class exercise? no clue. college, when capital letters were for suckers (are?)

dawn is heavy as pewter caskets

eyelids painted on papier-mâché faces and

death is the color of umbrellas

and clichés, a red canopy over words,

a heavy tarp to hang the rain from,

green like grass grown upside down

and my eyes in the mirror are the color

of steam off a faucet,

my breath clouding silver with

droplets of dew dripping over my face,

This open and shut of stars in the night,

The moon peering through a bathroom mirror,

Shouting at vanity through flowers and rain,

The hand that clasps too tight is sweating

around the earth tonight and like eggs

or my heart it simply refuses to break.

Word Vomit Free Write Treasure Hunt: recent

Love is this how you entangle yourself in the threadbare patches of carpets
Of bald strings
Of fish gills and silver wire caught up in the inhale intake
Unravel your sandpaper signs
Down jack knife corridors I sling echoes
Lilting off stairwells and combed through wallpaper fibers
Oh darling curl me up like corners
Red fibrous sponge of heat is raw
And throbbing like tin foil
Blades I dive at you and never break
The surface I wish I were lily pads
Or stepping stones
The pads of your feet are more alluring than
Sandwiches
Jelly fish
Flamingo father my spider veins spell out your name
And my skin crawls for you darling
Darling I crawl toward you
Thumbs jammed deep into pockets
Please leave
My pages closed my mouth sealed
Hermetically as coffins ragweed sorrel mare
Hiatus
You are lovely as calla lilies bent
At the stem and dream of cracking ice and skates
And you. Diving in sweetheart
Companion anonymous valentine stop
Me. My candle wick heat is scratching for matches
So soothe me.
Hold me.
Alabaster glass and dazzling.
My secret.
My shark.

Compilation of Metaphors, extended: circa 2009

When winter ends please place my heart into an empty ice tray

Wiggle it under water till it’s submerged

And then freeze it

I don’t want to thaw.

I want my love to stay as ripe

And preserved as it was the second before you

Parted your lips only after the kiss so you could say

It’s over.

And I felt the fractures forming then

Fissures I have sutured with tendons,

Capillaries that overflow

I don’t want you to see me now.

Pickled and afloat in jars and waiting.

I want the sedating touch of frost.

Seductive chills down bones.

I fossilize my love into stone.

Compilation of Metaphors: circa 2005

Here I gesture like eggs,

Sitting on shelves in doors and here

Is not where I left you,

My round smooth body cracking

From the weight of a mustard seed and pimentos,

Fractured heart breaking from the sound of a word.

Here I let you stuff me like olives in a thick glass jar,

You let me swim like an eye ball in labs,

Peering at you through glass walls and

Abandoned on shelves with the ketchup,

The light here goes out whenever you leave.

Like a dog I salivate to your breathing,

The sound of proximity giving me fits.

You tethered me to a pole in a junk yard

Where I’ll sell the tubes of my heart out for scrap.

Here I am stuck on the sill like a plant without water,

My dry dirt breaking to show you my roots

While you look

And only see dust.

In the purple room like a bruise I congeal,

Clotting the door frame and barking for your attention.

My arms grow towards you as though your heat

germinated my limbs while you

Search me like refrigerators at two

O’clock in the morning, fashioning yourself

As hungry but finding it was only

Boredom all along.