Grenadine & Tulips

[grenadineandtulips]

I have been gone, for nearly forever, but I will be back soon. 

[grenadineandtulips]

30

7.  We built a storm keep between the spaces in our arms. In it, we had adorned our marital bed with cotton linens and the phosphoresce of collected firefly jars.   You demanded that I leave my tired boots by the porch step. I have never feared the things from otherwhere, but you were so stern about keeping our virgin cedar scented floorboards pure.  After awhile I came to hum the treble of each of your beauty marks and,  I could even distinguish the authenticity in the bend of your mouth; I had never once seen callousness in your face. Your irises were melted and softened velveteen. But, it happens I am a collector of last looks. I do not know who I met with tonight, but it was not you. Goliath, stacking his things in piles. Fittingly, it was accompanied with an ominous sky, and the kind of monochrome backdrop and metallic copper taste that pricks your lips electric.  Before this evening, I had never begged before. Now, my chest feels rotten, and I think I have lost the songbird that resided there.   

[grenadineandtulips]

29

writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block writer’s block

[grenadineandtulips]

28

Faith is a singing voice, and you either have it or you don't. A gift. And some can train and train just to warble a wavering tune, tinny and reticent a wind chime in land-locked cornfields, where the breeze is scarce but warm. There are pupils, of the murmuring sawgrass reeds and silvered ripples in ponds, winding footpaths and reading gravel like treble clefs. After awhile, maybe they can croon a delicate hymn.                           But you,  I've watched your spinning fingers, deft and reliable as spinnerets, carving beauty marks and filling in each crevasse and blemish with velvet and peonies. I've heard you singing sometimes, and even to me, not in melodies but in gossamer and lilies, untying my scuffed boots and carrying me to bed when my thighs are too tired . I know i'll never carry notes like yours, but I can hum you under my breath and lay at your feet like a lamb. 

[grenadineandtulips]

27

It is 2 am and this is the second diatribe I have started with that line. My feet are sore and I have paced the leather seams from both my shoes, I am eating a supper of hard boiled eggs. I want to smoke but I have roses on my dresser. I want to smoke but I have consequence now, and someone to answer in the morning. I am a patchwork and edifice of mess and human ideals. I think I am the product of the various  left-over parts that god or whomever wasn't sure of. I am piece meal,and in the late evenings I feed wanderlust and dream of fantasize of finding some deliverable island where I am not some strange and curious entity to be mutilated by various ordinary vultures.                   In the morning I wake up and try to function like there are not canyons, tangerine and clementine sunsets and wonder in my brain. Like I am not chronically wandering from my very own skin. The truth is that I truly  am disappointed by most people, and I am sure that they can say the same for me. Normal folks don't like foreigners and I am speaking metaphor in tongues. I walk around rambling like a woman gone mad, holding out my insides cupped in mottled palms like some grotesque manner of shaking hands. I am love incarnate, I am the gnitty-gritty things no one ever wants to feel. I am cracked ribs, and blood-beating hearts and every lover they held in their arms that they could not have. I am vulnerability in a breathing body. 

[grenadineandtulips]

26

You cannot peel open the bud of a blooming flower without plucking it from its reaching vine. Nervous fingers mutilate it's green petti-coat and shred the velvet of it's gossamer petals. I am a lily grown on a broken fence, a Jonquil in some city alley-way.  I am tired of the bricks and chicken-wire tangled about me, I am tired of the spread of English Ivy and my bones being delicate as reeds. Avoiding boot-heels and kamikaze Taxi-cabs.  I am tired of children throwing stones that spider-vein my dirtied window panes.                  And the goal was steadiness and pace, but I took your love like ambrosia to a set of starving ribs, I had never tasted earnest and honesty before I took them from your mouth, a whiskey-ed treacle and syrup decanting my gut warm. Honey-wine. I had never felt another soul empty into my paltry and rattling marrow and atrium.  And I think I make you nervous, I think I swallow you up like ocean swell, swirling and corporeal.  But I would lay at your feet quiet as a lamb if you would just keep your hand on the small of my back, and kiss blood back into these bones. 

[grenadineandtulips]

25

Someone somewhere has been humming you under their breath; I have been singing your name like a hymnal. I woke each morning the sun on my face, and kept you tucked in my pocket. opened you in the evenings, and dog eared the corners until the pages were soiled, and I keep flipping on my porch light, and leaving a pair of sneakers by my door. They are muddied, but I would wash them clean. If you would only stop to visit sometime. I would put on my best summer dress, and smile with all teeth and all the world's light would shine out of me like a brilliant dawn, because sweet heart,  you are the start of my day. 

[grenadineandtulips]

[grenadineandtulips]

24

It is 2:30 in the morning on a Saturday, and I am twenty-four years old. It is nearing the creaking dawn and I am impossibly tired, stumbling home from my service-industry gig. My breath is oaky and painted in Chardonnay. I have hours of holes in my boots. I know now that my lesson is in patience.                 I asked my mother once when she felt like an adult and she told me it was when she buried her mother. I dreaded that, but every life is different.                  I feel grown, because I am working to the bone, and I am waiting. I am a painting, hung on a wall, cable wire and delicate frame, suspended in time and empty vacant museum walls echoing a staccato set of heels. Collecting dust and commentary. 

