the witches in my head won't go away

i quell them using drudgery as narcotic
 at night they break out  broomsticks
ride a full moon across sleep, wake
 me to cackle and pop.and the need to pee.

the sky's  booming curses from niarobi
 dressed in gangsta goth from tampa,
chained to pink purse in black fish net
gonna catch something, jolly boy.

three witches ride  home, conspirators
to a hole in my head they own.










***((()))__=




what i learned at my cousin's bar mitzvah

i didn't have a cousin who was a jew
my converted aunt seldom attended family functions
always a sollitary sojourn. i didn't even wonder
who she was in a child's scheme of things
the childless are alien. there was one jewish
kid on our block, his name was david. we rode
the same bus to middle school every day. i read
chiam potok, holding the book title side out
but he never looked at me, didn't invite me to the big
event.i heard he messed up the recital but no one
admitted to going. i would have gone, just to hear
hebrew spoken out loud in the south without
someone burning a star of david on the roof.





it was different times.
it was the same times












*((((

so these bitches come up on me and my
man, you know?all hey hon eeeee they
voices like butter an only i hear
 the hiss of a too hot pan, my man's
 been talking bout ownership
 bout broken relationship,
 how the nation slips into infidelity,
 well captained, progress as the hand. no
 i'm not down on gay marriage, i'm
 down on all marriage. but whatever,
  you wanna get married , get married.
 wanna open the vows to whatever
you feel comfy with? have at it, with copies
triple signed on the dotted line.
 i think i rote all this before. wha a bore.
if opening relations means
 communication is better than betrayal, i'm
saying what's the issue,
a bit of ethic tissue grafted on to maybe?
anee way. some like it cho co choklate,
some vanilla,these bitches in my hood
 betta watch they fella



















((

at dinner you excuse yourself
ill from the task of eating the meal
you made. the pill kicked in , suddenly
the idea of being upright is ludicrous
but you'd like to take  your maggie down with ya.
please bring it my love my hot rod trophy, wife.


the  day ends in flits and chitters. half moon above
the transient. to the west clouds
 gang up,streets seem unsafe.
gather the brazillian pepper branches
you artfully cut  from your natural trellis.
so proiud of this piece of eden
sliced from the shoals of commerce
 dream on my sweet
while the drowse of summer kicks in,\
 lulls the cricket harmony
 the approaching lighting
akin to rapture.

the chase

the curtains on the porch have fallen
sodden from the low front's assault
days of swollen skies like sadness inside out

you are at home
with mother so i fill out the hours
imagining you as my daughter, now,
if i were younger what  these sheer panel
curtains could be for dolls
that hold your inner fears and woes.
or you might wear this worn denim hat crown
chasing ducks along pondbanks, stamping your foot
when you can't catch the ducklings, offended.real
tears fall from your skies.
i can't say why i keep the torn hatstrap
it has a leather slip knot that might be useful in
monster time when the beast seems
indefeatable till you catch it at the doorway
and slip the noose around its neck.

one moment.

dear sister,

i woke this morning thinking of not you but other things, how my hands might heal but only if prayer works, or something similar. yet i couldn't go back to sleep. unbidden, the picture of you with a close friend, visiting my neck of the woods, came again. my neck . the woods. you didn't call or in any way let me know you'd be this close. just another instance in a long string of them that i'm putting together into a necklace that begs to hang on my neck. it wants to choke ignorance from my vision  of you and i . i had thought we were close, that circumstances kept us apart,that we were friends that would make time for each other when the opportunity arose. however, over these many years apart, any attempts to do that by me were met with lukewarm enthusiasm which quietly died. it never occurred to me that despite loving me, you just don't like me. odd huh./that i wouldn't attribute to our relationship the giest of our family's relationships with each other.

