untitled so far

Black dress metaphors + WASP imagery=I watch too much Gossip Girl and I'm madly...smitten.

-d

****


You are the seam I don’t want to rip out.
I’ve re-sewn this black dress again and again;
the style has changed with me.
It started as a moon-shaped collar,
but it became a neckline as low as a drowned man
and the black satin lay strewn on the cutting room floor.
It was a dirty movie I never wanted to see again.

I’ve made some cuts
taken it in and stretched it out
crazy stitched a red heart
that looked more like the burning end of an expensive cigarette.

I wore it to Gatsby’s summer parties
a black hole in white-hot August
the sweat and wine blotting out the fabric
like an exploding feather pen.
The sun burned my shoulders
and all of old money New York saw me plunge into the pool.
I made a spectacle of myself
just as I planned it.

I met you on a yacht in the racing red heart of Indian summer.
All their couture eyelids opened to watch the idiot
throw herself off the edge in a deafening splash
but you pulled at my sweater
and I fell back on deck.

What started as yet another cheap performance,
yet another manic fit
soon became what some call love
(but I’m not sure.)

Carl Sandburg’s cat cleans himself in my apartment
as we create chills for ourselves, a magnificent fever.
You made me a perfect tailor
on a dark dance floor.

tova

I read a short interview in Time magazine about a woman named Tova who was a flawless matchmaker, but only for Orthodox Jews. She claimed that the first time she made a match, God spoke to her.

-d


******


Tova

Five pointed stars swing over my head
a silent wind chime
that only I can hear.

People are like icebergs
but age and violent sunlight
make everything that is underwater
seem less significant.

I must be some sort of reparation
for the ash we lived in all those years.
The only thing god could send
was flowers and chocolates.
Diamonds are the new manna.

I send them all to live in white houses
with fresh cut flowers brought in by some Gentile woman
every Wednesday.
Bathrooms with monogrammed towels
and portraits in the paper.

And I sit on my digital cloud
waiting for names and faces to magnetize.

satisfaction

Satisfaction

I was, as always, a spectacle.
My eyes, when they were shut,
were like two eraser marks
and when I opened them, you could see all the mistakes.

Such a strange bird I must have been.
The female flaunting her few bright feathers
that ridiculous yellow against brown.

You left when most people are waking up
and offered me no promise of finding an end to the maze
or a solution to the puzzle.
Only the theories spinning in my head
knocking against the skeletal wall.

Was I a whore or a nurse?
A trapeze artist or a crumbling statue?
An addict or a kind apothecary?

Another wedding dress is burning
in the little closet in my brain.
Only this time, I use the sleeve
to light my cigarette.

white rabbit

White Rabbit

So smoke your cigars and drink your wine.
There’s enough matches to go around
and there is always someone to clean your lipstick off the glass.

I never thought I’d miss the collegiate life.
That slot machine everyone kept feeding
on the off chance we’d get lucky.
Still I can’t say bohemia isn’t any kind of insurance
I can rely on.

Now I sit up in the attic drinking bottled Pabst
and eating blueberries for breakfast
too afraid to know love as anyone more than an acquaintance
he wasn’t that great of a friend anyway.

So I am left as nervous as a white rabbit,
waiting to see if I’ll appear
out of nowhere.

8/21--Cassandra

Cassandra

Cassandra is a chemical
colliding with herself,
the green blue light of reactions
a lunatic’s moonlight laboratory, where she
practices that same alchemy all rejected lovers know.

“I, more than anyone
should believe in phantoms.”
she says between bites of juniper berries
and olive pits clicking against her teeth.
Wine and smoke slosh and curl down her throat.
The imagined one imagines Cassandra’s marble legs
descending her wooden stairs
her ghost close behind.
His tears
hot rivers running down her legs.
Her exorcism: “My mind might be a nice place to visit
but I doubt you’d want to live there.”

“He tells me, ‘Write it down, Cassandra.’
as if I haven’t already,
but it is all fantasy, a story told to an ugly child.”
she explains, her brain a burning mattress
or a lukewarm tub.
Inside her body, guitar strings strangle her organs.
That same ghost, of course.

7/14--Aftertaste

Aftertaste

A broken heart can make anyone a sponge.
Faceless and asexual,
the guru of the coral reef.
A patient samana
(if only to be
such a beautiful word).

So I kissed a stranger last night
(the only thing I remember was that his hair was nice
it was blonde like a surfer’s swell
but it couldn’t be in this Midwest bar.)
We kissed behind a blue plywood door
if only to get the aftertaste of you
off my tongue
maybe this one would lift the curse you put on me.

Mine was a fate much like a rape victim
or a stray dog.
You are the only story I can tell
repetitive as a romance novel formula
(girl meets boy
girl goes against her coy feminine instincts
and falls in love.
best friend seduces boy.
boy gives girl shards of hope
best friend finally claims boy with a lease
boy rejects girl
girl resents boy)
and so on.

Like this I open the same wound like a Christmas gift
quickly, I tear away the paper to find the same gag:
the same rotting apple cores
the same damage
the same look of disappointment as the neighbor boy
laughs in his folding chair.

Lately I entertain ideas of new characters to replace you
a guitarist with no arms
a bored housewife turned cross-dresser
a hip lesbian with a parrot on her shoulder
some girl named Catastrophe
but you always creep in with your key of D (slightly out of tune)
and blue work shirt (slightly unflattering)
and your glasses on my dressing table
and your Dutch master nose.
It all shows up in the doorway
as I drop the bleach rag on the tile
or spill a bowl of olives
I cross out paragraph after paragraph
strophe after strophe
but you reappear again.

(sometimes when someone asks my name
I can’t reply with anything but
‘I’ll never tell…’)

7/14--Hôtel Mathieu

Once again, I'm giving the finger to expectations and gender roles and writing a non-romantically themed poem about a guy.
Here's to you, Matthew. Thanks for existing.

-db.

***


Hôtel Mathieu

You would sit on the sofa, awaiting the tragedy
of the day
like the dog-eared page
in the bathroom Reader’s Digest.
I’d tell you the tale directly from the tarot cards
that I thought spelled out my fate
as I flipped them over and over in my brain.

My psycho-astrology was fucked.
I’m a red beret lunatic born on a cursed day: November 3
when death has lost it’s novelty
there are no daisies in my eye sockets
and my candy skull dissolved in the rain.
There are no saints on my playing cards
I no longer fish for Saint Anthony
when I lose my keys.

You nod at my metaphors as you stir the macaroni,
the gypsy punk at the antique stove.
I’ve been comfortable staying in your film noir hotel
where it is all black curtains and red scarves
over white paper lamps.
Photographs of inky women with skin like paper
beauty is all chemical
all grayscale.

Lately you don’t mind my lack of scandal.
Everyone needs the neutral poet who only makes love
to her green desk lamp.

Hold the umbrella, amigo.
It’s been raining all morning.