PAST PROJECTS

A Collection

BAPTIZE, #2

Baptize, #2

I dreamt last night

that you were an escape artist

I’d come to watch you elude

Squinting against piercing lights,

I never reach for my glasses

Even when they’re right there

I wanted you to be a quick blur

Your mother was a tightrope walker

Your father, an extremist

Your sisters, all acrobats

When you were three,

Your parents padlocked

Your compact body in the bathtub

Held your dark head under bubblegum-Scented waters and waited

When you emerged, free of chains,

They gave you one red M&M

You never see me

I was there for the Mirror Challenge

It had taken the Birmingham man five years

To make those cuffs

56 minutes later and I counted every one

You were paraded around on the shoulders of The World’s Largest Man

Looking smug and uncomfortable

When you were delicately set on your feet,

I watched the Bearded Lady smack a kiss on Your lips

My skin grew too tight for all of the memories Inside of it

I remembered waiting beside that oversized Milk can filled with water

Sobbing, ugly and heaving

“Failure Means A Drowning Death!”

I never believed in you

Never took you as gospel,

The way some people do

When you escaped me,

It was the biggest feat of your career.

GO TO BED

 She wakes with

Thunderclaps at her back.

The night before,

She’d swallowed lightning bolts

Which explains

The early morning jolt.

Even as a child,

Sleeping and awakening

Never came easy.

Her mother laid her

On her back

When she was a baby,

Swaddled tightly.

Found her minutes later

Spitting up salty sea water

And seaweed.

Sleep doesn’t come easy to me

These nights.

Not after her.

I dream of her end

In a thousand different ways.

I dream of fentanyl.

I dream of blood,

Spreading like a blooming

Across the concrete underneath

A 40 story building of

A tech company.

I think of two fistfuls of prescription pills.

Years of prescriptions

Exploding in her lovely mouth.

For once,

Not so tight-lipped.

For once,

Not so lock-jawed.

For once,

Open like the mouth of a tornado.

When she slept next to me,

That was the most restful sleep,

She said,

“No sand under my tongue,

No magician pulling

Scarves from behind my esophagus,

No loud bass thumps in my ears,”

She said.

I say,

It’s because

I held on to her like children hold their breath

Going through a tunnel,

I trailed over her ribcage like

Rubbing the cracks in a sand dollar,

I say.

She’d never felt so full.

She had never felt so solid.

She’d never been a real girl

Until then, right then.

No mermaid, stranded at sea.

No swift and terrible alchemy

Keeping her eyes peeled,

Stealing her sleeping.

It was just me.

Just me.

ALTERNATIVES TO SPLITTING YOUR SKIN WITH MY TEETH

Shoot each other in the chest while wearing bulletproof vests.

Pull out your tooth.

Tie one end of a string to a doorknob,

The other to your front tooth and

Slam the door.

Slamming doors.

You’re always slamming doors,

In my direction.

Read from the same worn, leather, brown bible.

Because the only thing, you said, that can save us now is if Christ himself

Descended from heaven

And made us say our sorries and force us to hug.

I could braid your hair too tight

Like so tight,

Like so tight

I can squeeze dialogue out of the brown ropes.

We could write love poems

One line each.

But I worry my lines will compare you to a stained glass angel

And yours would compare me to an atom bomb in a china shop.

We could touch each other slowly.

I’d have to prepare my cast-iron suit.

Your hands have been sandpaper these days.

I could melt peppermints all delicate on your inner thigh.

I could drain the moon of its milk to give  it to you as a birthday present

That the other women could never give to you.

Not her or her or that one or the other one.

Leave hickeys on the pads of your fingers.

Shove tiny nail scissor blades under each other’s fingernails

Suck the blood

Spit out the blood

Examine the blood as it is a Rorschach test

I see butterflies.

You see corpses.

I wrote a poem a little while ago

Called “How to Eat Your Lover.”

We’ve moved past cannibalism to straight incineration.

We are setting each other on fire every night.

It isn’t the heat we were used to,

Smoking bed sheets, the warmth rocking us to sleep.

This strips your skin in layers

Burns so hot, you’re too stunned to remember how to scream.

Pour the gasoline.

We could pour the gasoline.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions?