snippets / scribbles

“Dead Bananas” is in 12th Street’s 10th issue.

Peels on 5th Avenue.

open your lips with rosewater drenched on a cotton pad. mist it on your creases and recite poems on the toilet. take a cold silver vessel. pour three pools of bitter oil. move it into your mouth.    swallow. any morning full of empty basins. cup, sink out of water, aching belly. my womb is exhausted. i’d like to write about a phallus occasionally but the literary penis has always been off limits. or everywhere    i can’t say which     its both.

contact the goddesses. if they don’t answer they’re outside of you somewhere making love in a meadow. a reply came late by pigeon courier: “it doesn’t count if you don’t orgasm,” signed by Flaubert’s Emma.

the following things either matter or don’t matter: when you wake up, if you get out of bed, what you do at all on any day. the literary vagina is aimless, overused, unsatisfied. i like Flaubert but he’s a puppet master. i’m not supposed to like Emma, but i do like her a lot.

these tongues aren’t mine

and it is yet complete tumbling.

Relief,
delicious weight, from floating
phases hating yourself, especially
To be reminded.
To make a home in oneself.

& when i get tired of words there’s always an image.

exhausted by the sounds that language makes.

Hey, I felt the coldness of my winter
I never thought it would ever go
I cursed the gloom that set upon us, ‘pon us, ‘pon us, ‘pon us
But I know that I love you so
Oh, but I know
That I love you so
These are the seasons of emotion
And like the wind, they rise and fall

The Rain Song, Led Zeppelin