PALE LIGHTS

sparkle woman is pale
under dark lights
she is under pale lights
sometimes she disappears
seems she wakes
but the mad crowds
see nothing

sparkle woman sweats
in her cold burnt skin
cuts her toes she stumbles
on the splintered floor

but the mad crowd
sees nothing
the dark lights have bitten
through the gentle cords
where their eyes were
their hair is dirty and grows
from their fingernails
they are darkest
under the pale lights
their mouths twitch

under dark lights her outline
emerges from the wall
a nuclear shadow
the pale light
inside her now
when the lights go on
sparkle woman
disappears
seems like waking

REMEMBER?

remember?
when the sun heaved its dry spew
magnified us
bloated earthbeaters
we were larger than our skin
we were giant creepy crawleys
spitting and sucking our own poison
into our wet holes
& smoky pulsing homes
remember?
when we were shrunken and clinging
to our collapsing homes
radiating tinfoil
reeking of mildew
eating holes in us
remember?
when we felt better
it was all white
and the medicine
smelled like canned cherries
we nailed our eyes shut
and pried them open
the box delivered
all those colors
that melted
in our waterlogged palms
remember?
we sought the fire
that would burn our light to the surface
it was all we'd ever wanted
to fall with the sun
as it bloodied itself
on the earth's rocky crags
remember?
when we were ivy and
grew around each other
intertwined till we were knotted
and our blooms rotten
air so heavy thousands of dreamers
found something they lost
and the moon
startled us through the trees
remember?
all the faces
the way they wrinkled
and the stars
poking through the fabric
of the light that formed us
the way the molecules combined
to bring us home
and whisk us from it
remember?
we were so silly
with our babytalk
and our scribble scrabble
hobbling
our our awkward legs
and all those worlds in our heads
we were so funny,
remember?

UNANSWERED QUESTION

I am my parent's miss-hap,
My holy mother and father
Enshrined
I am my own dead children, the criss-cross
Crotch step of dead ends dividing,
I am all the threads I once wove,
A cloudy shroud of light refracted skinlike
Intermittent bands of unraveling wool
I pull it over my belly to cover the cold hole
I burn like undigested noodles and I burp, meaning to cry
I am a blind mouse sucking on a sleeping nipple,
I am a broken glass sculpture,
Shattered on the verge of a twisted lightbulb
Popping and sputtering filaments
Molded with cements,
Infected stitches and shining shards
Randomly catch the sun

Tattered rags stretched over bones
Rising like yeast, stretching till implosion
Rising, grotesque
I am a virus
A dream I am dying to awake from
I am a virus, a plague is life
A wet and messy gift
That looks itself in the mouth and gags
I am a cancer of too many words
Choked with images and starved for form
I am a broken Polaroid, snapping photos that fade
As soon as they appear,
I am a pile of blank photographs on display
In an empty gallery
Scratch and sniff, the blood leads to the source

I am a flash of flame
I am light
I am a burning bush
I am light
I am a bundle of bones
Untitled, page 3

I am light
I am shooting stomach cramps
I am light
I am projectile nausea
I am light
I turn to stone in the mirror

I am nothing I can describe
But I wake up every night afraid
Of a wind inside my head
And I'm crawling blindly
like a newborn Mammal
towards the warmth
that searches for itself
over and over