exquisite corpse (please take part)

She and I were to be married, then the storm took her, and she tried to take me with her.

"You have the ring, my dear?" he asked, as the priest came near.

The waves crashed upon the rocks below. The surf and the foam, somehow given ethereal voice, as it climbed up the cliff walls. 

"Of course, my love," she answered.

Yet, somehow her voice came to him as more than one, and one as all, and he was struck dumb. Regardless of sunsets unobtainable, he promised her horizons. Sudden gifts of gravity.

The ring was a perfect match to her finger, and her dotage was a perfect match to his ego. 

when they discover my corpse [written 2002]

one hand clutches a wilted megaphone; the other, wrapped around the throat of my elusive conceptual ghost. my unanswered questions lining the bags beneath my bloodshot eyes. my eyes, fixed on a point off in the distance; like Pike saying, “yep. we should be there by tomorrow.”

my legs buried in couch cushions, remaining torso bathed in the frenetic glow of infomercial 0blivion. ropey iridescent drool aiding in the escape of my half-baked last words: “all work and no play make Jack…wanna lay waste” shudders offer the only punctuation.

surrounding my pyre, the doubt-stained carpet is littered with the tardy trappings of escapist dogma. cold empty bottles & cold unplayed CD’s. (even in death, I feel thirsty.)

my obituary is choked with mixed metaphors. my funeral is cancelled, due to creative differences. the eulogy, postponed by exhaustive rewrites. 

personality obfuscations cloud the forensic evidence. “he’s not dead, he’s just apathetic.” 

(giggles shatter the mourning air.) 

oubliette blues; 10.6.2014

cicadas can still be heard, always in trees far away from where you stand, as if they were almost as confused about the order of things as we are. just once, maybe they could play their jittery concertos closer to home so we could, at the very least, have a conversation. attempt to suss this shit out? 

“give it a week”, says Ol’ Man Gutter, “your balls will be too frozen for you to care.”

wind the chord around and stab it through, just like your tired entrails do. 
is Thelonius Monk mocking you from the grave? makes perfect sense in this current nail-gnawing atmosphere. difficult to tell which stutter is digitally accidental, or surreally intentional. 

all the while the world outside remains flat. like blank printer pages. the kind I give to my daughter, so she can make worlds of them, with her chalks and markers, because I am too flat like the world I’m trying to offer her. 



given the choice, yet not able to choose. sometimes the moon is that much brighter when the torch is taken away at the last possible moment before the hike through the fucking dead forest begins. shadows make the rocks and pitfalls look like raw diamond-edged adventure. cannot take me hostage here, I go willingly. regardless of the stumbles and the scrapes; the laughter drowns out the pain, and the blood writes the pamphlet. 

[I am a flower that only blooms during the day, hidden and afraid at night, and she is the sun’s rays, beckoning my petals to open.]