Writing Life
In the wake of receiving new eyes—
ball and white, red and black—
my intellectually adoptive grandmother
has departed her own gnarled hand,
likely moved on by neglect.
In her place the Scottish hag
Cailleach of my blood,
the same gnarled hand but missing
ring and pinky.
A red leather bracelet
sewn to my wrist—involuntary surgery—
whispers sanguinely to the half
of my innards that still
belong to the ragged dead hung on
my right ankle as I exited the womb.
-M.
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 black tarp shrouds instead
tacked haphazardly to broke-down
chain link.
-M.
To the god who loves to roll and nuzzle
into mortal filth the way a dog does
warm grass in a shit-strewn dog park
I offer my sea-less Empire.
The zit-faced babies in their wife-beaters who hang
at the shop across the street
from the central high
who jump the ostensibly smart kids
for quarters to buy snacks
meet in secret over their five finger discounted
bongs and pay homage to you
unknowingly.
You’re in the joke that isn’t funny
sober.
Beloved,
Empirian Theos—
the grasping palms of the Northside
panhandlers with hole-y stories
who live in apartments more lush
than mine—these belong to you also.
Preside over the dying orange groves.
“Infected mosquitos here. Hydrocephalus risk,”
your inviolate scripture between the scruffy rows.
Haunt
our landmark abandoned mall—
commerce’s inbred cousin.
Spin the carousel’s lame horses
that rock drunkenly on their tarnished poles
and whinny in the night for a bullet
between the painted eyes.
I offer our fame to you also—
Sammy Davis Jr. lost his eye here
in the dirt of a precarious fork
in the road out. It has rotted away
now, no doubt, brain food
for gila monsters, but the animus
would make a fine moist orb atop your scepter
with no eyelid to blind it to our resigned demise.
Watch over us, oh God of the Dark
and Disparaged,
I pray.
-M.
I could ruin him by his lips
allow the flesh salt
of my pink finger pads
to desiccate the delicate
membranes
to petrify them
forever
together.
-M.
He stained my skin with the fruit of his godhood
crushed young strawberries down against my soft places
left listless trails of bruise and pulp
He placed one and another between my teeth
and commanded I bite like I
was an uncivilized thing
close enough to the leaves and stem
to taste the bitter break
between god and creation.
-M.
That he and he and I
could lie
down in a bed together
just to lie
to speak of inner things
to lie
to lie
this bed bears no jealousy.
-M.
Stone-heavy, it bows its branch to the black
earth. Oxidized blood brown
hints at a cheering red which might have been.
Striated. Scuffed like shoe leather
worn away from starving children’s toes
clenching and unclenching the kilometers
of an August death march.
-M.
I reached down to play and forgot how it went
this piece I wrote when I wanted to be a composer.
All I could play then was Clementi’s sonatinas
so a sonatina is what I wrote and noted
In the style of Clementi to give the unintentionally pedantic
arpeggios some gravitas.
It was easy enough then for my fingers to churn
on the left hand and twiddle on the right.
But now, silent stacks of sheet music behind me,
leaning towers of dog-eared Film Score Monthly,
my battered mind turns her back on the fingers that long
for the old twiddle and churn
back when the books held more hope than silverfish,
when the room used to be bright,
when the piano was only a little out of tune.
-M.
My one beauty
my one pure thing,
I can’t heal you.
I can’t.
The fever’s in your girlish mind.
My hands fail me—
are clawed up by morning.
There is nothing I can hold
through the night.
I have been there before.
Let me focus on my wine,
plying lust.
Play along with me.
Let me hurt you a little more.
Crawl down here with me,
willing.
I’ve given up the face of God.
Yours will do.
Let me scour the trusting flesh
from your cheeks
with stony grave dirt
and self-prophecy.
Rub your nose in it—
cologne
and your blossoming body
of sorrows
still heady in my clothes.
Your scent is changed now.
Woman,
let me thrust into your hands
wet loam and loathing
rotting limp leaves and spoil.
Make glory of them for me
I beg you—
it is all I have left as a man.
You have been a guiding light
and I will never
let you
leave me.
-M.
I wrote poetry about
jazz long before I
earned it, listened to or
liked it.
Now I
purr and deliquesce—
can’t consume enough.
The god of jazz, whichever slinky
Power he may be punishes
my ears by
insatiable hunger, my
dissonant heart by
terminal syncopation.
-M.
M. N. Ashley 