i have lost so much childhood memory. i don't know if it's consequence of having to shut off- twenty years of marriage to an emotional abuser that i can't recall details of our common bond, but i'm sure that selective memory helps me survive with small bitterness. i miss the details i didn't know i'd miss. the last time i forced myself into your life, i thought we'd had a great talk and you gave me back some memories i will cherish despite them being melodramatic. we stayed up way past your bedtime, talking, smoking, laughing. the next morning you woke up with chocolate on your shirt, due, you said, to midnight sleeping munchies. in the same breath you told me never again. i thought you were joking at the time but now i know you were quite serious. i have determined to stop setting myself up for these kinds of encounters. stop expecting your friendship just because we have the same parents, to stop asking you to come on weekend excursions. what i hope to accomplish with this is to let you live in peace. i don't want you to have to make up excuses or feel fretful about a deadline you have no intention of meeting.

we can't help whom we like. we can sometimes find reasons for the liking but it's a consequence of our total experience more than reasoning. you have friends you've had since high school, some longer. i have memories of friends that disappear. it appears to me that i am easy to leave, easy to forget. if it weren't for the accidents of our births, we wouldn't have known each other at all.we have wildly different interests and ways of looking at the world. although my personality revels in these differences, yours feels uncomfortable with them. i wonder if you wonder how we even came from the same country, much less the same upbringing. i would attribute that thought to you, but i think it may be projection. it's awfully arrogant of me to assume any thought on your behalf. after all, i don't really know you. we haven't shared a home in over thirty years, much less a neighborhood. i abandoned our hometown as thoroughly as you integrated it. you cherish those gone days, honor them by keeping up with people from the past, visiting our mother's and sister's graves. i have not been to that cemetery since the last burial, when were both still teens.

 truthfully, i don't think we did have the same upbringing. i was the middle child and you the youngest. sociology says we had different roles to fulfill, that our parents treated us differently. common sense says of course they did, we are not clones, merely siblings.

let me just say i miss the things you held onto. i would spend a whole weekend listening to you recount them if i could. but i won't be begging for your company anymore. i will be satisfied to see you a few times a year as required by holidays and or birthdays and or other celebrations that demand both our presences.

there is a certain amount of freedom for me in this decision. i no longer will worry about my chronic lateness or being scolded by you. that will be an inevitability i'll force you to accept by not apologising either. dad made that perfectly clear to me last time i saw him. it doesn't matter that i've been surrounded by people that force that lateness..no, i'm not excusing anymore. it's me, a part of me you don't like but accept because you have no choice. i will no longer set myself up for disappointment by requesting audience. i will accept your invitations when they are submitted if i can, but i won't expect them. i will not invite you to events that you would have to wiggle out of in advance. i won't extend the hand, so you don't have to shake it or ignore it. i think it's probably better for both of us that way. i let go demands and expectations, which frees you from any guilt i may have unwittingly placed on your head. i love you. i even like you, despite your flaws. i have many acquaintances. i will remember that you are one of them.

psylids are bacterium transport eating machines

what if aliens in the form of bacteria
have already invaded the earth and they're using
these really strange looking biological machines
that mimic already existing insects
to perpetuate alien warfare on the  human race by
making all of our fruits and vegetables inedible
what if it's not aliens, what if it's some crazy jihadist
cia talibinista onward christian soldier revelationist group
that's so far advanced we're like roaches they enjoy
crunching underfoot. what if the bacteria are like power rangers
and once they've established their footholds in the various crops
they'll put their rings together and form a more complex
organism that will finish the kill. then they'll asexually multiply
and fill the earth, how's that for a meek inheritance?

a non o non o dey

"i want someone to feel like bill withers about me"

-lynze 2012

so what was this all about this dull knifed life set to paper. a molecule that writes, a bubble that bleeps on and off with my breath? how many bodies did you go through to find me at last?
i was never away. it's an always never kind of date
when i think of ghosts you are primary among them
ghosts from my childhood seldom haunt me anymore, it's like
what part of the sea didn't you understand, little gnat, little lifted in the wind ette
this expanse carries the scent of jubelie and grits. when the mothers died
when the older sisters died when everything you were supposed to model yourself on quietly faded out of the way how could you stay there? in the rooms men come and go, talking of chris diangelo. but sport was not your art, my tall drink of sand, my surfer of salacious. your family is still forgiving you for the young lover, your friends are happy to not know who you are. can the poetry, girl, you is writer no more.

