone incapable of loving, as an evil source of darkness, which only attracts more dark, broken, & lost betrayers, liars, & sexually depraved...demons.

The heels, too high, got snagged in some branches. W/ waning perseverance, I could no longer carry the armload of antiquated junk so I dumped it all upon the green ooze & lily pads, watching as brown swamp water creep & seep over it, & it sinks out of sight.

Episode

There's a question inside me & I long for the answer
to fill up the empty box.
The answer isn't in the mirror,
it isn't in this laptop,
it hasn't been seen on TV,
so far it doesn't appear to be
coming forth from inside me.
It's not on the Internet,
not in a book
or in my refrigerator, the cupboards, or in my car.
I've checked all those places.
It could be in a human sized hole in a graveyard in the ground
but I won't know that until...
It certainly isn't in my wallet, and isn't on the wall,
or at the gym, but it could be in a man.
(Their plan is to convince you they
have the answer then lead you on
til you're like an abandoned baby
who gives up.)
The answer might be locked inside the ping pong ball
bouncing chaotically back and forth in my chest.
But it's not locked inside my heart-shaped box,
it's nowhere I've traveled
but maybe I haven't looked thoroughly enough
or maybe I've been looking so hard, so long,
I've forgotten the question
or I'm seeing it all wrong.
Can God even hear me inside these concrete walls?