Strangeworld

Mom told me that I dress like a junkie
Maybe she knows that I am
She feigns a little dream of a house by the beach
Between the Indian grave and old Uncle Sam
Skipping and tracing those ne’er-do-well days
When we were still her golden girls
Ordained in purple and polka-dot dresses
Hair like silk, teeth like pearls
Perfect people in a gift shop snow globe
American wet dream picture frame
Perfect people, all the people as one
Crying and weeping at the thought of our names
Oh, perfect people, all the people as one
And everything under the big yellow sun
Created to live and to laugh and to love
And to spread for The Man and cry till it’s done
Is that the vision of the middle class woman
Two and a half kids, a man by her side
His guns still blazing beneath the suburbia
She’s keeping together by spreading it wide
The news says they’re putting acid in candy
And that speed would be ethically better
Princess Diana appeared in my trip
And said “do what you can to upset her”
So I’ll shave my head and pierce my tongue
Then poison my body with tapers and drugs
Yes, the people are perfect, oh the people are one
And everything under the big yellow sun
The American Dream, the one and done
Cops in the city making love to their guns
Christ has the backs of our overseas sons
Comedown to Mellencamp, nervous and stunned
Oh, we’re all perfect people, the people as one
Perfect people under the big yellow sun

It’s in the perilous boughs of the tree
out of blue sky the wind
sings loudest surrounding me.

And solitude, a wild solitude
’s reveald, fearfully, high I’d climb
into the shaking uncertainties,

part out of longing, part daring my self,
part to see that
widening of the world, part

to find my own, my secret
hiding sense and place, where from afar
all voices and scenes come back

—the barking of a dog, autumnal burnings,
far calls, close calls— the boy I was
calls out to me
here the man where I am “Look!

I’ve been where you

most fear to be.”

When I was a young girl, I had a fear of mirrors
They were always broken / strewn to the floor
I was stepping over shards like gruesome egg shells--
a reflection of my internal state.

I would hold my breath in passing, a white berry-knuckled grip
as Bloody Mary sidled right below the surface.
Her presence kneaded at me like ringworms.
I didn't have to utter her name,
it sounded just like mine.

When I washed myself, dosing in lakewater and gasoline,
I hoped to rip away the blisters and reveal something more loveable.
I wanted to tear away everything
my eyes touched, whatever oozed contempt.

The blood was nothing but a manifestation
of acknowledgement tucked beneath floorboards.
I was a living, haphazard instrument of terror,
anxieties scuttling like rats.

But at least I reacted, unstuck from
the repetitive Jabberwocky dancing upon the grave
of my dreams, those American ice cream cone dreams
I was taught in Mind Prison.

When the stars shrieked through the windows,
I squeezed through the visual blockade
I poured my syrup in digital molds / pranic pixel escapism
cherishing silence, protection
from pyrokinetics and the mind body connection.

My avatar was perfect, the more life
I siphoned from fruit flesh, my joie de vivre festered
in shallow spilling adoration.
I relished like a queen in being (un)seen.

The world is spinning
and you refuse to fall off.

Yesterday,
you stabbed a crooked finger
into my hidden diary
criticized my Fascist inflections -
debated my scribblings
on Marxism,
noted the notations
indicating Munchausen by Proxy
and then

choked and lamented
upon vague references I made
concerning Virginia Woolf,
Sylvia Plath,
Anne Sexton,
Cruella De Vil
and Hitler.

You literally littered through
my private Pandora’s box
of personal prose and poetry -
with an unbridled
crazed compulsion
and without my
permissible permission.

Pointing to bold typed words,
such as “ebony”
and “vacuous”
and “sociopath”
and the one
you couldn’t evenly pronounce –
“phlegmatic.”

You stomped your hot heavy hooves -
screaming with the dire urgency
of a rape victim:
“What the hell are you talking about?”

It didn’t take very long before
I simply shrugged,
slugged the remaining remains
of my Rolling Rock,
took your index finger
guided it across
your ratted sweater

and placed it
upon your
hopeless,
hapless

heart.

As the tide rises, the closed mollusc
Opens a fraction to the ocean’s food,
Bathed in its riches. Do not ask
What force would do, or if force could.

A knife is of no use against a fortress.
You might break it to pieces as gulls do.
No, only the rising tide and its slow progress
Opens the shell. Lovers, I tell you true.

You who have held yourselves closed hard
Against warm sun and wind, shelled up in fears
And hostile to a touch or tender word—
The ocean rises, salt as unshed tears.

Now you are floated on this gentle flood
That cannot force or be forced, welcome food
Salt as your tears, the rich ocean’s blood,
Eat, rest, be nourished on the tide of love.