Author Archives: babylon crashing

MONGREL’S HOUR [on all hallows’ eve]

31 Friday Oct 2014

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Thousand names for flesh and its answering
silence. Fold into you. Like so. Like so.

A child’s cry. Of pain and of pleasuring;
but not a cry, no foal’s moan that I know,

no lamb. No body turned to face the trees.
Autumn branches, immaculate muscles

grinding, we all grind but nothing will please.
Nothing that I can touch. Leaves stripped. Mongrel’s

hour. Let the grass weep in my image. Frown
as I swallow down what you did not do.

Here are the names that I give. Grave robber;
they dug and they took. You heard my scream down

in the field, you heard my bleating. But you
never replied; never raised a finger.

the myth of arrival

30 Thursday Oct 2014

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«El rechazo me liberó»
“Rejection set me free”
— The Monolators (2003)

I.
All this splendor seething. In
the airy green here is the head,

the heart, tendons, the blackened
shoulder that beats and breathes its reign –

and I – the child of an idle brain –
shook my head to scrap.

II.
Blue is my belly
intestines

entwined
I have been a
poor parent

to my desires
I wish to cut them out

translucent
alkalinic; the edge
of the blade at
point of entry.

III.
Patience roots in
this, so hard to slow
down these tangled
desires they demand
so much. Weary

at times, at tasks,
to do without,
make sacrifices
before
these
cravings
dry up.

new doorways

29 Wednesday Oct 2014

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From the back of the throat, phlegm or poem,
what we cough up is the same. Something hard

we find we cannot choke down. Hard, irksome
pain, you have become much like a barnyard

squeal, skin flick groan, slaughterhouse yap; the marred
bit of the song we skip over in haste.

Anything than to listen to those scarred
voices sing. Better to escape shame faced,

guts a pitapat, than to stay debased
by the things we have no control over.

Here is my throat, my O of mouth, the taste
of wind rising up, filling the puncture

wound of my chest; gun shot like doors, a new
doorway hole that the dark wind whispers through.

without consent

28 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Feminism, Poetry, sonnet

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“I hope the exit is joyful — and I hope never to return.”
– Frida Kahlo

Translator of omens, chloroformer
of slurs, abductor of wickedness rare

and new; at Shaman’s Drum, in Ann Arbor,
not one poet posed naked, nightmare

of flesh, on their book covers. Perversion
was just a word. Strange eyebrows, broken shoe,

Blue House; you’re still naked, your alien
body, without consent, remains on view,

exposed, gets sold. Others make us monsters.
Others sell us. Others bring us back. You

ribbon around bomb. You jaguar. You grief
in sheets too thin to scab. Blasphemies, slurs,

omens; art keeps us in hell. Who knew
that ink damns painter just like knife damns thief?

schmutzy golem girl

21 Tuesday Oct 2014

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Legend concerns the animation of uniformed matter (which is what the Hebrew word golem means) … [and] the most famous golem is Rabbi Loew’s giant servant made from mud of the [river] Vitava, who was brought to life when the rabbi placed a shem [magical scroll] inside the clay …”
— from, The Rough Guide to Prague, page 101.

In the end, being
nothing more than
river clay, she left
dirty teeth marks
each night across
my neck and
fingers. Clothes
shopping was
a nightmare.
Food bored her.
Often I found
her laying on
her bed, moodily
playing with
her shem.

Her eyes,
the same sludge gray
that they drudged her
up from, held all
the cosmos, twigs,
a drowned squirrel.

Once she said that she
wished to see a heart
break, “Or a bone!”
looking eagerly at my
hand. “Don’t worry, it
can be a small one.”
But it was the warmth
that ran wild in me that
she couldn’t believe.
Tracing a fingernail
across each injury
she’d left fascinated
her. “Purple means
love,” she marveled,
watching all my bruises
change colors the way
the earth changes
with the sky, seasons
and clouds; reflecting
back everything; fading
back into what it once
was; the earth once
again reclaiming all
it had ever created.

goatish, dim soul

21 Tuesday Oct 2014

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[first a sacrifice]

Now cup your hands. Hold them out like begging
or prayer. In that space where your palms do not

touch think of something decaying, something
alive. Breathe in this goatish swamp air, what

others call “swamp pussy.” Now cup your hands.
Hold them out to implore, pray. All the rot

of your swamplands are burning. Your swamplands
on fire in your poor, cupped hands. You cannot

let go. I’ll pray for you and your goatish,
dim soul; a beast led to slaughter. Don’t hope

that the goat knows the end of the rope. Prayer
stops when the goat is pulled forward. I wish

I had never seen that. The knife, the rope
and the terrible motion in the air.