Unexpected Birthmarks

Pigeons peck at chicken scraps
& no barks respond as sirens pass

Nature now dry trees & replication
& dead birds keep flattening
on paintings—

Mistranslation is missing
the brushstrokes.

One visible fingernail like a nevus in a pine tar sky
& a finger sweep in the public frosting

Venus roller skates while steering the stroller
& the dog walker limps & has twenty-four legs.

Awkward pedestrians overlook
our mannered postures as we regard a solar eclipse
before a gazing apparatus

& continue these steps despite exploded heavens
anatomies of rats in the street—morsels & a mouse remain—
light particles

Perhaps for orphaned armoires & what they could contain
& ex-library memoirs expunged from the system

Nervous gleaners take a sleepwalk
around midnight & take a gander at the air

I diagram the firmament & note twelve elephants
steadying the atmosphere

o, mother

o, mother


You came to me dancing
with claws so soft
I cease to look behind you
dancing in the hollow
between the rattlesnake
and the peacock.

o, friend

She came dancing and fanning
as we coax her with the shakere
electric crimson shakes the lobes
leaves and feathers and seeds fall
from the gourd into fluorescent
blue emptying

o, sometimes with polished scales
I am she
waking.

It’s Not Enough To Think Planets of You, Saturnine.

Nothing grows until there’s a crack
a breaking of eggs and earth crust. My liver
my lungs etched in pottery motifs
Cave paintings on my stomach walls will be beautiful
stretched over a cannibal’s drum someday.

You are all silhouettes
statuesque embossing my eyelids
like the sun erupts through cirrus wisps

While you wonder about favorite pastimes in the arctic
you will catch this drift
that earthquakes never skip a boat
a beat to dance around this axis is perpetual morning
stopped abrupt by an equal or greater opposing force

I witness the body dissolve
I become a chieftainess smoking
a cornhusk pipe with tattooed lips
rapt in velvet contemplation.

Her hands deserve
a machete
for your eyes.

Your Inner Vision Is Illuminated By This Realization

Enough have you wandered
during the long period
of your quest
states the Yajur Veda circa 2300 BCE
and less than 1/32nd of the dime-sized world
knows it is embedded in darkness
and weary must have been the ages
of your searching in ignorance
and groping in helplessness.

Going to the polls, they believe,
can be a spiritual exercise
that can bring a positive change.

Is voting good
for your karma
or your soul,
besides being good for society?
All elections are important,
our psychics say—
how can Americans not vote
in a presidential race? Especially with so much at stake (with the country's soldiers in harm's way, a global energy and health care crisis, recession and more).

1:32 was once so common a scale
for toy trains, autos, and soldiers
that it was known as "standard size"
in the industry. A man is 2-1/4 inches tall (55 mm)
in 1:32 scale.

Behold the superfluous!
Nietzsche said, They steal
the works of the inventors
and the treasures of the sages
for themselves; white (or mixed race)
liberal democrats who drink five dollar lattes
in eco-friendly cups, listening to NPR
in a bio-diesel hummer (don’t they make those)
with a "He's not MY president" sticker on the bumper;
that also has a miniature dreamcatcher (1:32 of original size)
hanging from the rearview mirror; while carting around
an adopted black (or multi-ethnic) child (three-fifths human)
on a return trip from COSTCO and IKEA; welcomed home by Tibetan prayer flags hanging from the front stoop
"education" they call their theft –
and everything turns to sickness and misfortune for them.

Your identity has been swallowed by the media
and fed right back to you on the market
for only $2,349.99 per month
for the rest of your life.
To sin against the earth
is now the most dreadful thing,
and to esteem the entrails
of the unknowable higher
than the meaning of the earth.

This is the threat to our lives,
says Mr. Campbell.
We all face it.
We all operate in our society
in relation to a system. Now
is the system going to eat you up
and relieve you of your humanity
or are you going to be able
to use the system to human purposes?

Then he realized:
"I, indeed, am this creation;
for I have poured it forth from myself."
In that way he became this creation.
And verily, he who knows this becomes
in this creation a creator.
Your inner vision has been illuminated
by this realization.