many times i have talked with you thus. but write i must. give me guidance in my hour of need. give me something to feed on. this nebulous has a moth's insatiable apetite. burrow in the wool, egg laying. when will my babies hatch and eat holes in last year's sweater so i can fill them with poetry? ay/? is this what love does to me?


if you can't write about it it's not a healthy love
but you can write about it and you don't.


today you

grade some papers at the kitchen table
while i mow the yard. cook yourself breakfast.
wash the dishes spotless. laundry, yours. they
seem to have rescinded the offer and you say
this is how your life goes. who am i to disagree?
i have been worked by the machine for many more years
than you served. when you scorn it, it seldom forgives.
you must be exceptional and more ruthless than it.
it is a person. the supreme court has ruled it so.
it is a jealous god and wants your love in labor.
so, the adjunct mill for you. i should do a tarot on it but you
don't like the dark arts confirming your worst fears and i
will read hope into it thereby dashing all of ours.
they do not deserve you but then none of these institutions deserve
the true scientists that somehow survive the sumac thicket
that serves as research today. we will lose all new pathways
following corporate footsteps because the corp wants a body
to sell at market, so it can purchase its kings.

meh, but what has that do with us, small in the incomplete
black and white remodel kitchen, eating nachos and grilled cheese?
your time to change the world was yesterday and you pitched a hissy fit.
there is no cure for bad decisions. i tell you there must be some wicked karma
in your recovery program. the tornadoes spawned from your wingflap
multiply ahead of you , tear you apart at the gate of the garden.
this is something i have seen. why do i tie myself to such storms? surely
the lightning will take me when it can, i don't need to sleep with it.

but karma, i dunno, cause and effect so..your personal space spills into
everyone, cracking its knuckles, bangs shins, topples stacks of papers
piled in your wake. maybe look at that. i think most succesful people
aren't quite so scatterbrained. yeah you were a genius back in the day
but you began too late and fizzled out too early.

but see, all of that, i don't blame you for it. it's like, that's just how it is.
i was supposed to bring poetry back t the american people i should
have been a high school teacher i might have had healing hands but
these futures were squelched early on. can't have too many in the one percent
that would make it 2. competitive. that's where we both fail. we like

the easy win. and life. huh, it's a ten round boxing match
against the butterfly with the bee's sting.


so, i'm gonna go wash and wax my car now the rain's all through.

inorganic traitor

it's tough with no carbon
to move me around tendons
revolve in latticework to the tune
of whatever's   in motion nearby
it doesn't help that i know
thoughts can read minds
the trick's  in the frequency shift
dumb as a rock applies
literally to speech.
keep that in mind
emotions wave through me
bubble through  pores
exciting uncounted galaxies
that spin within me
their  bright cometting tails streak
past without enrichment
i think about the nature of falling
apart a crystal at a time
i lose whole chunks  with less mourning
  though i fear  the crunch of hammer
 the chisel's bite earth's
quake. but
 the little ones
 the wee bits
who notices who
 i am when  nano
  dust
 spread  over windshield and field
gobbled  up  by plantroot0
00000000000000000000000000000000  feeding the other.

loosing passion

i've felt it from your skin
woken by a touch , forgotten
in past's damp swamp, a cypress fallen
sun exposed, explodes with squiggly
tadpoles turned to frogs with gulping tounges
and suddenly you can eat again.

i've heard you complain of nothing's
sucking sound, the calm of desirelessness
a warm gulf tidal pool, remnant of tide's
recession, ear's last pop. and now i have to give you hand
when the poem just begins and i wonder
why i have no time to write and it's all about the living
for which i have no passion if i cannot write.
o my love , why did i forsake you?