Practical Blasphemy:

Another season of sadness
leaves behind a crispy exoskeleton.
Empty yellowed aphid shell
pale and clinging;
leaving me wondering
just how that crunchy little bug
escaped.

My childhood summers were Hell-Floridian long;
spent hunting down ghosts
in the back of my school playground where only 5th graders went
(unless they were sca-red).
From April to October we
robbed from caterpillars,
spun bracelets from thick milky webs,
fearlessly climbed the tire wall-
even when the tires were full of water
(even when she slipped and broke her arm)
((even when some kid got ringworm in May)).

Little did we know
that you can’t really play Sardines with only two people,
that Hide-and-Go-Get is a game for both genders,
that there is a name for girls kissing girls.

And later,
when being born backwards began to affect me more,
my summers were spent
burning and praying.

Then taking opiates.

But spent.
Gratefully spent, and then left behind
or so I thought because apparently it clings to the bark with its foot fur Velcro hooks
for fucking ever.

Fall- appropriate
and humanely conducive to long sleeves,
will distract me with a kinder form of death.
Then the beloved soup season;
dark and Rising and magical,
and one-hundred and fifty calories a can.

It is the eruption of green-hot;
the so-called new beginning
the so-called second chance
the so-called fresh start
that never fails to reveal,
always,
a shell.

And it waits for me like a tomb.

quiet cross.
peaceful cross.
Serenely gazing down
upon happy,
fortunate faces.

It tells all of the beauty,
the pride,
the blessing of a gentle life under its wings;
and none of the fire shit intestinal vomit drenched
torture
your limbs will endure hanging on it
left to die
with only a vague hope
that as the doves peck out your entrails
and feast on your delicate eyeballs,
you will be rewarded.

no one can see the Body.
only the cross.

The golden mornings and silver sunsets
bleed into a sepia sort of evening,
where memories stain like photographs-
crisp and colorless.

Waiting from the waist up
for the Atlantic to drag us to the shore
with board rash and jellyfish stings
and sun-bleached smiles,
the air curled with wet/hot
and a hint of stupid.
Longboards drip in my garage
smelling of dust and salty sex wax,
hiding our waterproof lighters for the ankle-high days
(which were both and so were we).
MAR-I-JUANA.

Shelby’s, Sandpiper’s, and Sticky Fingers
all steamed with coffee and jazz
as I attempted apartment pool suicide.
Cinemagraphic spotlight swim-
tinged blue,
ringed with palm trees,
and lustfully warm.
I wanted to sink like Ophelia,
suffocate with the stars,
fill my pockets with stones and take a walk with Virginia.
My bodyfat would’ve done it, alone,
but pile on the surf,
the drugs,
the collective, constant sigh of a city at peace with itself,
and every individual grain of sand from St. Simon’s to the Keys
and I should’ve rotted in my own nostalgia three years ago.
Instead, my feet touched concrete
(because everything has a bottom).

Bury me in red Georgia clay.
Smear me baseball diamond orange
and dump me off the 10th Street pier
to dissolve like rock salt
in the same blue-grey as my lover’s eyes because I can not go on.
I cannot go away, I cannot go “home” I cannot GO.

The Sears Tower won’t kill me.
Nor will the Brown Line, the winter, or the Lake
(though you should keep an eye on those bacteria levels).
It is the gravity
of that gentle, quiet tomb
that will ultimately be my end.
Not the gulls, or sand fleas, or the ocean itself,
but the longing;
the loss of that lodestar.

Spin me,
Pull me,
Staple The Awakening to my skin.
Let my blood.
Let it sting.
Let me sink.
But, please,
Let it be bottomless.

The old woman’s hands
brown and spotted
like the sugared crackling on a ham
crackeling
cracking
split and peel off in little flakes
like roofing shingles sliding into the emptiness
a noise unto themselves
like the gentle shushing of the sky to the leaves

dried and dead in the curb corner
along with roadside-grilled worm carcasses.
The lowly, sun-worshipping creature
fried and flattened
neatly dried into a crisp, brittle coil
under my feet.

The old woman’s hands
(SPF protection-less)
bake Rotisserie-style
as the Ant-God
my Gaud;
the great gaping cake-hole of civilization,
smiles from above.

My sweet-breath flower boy-
mushroom tender
thing-bearer;
Flour boy
with shattered saucer eyes,
putting silent somatic smile sparks
on the kisses of my cheekbones.
He cradles
me in my dark iron swaddling,
reminds me that there’s more to life
than being born in Dallas,
and will never, EVER let on
that I pluck my bellybutton hair.

He is
Christ
Prometheus
philanthropist martyr
who will raise his own sails
using the ropes that bind me to this
skin cell teal table.
He is
Spirit sex
Soul touching
licking my wounds for me,
gaining nothing but the sharp,
stigmata stains slashing at his watercolor skin.

