Writing Life
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.
Golden Sexuality sits by an open window
his hair shining, his lean legs crossed.
He considers the cave-riddled 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 his instinct-flexed shoulders
still warm from the running catch
his hollow chest where the feral heart echoes
root-wounded back
crossed legs
golden, shining hair.
-M.
One fourteen-year-old lies
in another’s lap face-up
squeezing the pimples on her
I’ll-die-for-you-sweetheart’s scabby
sunburned face.
I lie
with you, naked back to the earth
dug deep
moist and freshly turned
picking the teeth of a death trap.
-M.
I saw you bought that house I loved
on the hill, off 
Doheny, hard to get to
during rush hour or when the veins of LA
burst and bleed all over West Hollywood
up Sunset
and gush through the Bel Air gates.
The skin of my inner wrists
with her oxygen-blue undertones
(soft contemporary design)
is up for sale too.
Ten million or best offer
(like the house on Doheny)
plus, realistically, another million or so
to meet your execting standards.
How deep, my Darling,
are your lightless pockets?
-M.
He offered me a cigarette from a gold case.
“Try one of mine,” he said,
and maybe didn’t mean the cigarette.
It could have been laced with psychedelics, but
his deal-striking face
by the blue flame he lit me with
lulled my terror of the monstrosity
it might become later—
the teeth with which he would tear at my inner thighs.
I watched the cherry crawl up the paper—
promiscuous death in her wedding whites.
-M.
In the back bedroom at the little
fold down desk eating my snack
of a Ding Dong and room temperature
Diet Cherry Pepsi
annoyed at the immovable maps and
call-in bomb-dodging journalists
soaking up the screen where my
Beverly Hills Teens and She-Ra should be.
Especially She-Ra.
She
more than the bomb-dodging journalists
was type for the writer
I wanted to be one day.
-M.
Thought I was special.
My cabbage didn’t stink like
other people’s did.
-M.
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
collecting tufts of red dog
hair from between the fence slats
to make their nests luxurious—
and sound proof.
-M.
I am trying to sleep and the neighbors
two doors down have a live mariachi
band in their backyard. It is three
days before St. Patrick’s Day.
I imagine the nachos, con guac,
a perfect metaphor for the Cathy’s
and the Prods. By force of hand the
orange and the green come
together—messily. They fight it out
in the gut.
-M.
![2004_1799[1]](https://mnashley.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/2004_17991.jpg?w=656)
M. N. Ashley 
