Writing Life
When nailing down eternity
two pieces of wood will do
bound together by dusty
centurions on shit duty.
Try also iron nails
in a bottle of piss with
fishhooks, sulfur,
and the dirt from a murderer’s
grief-less grave
dug from the dirt patch behind
the green cemetery
not good enough
for a proper fence but bound
by torn green tarp shrouds instead
tacked haphazardly to decayed
chain link.
-M. Ashley
When the angel comes
Will I know to step back
Will I have love
Or will I have lack?
-M. Ashley
Golden Sexuality sits by an open window
his hair shining, his lean legs crossed.
He considers the hills wearing their shadowy green
the glacier-strike lake they curve into
born cold, gone balmy, rippling life.
He remembers stag chases
trysts in the leaves—the fleshy
shock and shudder discovering
exposed roots with his bare back.
He sinks his consciousness into the water
the fingertip tendrils of his god-form first
followed by the instinctually flexed shoulders
still warm from the running catch
hollow chest where the feral heart echoes
root-wounded back
crossed legs
golden, shining hair.
-M. Ashley
After the shower fruity
Shampoo smell released
Ascending from a turban unfurled
The Holy Spirit you kept
Under your hat.
-M. Ashley
If the ill-formed shadow-mass of “the civilized”
drives your wild heart to rage and howl
you know it goes on beating.
Though deprived of the lucid heat
of blood-hunts in broad daylight
it stalks within itself and becomes
its own series of revelations—
its own wastes
its own benighted hollows.
The sheep’s clothes hang heavy
but the flocks still fear you sleeplessly—
your shadow-cast
causes their lambs to quiver.
-M. Ashley
Fresh box of 12 bold
pens. If only they smelled like
brand new Crayolas.
-M. Ashley
Every two weeks I pay a college senior
(engineering major I believe) to rip
most of my eyebrows out of my face.
The right one always comes out higher,
arched more elegantly than the left.
“It’s the way your face is constructed”,
she tells me, as if an accusation of
the original engineer’s design.
I nod—a permanent inquisitiveness
in relief
over my right eye.
-M. Ashley
There is always one
bossy ass bird. He digs himself
a naked hole in the dense
mockorange, puffs out his chest and
sings at 11. The sparrows who live there
too roll their eyes and go on
about collecting tufts of red dog
hair from between the fence slats
to make their nests luxurious—
and soundproof.
-M. Ashley
We were meant to dance
I think
This is how the, “Push me.
Push me.” love rounds
Into something more like sway
With the long ache and
“Hold me up
Hold me up.”
-M. Ashley
This poem is about ten years old. One of my all-time favorites.
“How often have you sailed in my dreams. And now you come in my awakening, which is my deeper dream.”
-Khalil Gibran, “The Prophet”
In my dream, I walked with my god through his sacred orange grove. The trees all had white bark. That was important somehow, the white bark coming off like ash, but healthy healthy. The trees were all so healthy.
Today, walking my puppy, I came across two lemons on the sidewalk. It was around the side of someone’s house, not near any trash cans. No wind had been blowing so they hadn’t come on the wind. There was no lemon tree leaning over the fence or anywhere nearby. It was as if someone had been walking that way and dropped these two lemons for me to see and follow like breadcrumbs, but sour and more vividly colored.
I thought of my god’s white barked orange grove and could this have been my god walking this corner, dropping these citrus fruits for me? Do oranges in the dream orchard become lemons on the waking dirty street? Dreams communicate this way in the sleeping and waking dream. Color color, symbol symbol, the promise of a taste. A god that walked that way before you. Mystery.
-M. Ashley
M. N. Ashley 