My pale-faced white friend
who always bites the hand that
feeds-strokes-rapes
him and now me.
and it’s that delicate tea set
China-fragile hand debt that flitters
Over my retinas when a man says
“Shhh.”
Kind, gentle trash-pollen boy who
knows so much of what it means to
be a man that the negative
connotations of the title
INSULT him.

I am sorry
that he bakes and blossoms,
but if he gave in to the
oven summer sun parch,
I would wilt, as well.
I am not sorry
For the flexi-bone calcium bend
I can see through his shell,
because my boi flies and crushes
in an absinthe finger song;
pen-string-squeeze
like a Tricky Tori Trip-Hop bird,
Storm smiling.

Gratefulness
rises in me like bubbles in Liquid glass-blood,
kiln-killed,
sticky scorched,
and I would rather boil alive
than have skin.

At about the same time my eyes changed color,
something snapped in me like a glow stick.
‘Non-Toxic’ only means
not poisonous enough to kill you
(everything in moderation).
I wear sunglasses to cut the glare,
ashamed of the lime light,
so that others may be able to look at me in my neon-oddness.

Everything I’ve ever done is invalid
because I see through lizard’s blood and Miller Time.
How does one go about creating art
when you cannot see out of your own electro-shock eyes?

I am blind like God is blind-
grandiose and perpetually flinching;
rubbing with our wet, red fists
to get the blood out.

And when that light dies- a slow fade
behind the black blood-crust,
I will be grateful to have been so hidden
so muted,
so secretly bright
that I could have lit up the whole world with a blink,
and then extinguished it with a tear.

Your mouth is like a razor-lined pussy;
The JuicyFruit smell
Engorged with bruising
Around the stitches.

Let me suck out your poison
From the glistening rift between lip and lip.
Let me heal the wound beneath your
Tongue-ties
With my honeysuckle salve
And undo them with my cherry-knot tongue
Forbidden from calling
You! You! I choose you!
As you drive away-
Back to California.

I’ve been searching for a goddess ever since HIM:
My love My light My heart drunk on cologne
And rejecting every deity since THEM:
My anchor My pestle My hopeful Sisyphus.

But with you,
I became the saint
Unto whom you appeared,
Laid me on your altar,
Worshipped my body,
And cut out my heart.

It’s an honor to die- the heart offered freely,
Pulsing in his priest palms,
Holy in its partition,
Venerated by the magi,
Blessed by the shaman.

But still ripped out;
Screaming,
Tortured,
Still beating,
Still bleeding.

Then fucks my heart-hole.

His cum clots my blood;
Seals the wound shut
And now I have another mouth-
A mouth like yours-
Mauled by love-
A beautiful disaster-
A seeping, semen-filled fjord
Stitched together by distance.

The higher you get
The smaller it seems.
You don’t see the river,
Only the schism-
Crags interlocking to zip up the earth.

I am still on the altar.
I have been abandoned,
After good use,
To the vultures.

You! You! I choose you!
but you are gone.
And, like Prometheus,
I will be ever-sacrificing
Because what I have to give
Changes every day.

Wet baby bird
skeleton,
pucker plucked clean and dry-
even though I said I love you.

I could’ve been your prophetess.
I could reanimate and wear garnet earrings and peel an orange or cherry rose charcoal in 30 seconds flat and bellydance and drive a Lexus and snort when I laugh and fuck
for hours…

No warning.
No oracle, this time-
just Pyriel alone in the desert,
defeated by the third Prophecy.

I thought I was safe,
since the world already died during the war.
A misguided needle buzz slave,
I thought I’d made my mark
when I was marked,
but when flying over the intracoastal with Kid A
I was what BOO! died.
I watched him.
Watched him carefully swab the blood
off MY freshly inked labia
(but in a different way than She touched you)
and knew I was safe.
Split and picked and
PROFOUNDLY sad,
but safe.

I guess no one is safe without Her,
because I searched for my
dog
my sign
my Goddess
my angel with a strawberry sprinkle doughnut-
and found
not even mountains of yowling, writhing white agony
to lord over:
just wind and wrists.

My feathers
spread in bloom around your head
like the most perfect of prozac blue halos.
(You take your drugs, I take mine.)
Peyote prisms streaming through them
as the sun takes the desert from the spiders
and gives it to the snakes.

You look at me.
Kind:ly.
Kindly look at my bones
tacked to that sticky prison
flypaper grit,
desperate and fluttering.
Electrical tape
trapping screams inside my twisted beak,
spine arching towards
away from the sand.

Kindly.

Look at me.
Cock your most perfect of paleontologist heads
quizically
to my death,
and in the midst of a Motion Picture Soundtrack,
forget your own.

Fuck you
for being silent
while I bleach like a scar in the dirt.