The nocturnes. The sacral superimposed on the sermon. The nocturnes
the ornament and the hearse and the ornamental near the heart dangled.
The sacral. The temperate humor traipsing along the fulcrum.
The nocturne. The nascent sunshine eastern present ascent.
The sacral. The fulcrums. A temperate hour traipses along them.
The nocturne. The haste. The sunshine nascent nearest ascent.
The spore. The haste. Sacral superimposition on a sermon. Porous.
A temperate humor shifts inside it. The haste. The spore. The ascent.
The melancholic. The fulcrum. The haste. The spore. The temperate
heart traipses among them.

I Fear It’s Not Enough That I Think Planets of You, Saturnine.

Some stars you can see even during a morning sky,
although I guess those are planets as well.
I indulge a need to compile songs essay-like
for you. Layers of tone say more than all the reasons
I could name for you. How prison-like this form—
all tissue and organ-bound
ceaselessly aspiring for more
celestial routines. Contortionist dust.

Nothing grows until there’s a crack and a breaking of some kind.
Eggs and earth crust show us. My liver & lungs are marked
with common pottery motifs. Cave paintings on my stomach
walls will be beautiful stretched over a cannibal’s drum someday.

You may wonder about favorite pastimes in the arctic. As I witness
the body dissolve
as I become a chieftainess
smoking a cornhusk pipe
with tattooed lips deep in velvet
contemplation.

Her hands deserve
a machete
and your eyes.

O'leary is left with a dead guy and it's not right.

O’Leary is dead,
 and O’Riley don’t know it.
 O’Riley is dead,
 and O’Leary don’t know it.
 They both are dead 
in the very same bed,

and neither one knows
 that the other one’s dead
. Ba-rooom, Ba-rooom!

~Some rhyme I heard as a kid that stuck with me

What is right and what is wrong are difficult for many to decide. Just as figuring right from left.
Upon first learning to write, I was told that lowercase b faced right, so the only right answer left for d was to make it face left. Now dexter starts with “d,” so it can be tricky to remember in terms of direction. But if left is sinister, then I guess it’s not right.
When I was four, I did not know it was wrong to write left to right (or right to left for that matter) on the living room wall. Left to my own devices I continued to scrawl, but right when my father came home I discovered it was wrong.

; Meditation:

She came to me dancing and now I can remember longing
for obliteration with claws so soft I close
My eyes behind she dances in the hollow
between the rattlesnake and the peacock.
She came dancing and fanning

My brain is electric crimson
lobes leaves and feathers
fluorescent blue and I am
sometimes a serpent

o, Divine Mother
teach me the emptiness
show me eternal erasure

Purnamadah Purnamidam
Purnat Purnamudacyate
Purnasya Purnamadaya
Purnamevavasisyate

The jungle doctor speaks:
“The first Inca was extraterrestrial. She was so beautiful. It was only her. He knew. She came to tell us that we are in our bodies like wild monkeys trying to fly a spaceship—always pressing the wrong buttons. Leave the chatter, my brother.”

I close my eyes and we are all silhouettes of statues tattooed behind my eyelids. How did you become embossed here like a sun always breaking through? When will you understand that the earthquakes never miss a beat and the rotating is inertia—perpetual morning until confronted by an equal or greater opposing force.

