I actually had a difficult time writing poems this month but I managed twenty two (!) in the end, of course I am not posting all of them but just 4 that I vaguely liked best. Maybe I’ll keep working on a few of the others and they’ll be in July’s batch of poems (is that cheating?)
Construction
Tell her she is polite
That she is kind and sweet
Draw a line on the floor
Pour her in a cage
Her insides no more than liquid
Watch her contort
Against the bars
Slam at them until they bite
Height increasing, pressing the ceiling
Flesh expanding until the cage no longer fits
Until its she is ever contracting
until she is paper thin
Oozing back out
Blood pooling
Flesh being pushing through
When it’s just rung out bone, discard
Try again.
Mask
Drag the brush across the canvas
Hard and rough
Feeling the texture under the head
the flex of the horse hair
Digging into pliable skin
Consider then the layers
How they build up
Fill up each crevasse, canyon
spilling up every space
As though it always belonged
I sit in my tall grass
I sit in my tall grass and I read you
your lines and your sighs
spacedandclose
dreams strewn out of each ink blot you work up
wrung dry on my altar,
sharpandsullen
I spill tears while you lay track
gliding, rumbling by, soft as lullaby
distantandlulling
Curved.
Bodies are no more than vertexes
Mathematical equations
Where tangents twist themselves
But never lines straight make
A gauge brought in
Reveals no sides but
Complex geometry conspires
Slopes and vectors to a single quotient