[grenadineandtulips]

23

A chest full of coins, that rattle when I take evening walks, deposited by lovers and passersby, I'm saving some change for bus-fare, a trip to blooming fruit trees and a place to collect the sun on my face. I don't know who I am here, I don't even recognize my own mouth. 

[grenadineandtulips]

[grenadineandtulips]

22

I'm standing behind a velvet curtain, my toes nervous, perched on a stage,  and every-day-ordinaries are just painted on scenes to push over, and folks are audiences in uncomfortable seats.  I didn't sign up for this role, this hum-drum melodrama with no cue cards and poorly written dialogue.  I wanted a romance like the trap-door i'm standing over, that pulls my feet out from under me until I've hit real ground, splattered on the cement floor,  Declarations of love with a kiss like a right hook, blushing a fever and some really powerful score. 

[grenadineandtulips]

21

I am reckless and wanton and I can breathe in the petals of Gardenia flowers to be reminded of what sweetness is like. I will plant their seeds in my bones, and snip off their blooms to lay a wreath at my own feet; I know now that my arms are long enough to wrap my own hips                         I have both Sampson and Delilah boiling in my blood, and I have wrecked plenty of welcoming homes because I didn't care for the wallpaper. I have stood heaving and ragged over piles of rubble because their plaster was the color of roses. But the air is cool today and the copper gusts have goosefleshed my skin. I took a walk outside to be beneath something ominous and corporeal, hovering over me and reminding me I have all the wonder in the world. 

[grenadineandtulips]

20

A gentleman walked into my classroom tonight, broad shouldered, velvet skinned,  generously -muscled with a picture of a woman dangling nervously on a key chain from his waist. He purposely faced it to the students and not himself, like an announcement. She smiled up, and her grin was even and neat, and I can't remember if I have loved that much, if ever, to be carrying a face on my hip like a promise, Perspective is important, was that a declaration or a reminder for honesty? I'll wonder every day.                   I wanted to tell the woman with the strawberry hair behind me to hush, I wanted to tell her that not every lesson is a story, and that lips are like Berlin walls and sometimes it's charming not to have something to say all the time. She has eyes like a fish bowl, something to stare out of vacant and longing but full of granite and water and not much else.  I want to tell the student with the scars on her arms next to me that she is warm and her soul is like chocolate and she deserves poetry everyday. I wanted to tell the girl to the right of me that she is wearing too much perfume, that she smells like the powder room of assisted living facilities and bathroom candle gardenias. That it's making me nauseated. But my brain and my tongue have yet to agree, my words catch in the air and tangle in my curls, catch in the tips of my eyelashes and the creases of a furrowed brow and melt back in to my skin.

[grenadineandtulips]

19

This evening, in the bath, I navigated ropey capillaries and the lilac fireworks blooming on my shins, I salted and gleaned an impressive collection of scabs, and smeared a stinging salve on my abraded palms.  I know that if I had been born years ago I would have been burnt up as fall leaves. I know, I would have bound my breasts, and smoothed the line of my hip, and donned men's trousers, I would have worn creaking leather wing-tips and shorn my curls until they lay flat on my skull.  I would have gnashed a wretched tobacco pipe boldly between my gums to yellow my teeth and I would have talked as an auctioneer out of the corner of my mouth. I would gain clout, as a gentleman, as a scholar, and spread my word from ear to velvet earlobe till I was a lord about the land.  Then one day on a grandstand, atop an important rostrum decorated ornately with gleaming medals and a copious audience of admirers, I would tear open my blouse and undress, and they would drag me by the hem of my neck until my heels were bloodied and torn,  they would drag me bare-breasted and spitting ribbons, to some lake or some aged and mildewed post and then they would drown me there, in either water or flame,

[grenadineandtulips]

18

I am collecting all of my sentiments personifying them in puppy form, and selling them off to strangers on the street to be loved. home and fed elsewhere.  My guess, is this is the best, and most efficient way, to become a cyborg, which is my goal for now. 

[grenadineandtulips]

17

It is time for me to pull all of my sentiments from other people's pockets, and return them again, to carry on my hips. I don't trust them floating freely with matchsticks, and breath mints, and yesterday's laundered safety pins. I don't trust them rummaging about with other folks' poems, and the lint they've collected from nervously reaching their hands inside. Someone may grab them out, and then what would I do? Without my secrets, and promises tucked into linens, without the corner of my mouth? I would rather keep them warm with my own thighs, I know I can count on their sturdiness and their ability to catch heavy things.    My life revolves around picking up monstrous objects, and putting them back down again, gracefully. More often than not, I am catching them over my head and hoping they don't come crashing back down on top of me. I mean this both figuratively, and literally. Today was a little of both.