Torch Songs

I'm through with torch songs

You can carry your own damned torch

I tried to hold it for you and light your way

But it burned me

So you may carry it yourself

Winter Skeletons

Winter is the time of confessions, 

Illusions shattered, when the thin veneer of decorum

Starts to crack after it freezes

It is in the winter that the skeletons

Vacate the closets and crawl into bed with you

Where you huddle under the blankets for warmth

Almost slipping into blissful ignorant sleep

Until you catch hold of a bony finger and jerk yourself awake

It is always winter when we allow others to see these alabaster visitors

Sometimes we allow them to walk with us

When the icy white sky mirrors their bones

Do You Remember The Whales?

A song, based on a series of dreams I had.

Do You Remember The Whales?

One day I got lonely

So I shaped little people out of clay

Just to see what they had to say

As it turned out they could only

Pirouette, then fade away

Maybe it's better that way

The girl in the pink dress 

Said, "Do you remember the whales?"

I said, "Of course, but do you think I'm dead?"

She replied, "No, but I made you up inside my head."

I said, "If that's true then why do I believe in fairy tales?"

She said, "I do too, that's why we're in this mess."

It was cold out the day I turned fourteen

And everyone was telling me to be a man

I said, "Honey, I'm doing the best I can"

Then someone said, "This isn't what we mean."

So I went and hid behind my sequined fan

Just to cause a commotion while I cut and ran

The girl in the pink dress

Said, "Do you remember the whales?"

I said, "Of course, but do you think I'm dead?"

She replied, "No, but I made you up inside my head."

I said, "If that's true then why do I believe in fairy tales?"

She said, "I do too, that's why we're in this mess."

I've spent far too long in bed with a fever

Dreaming fucked up endings to fucked up fairy tales

In one of them Jesus asked me for some nails

And I had to tell him I was no believer

Then the girl in the pink dress turned the eels into whales

And they swam off, with gunners on their tails

The girl in the pink dress

Said, "Do you remember the whales?"

I said, "Of course, but do you think I'm dead?"

She replied,  "No, but I made you up inside my head."

I said, "If that's true then why do I believe in fairy tales?"

She said, "I do too, that's why we're in this mess."

The Stepmother's Tale

The Stepmother's Tale

Once upon a time I was a little girl like you

White as snow, in the days before you were born

Before your father.

I was young once, too

Too young, naive

I was seven years old when he took me from my home

And brought me here.

He frightened me

But I was too small to run away

I missed my family, my mother,

But he told me she was gone, she had wanted me here

I still don't know if I believed him.

I was eight years old when he married another

Your mother

She was only sixteen and she loved him

But he kept me

I doubt she saw me twice in her whole life.

I long for a child as white as snow, as red as blood and as black as ebony

She said, when she pricked her finger.

Two little drops of blood fell out the window 

As she sat sewing, while her husband was away

I was sixteen now, as she had been

As white as snow

He said I was as cold as ice, but not half as pure

As red as blood

I didn't know that place could bleed

As black as ebony

I became blacker than the darkest night under him

For nine months I grew blacker and redder and whiter under him

Black as hate and red as lust and white as scars

And she never knew

The child was born

You

White as snow and red as blood and black as ebony

I didn't know of your birth until he told me. He said,

She is whiter and redder and blacker than you

I thought he was finished with me

And my heart grew white with hate and red with jealousy

For he had become my blackness and I was loath to lose him.

But then she died

Leaving him alone with me and you

As the years passed and you grew older

And then he married me, and I flushed red

To think that I had kept him from you.

You were sixteen, like I was

I watched his eyes darken as they fell on you

And I grew white with fear for you

Red with anger at him

Black with jealously

Bring me her heart

I said to my servant

I do not know if I wished you dead

For your sake or for mine

On The Pier

On The Pier

As the summer disappears I am left thinking in a chilly breeze that blows through me, echoing in the empty spaces inside me, the gaps between my ribs whistling and my throat murmuring like the sea.

The breeze grows colder, and the icy water beneath the pier seems anxious, lapping at the shores like nervous fingers on a damp impassive desk. I look out across the water and the whole world is a study in black and white, cold-fingered melancholy, a film rendered silent by words unspoken while the camera rolls indifferently on.

There is no art to this film, with its grey water and icy sky, there are no close-ups, no panning over an iconic metaphorical image. The camera is impassive, sees all too much, too soon, too fast. The editor is powerless in his decrepit studio, afraid to stop the celluloid spinning, but still unable to watch.

Three black birds circle, etched against the brooding sky, and the pier creaks as the wind blows harder, and the ancient blackened wood seems tenuous beneath my feet.

In the film playing in my head I am falling, embraced by frigid fingers, stroking my face and pounding in my ears and whispering, holding me up, then pulling me down, and the lightness in my limbs becomes darkness in my head and I open my mouth and feel the cold, and then it is not cold, and I am the cold and I do not feel anything.

But the pier holds. I stand at its edge and watch my reflection in the water, studying my bones through my numb white skin.

It is virginal, my skin. Or rather, like the water, its coldness becomes virtue, the white of isolation turns to purity, like the angelic face of a hermit who never sees the sun. My skin is white and cold and virtuous, and it strikes me as the bitterest of lies that the birds circling overhead should see this reflection in the water and yet know nothing but skin.

Everything inside me is cold, every muscle clenched, passions once thought fiery seem to die. I sit on the rotting pier and look out across the water, ceaseless and deep, and I wonder if I could become the water, sink deep and twine my molecules into the sea.

It starts to rain and I turn away, walking back towards the sidewalk that grows darker with the rain.

On The Inside

On The Inside

If I were to hand you a scalpel,

Shave my head,

Kneel down in front of you and let you open the top of my skull

Like a zipper, like an orange,

Let you rummage through my brain like a suitcase

What would you look for

In the chaos on the inside?

What would you see?

Would I be like a book to you, with an index and orderly pages?

Or a vast unkempt library, scattering priceless manuscripts and dust?

Would you find my memories like battered photographs,

Old loves like scribbles of poetry

Or is it all just written on the inside?

Maybe you would step inside my head

Sew yourself in and look out from behind my eyes

And maybe I wouldn't know you were there

Or maybe I would fall in love with you

Once you were inside my head and I could feel you

Shifting just beyond my eyelids,

Adding to my dusty library mind,

Scribbling new bits into the margins,

Writing on the inside

Small Poem Involving An Impulse, Cold Hands, And A Book

Small Poem Involving An Impulse, Cold Hands, And A Book

Your hands look cold
As you gesture emphatically in the early morning
December sun
One hand appears frozen over the cover of your book
The other illustrates the details
Of the story you are telling.

I wonder what would happen
If I were to follow through on my immediate impulse to take your hands in mine
To cut short your story and warm your small pale fingers between my palms
What would you say?

I do not know, so I stand and do nothing
But think that your hands look cold
As your eyes glitter in the early morning
December sun.