इन थे स्पिरिट ऑफ़ लाइफ एंड ओपिनिओंस

I suppose I could conjecture, to you past, present and future, upon various reasons for the decision to abort my place of previous residence, Aside from the sheer nature of organic change in the currents of one's movements, migrations, causes for migraines, permutations and meanderings in any one person’s continuous life. If anything like the semblance to the trite thematic pursuit of any narrative’s protagonist or small child under the age of eleven, so is the consideration to change or more accurately eliminate all aspects of the current state of one’s, mine in particular, life. Perhaps I may enumerate these aforementioned “various reasons” affecting my decisions to explore personally unchartered territories and situations of the future.
Honestly, I would have to say that contrary to popular modern thought, I endeavored to explore this terrain of an opposite coast and similar soil, although buried under kilometers of impermeable surfaces, albeit steel and concrete and the like, because I was in search of a plant that could lift my spirits whilst hunting. This my friend and faithful kind comrade, is what one might dub meta meta, yet there is something in it that I understand, I get, to which I am attracted, In love, tickles my fancy and resonates with my innermost true breath. As I began to inform you my patient Lords and deities, is that unlike that which most are lead to believe, being a woman, But a uniquely-seasoned one in this regard, that I should be in search of such flora to the fulfill the purposes that biology dictates and that is for the most fundamental reason of childrearing itself; It is indeed to this end, I unabashedly admit, that I include in my justifications to embark upon such a vastly and seemingly impossible journey.
And this would in fact be a delightful “launch pad” so to speak, to mention that in accordance with the misconception of such a seemingly futile expedition, those nights of August inevitably veil our collective perception with an intoxicating illusion that night her nights are no doubt the most epic in length and emotional intensity. We must, however, consider that in order for tomatoes and other nightshades to grow and ripen properly without the common diseases to which they are susceptible, we must remember those actions taken and proverbs spoken by our grandfathers and grandmothers, respectively; They had allowed equal parts shadow, sun, dryness of the leaves, moisture of the soil, full moonlight and layers of swaddling mulch and burying on the occasion of a full cheese lunar event and sometimes even that which we call a harvest orange moon—And they never failed in this equanimity as a result of diligent hours of uninterrupted consistent self-implementation of morning calisthenics. There were of course other various extraneous objects that we may deem bric-a-brac in our contemporary consideration such as: tiger balm and other analgesic ointments contained in the most fascinating of packaging in terms of design etc., chickenwire, especially the grade used by my surrogate grandmother, Grandma Stewart—who was a sweet woman not only because she had spent the time and dedicated energy to crochet earth tone afghans in light of an analogous autumn color scheme—She had, as I had written, used this fine mesh (the chickenwire that is, not the afghan) to protect her imprisoned and abnormally large goldfish in the pond, most of which had turned out to be escapees of the annual Catholic School’s, unarguably to some and absolutely appropriately named “Christ the King” previously known as Saint Anthony, which also happens to be the name of my surviving elder sibling, more specifically, brother, who had rescued these orange-finned friends from the Fall Festival (Fest for short); In addition to these objects were also my favorite yellow legal pads and stacks of the once mysterious air mail envelopes that were stored in the piano bench, thus absorbed a distinct spicy scent.
It was from this temporal inflection or departure—I will leave it up to the anonymous reader to decide—that I made the next move and development in my increasingly improved ability and quality of penmanship, which also became the impetus to begin this discourse currently at hand.

फिशिंग फॉर मिन्नोव्स

Sand is felt on tin as nails or fists on doors
Tore down a war to stand with you man
And I stare at flesh and gore
Now hell and he send horses and messengers
Downwind signing against the gale
I feel slow and shallow as dew grows
New on a tan I felt
Grind the sand into the shore and fish will follow

O
Not

A

Wing
Has half
A
Life
Enough to feel a fellow minnow’s fin

इ ऍम नोट थिस और ठाट

I am not Lia Jennifer Jackson Brown Phillips Tanaka Coco Rodriguez Campbell Yaranon Hall
I am not yet
I am not a muzak rendition of "Let It Be"
I am not dry

I would like to be a deep-sea diving astronaut
an ascetic neurosurgeon
a hyperpolyglot philologist or poet
a diplomat who plays drums in a rock band

I will become inappropriate for city life
fly a trapeze in the jungle
maybe do some mechanical work on rocket ships for extra cash
I will become a hobbyist for underwater paraphernalia
I will become the kind of old person who always buys the same kind of shoes
when my soles have worn thin
or at least live and die with someone who does
I will become a spinster who reads a French newspaper on Sundays
understanding not a word, but femme sole
I will crochet all of the hairs and dental floss I find into a new outfit for the Statue of Liberty
I will become the sister I have always wanted