Where You Are

The pretty ones are too pretty to know their places.

The young are never too young, the old never yet old,

The toothless are laughing

or silent in dark transformation.

In the lamb's eye or the tiger's mouth,

comfort creeps into discomfort.

Acceptance or apathy adjusts
the pinks pains and grey aches

while the object of years is the same

from one death to the next.

Still the broken heart keeps beating.  

I awake in a blue shroud. Dawn’s pale glow seeps through cotton cobalt sheets, an azure wave under which I drift, dozing in a soft haze, eyes half-closed and crusted with tear sand. The shuffle of feet, the scuttle of sea crabs, pull me from the reverie dissolving in this Yves Klein tapestry. Your thin silhouette is a fleeting work of art, a mere two-dimensional paper cutout of the round, heavy night dweller. Your panicked pace and jerking joints perform my toy theatre; now for the scene of a brave and daring escape. 
As the door shuts tightly behind you, I surface gasping for air in one exasperated gesture. Airtight. A hot balloon expands against the cage of my ribs; taught pleura, a pulmonary distortion hardened and crackling as it rises. The growing pressure pulsates with the clock’s flashing red, heartbeats drowned in the blue filtered light of another empty morning.

I came from the sand.
I climbed out, faithless, to find you.
I covered my hungry hands with your smile,
I walked barefoot through coniferous woods,
I sweat glass and bled silver into your mouth,
and when you, the sun, the inferno that called me,
asked me why I came,
I showered sharks teeth upon you 
and returned as salt to my desert.

Josya

"Belong to" is not the same as "depend on", we once agreed, although some languages do not distinguish the two. You claimed you refused to be possessed, embracing your owner while holding my hand. "I wouldn't want her to say she loved me anyway." Sixty-three night strolls, a half-dozen bottles of gin and countless pages later, we were clearing out. She was calling you, but you'd be back, you assured me. I don't remember goodbye.

That summer, I was hiding again. I sent you one hundred hideous snakes of Medusa and you returned each one headless, covered in red marks, prodding me out from inside. Until you wrote you were staying. I knew the decision depended on her, belonged to her, and when you disappeared, you were still exclaiming that you refused to be deceived. Her words from your mouth were the last I heard of you.

Now that you are gone, what does your memory depend on?  To whom does your memory belong?

<>
they tell you
in more words
that will slide
off the tongue
as soon as
we leave town.
Raised in a mythology
of fortune
tellers without sight,
we dream sleepless
nights spent chanting
<< abracadabra. >>

Finally, A Medusa. Pharmakos. One.

The porcelain of her smile gleams

iridescent in his stagnant memory,

complementing her cerulean eye.

Pristine china white and stormy beryl
churn over the victims of her gorgon gaze

as a thick syrup of malice drips

from the corners of a gaping,
black mouth like a cat's, frozen in a frown.

Praying for safety cloaked in deception                     

as he plunged beneath the undertow of night, 
a glance illuminated his 

heart, hardened 

by her wicked hair of snakes.