Her Own Portrait Is Painted
Her own portrait is painted,
Painted like a turning profile
Of a deflated pigeon
Caught last day by a tipsy hunting man
She has her own portrait painted,
Seizing an ink-free pen
In the middle of the night
A smile held in place
Reflected in a broken mirror
By the bedside
And a departed tear,
They told her she'll never mewl
Laugh like the Jeconde
As the avid reader is sure to get her words back
She'll get words back
Catch some of them from that aching head,
Reshuffle them like a mason
Laying stones, above, so below
Or a hairdresser adjusting messy bun style
Or a partially sighted strolling the streets of Budapest with a flashlight
Flight,
Flight,
Sight,
the pigeon is released
The wings read lines of wisdom
And that frustrated lady never fails
To have her portrait done
To be merry the way a toddler is
You have to have a crush on
A man who is in sincere love
With words and tears
Never be infatuated with someone
Who is taken with swords and spears.
This is how her portrait will be well painted...
I was safer
I was safer in my mom’s womb
Like the roundness of the crazy world
I was turning in circles in her womb
the umbilical cord gave meaning to my tie
I couldn’t flee that sane world
and now I’m thrown in this insane zone
knowing not how to manage it all
as I’m without the cord, I realize not
the direction of my indefatigable mind,
I left it with arid bones,
cobwebs of spider caves,
Without maternal cord,
I figured out how exhausted my body has been
frustration mumbles higher than the whispers of fury
I was safer in that balloon-like creation
My dad’s fault or bliss
to turn that little frail girl into a woman
with great expectation of a nine-month paradise
of bearing a doomed boy,
swinging right and left, up and down
with huge imagination
of stepping down into the New Haven
ignorance feeds me like a carrot fuels a rabbit,
A dovish gazelle, an ecstatic plate for a famished tiger,
in the heart of Johannesburg,
A big-headed dictator with rocky palms,
A stone-like heart sipping beer to vomit poison
watch Bentham’s panopticon
I was safer for there was no fear of people
no race for promotion
no ascendency to chaos
no descent towards an abyss, full of worms
I was contained in mom’s womb
no room for enemies
treachery
bribes or evil,
in a nine inch placenta, I was a prince,
food, reaching me from the endometrium
I grew with no cries,
no shootings or hit
I grew in dreamy silence,
nine months on cloud nine I was,
worrying less about the crazy world
holding an umbilical sword
to conquer my secure stay at mom’s motel
before the windows of waste stretch its elbows and before
my Queen releases me to Terra
I was almost safer there, though
I’d be safer in my plush tomb
Her poems featured in Writing in a Woman’s Voice, The Writers’ Club, Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal, Dumpster Fire Press, Medusa’s Kitchen, The Rye Whiskey Review, The Annual by the Elizabeth River Writers, Valiant Scribe, Potato Soup Journal, Literary Heist, Four Feathers Press, Our Poetry Archive, The California Poppy Times News.
No comments:
Post a Comment