Writing Life
Roll up your sleeves
my golden god
these clavicles ache
for the cracking.
Your bare knuckles scrape
but are not scraped.
My blood spatters.
You stay freshly washed.
Dear god,
my kidneys have grass stains
and
I need an oracle
to locate my spleen.
-M. Ashley
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 recently turned
picking the teeth of a death trap.
-M. Ashley
Legally drunk on The Strip I slide
anonymous past the break-dancing boys
who sell CDs and their phone numbers
on the liminal bridge between
The Lion and The City.
Blurred, a bronzy man walks in front of me
gray skinny suit filled out to six feet, six inches at least
almost big enough to be the ancient god’s skeleton
found by archaeologists in an unmarked grave
somewhere in the backwoods of Greece.
On this night,
Caesar’s is the best he can do.
Its plastic emperors, audio-animatronic mythology,
and the gray-water fountain Evel Knievel jumped
wait to praise him
just north of the newest destructions—
about ten blocks shy of the lonely Stratosphere.
-M. Ashley
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
to meet your execting standards.
How deep, my Darling,
are your lightless pockets?
-M. Ashley
He laid back into the arm of the sofa
and let me strip him to the waist.
I worked the buttons of his dress shirt
methodically, counting
(there were so many buttons)
I felt
I would never reach the shirt tail
never release him
fully,
(until I did).
His skin was cold and seemingly
lit of its own. It was
the sickly purple gray of a hot
oncoming
(interminable) night.
His chest and abdomen
all full of little scars.
He opened his languid arms, wrists
still buttoned
(and bound)
into the shirt as I bowed
to kiss
the ancient wounds.
“Like you,” he said
(graciously)
“I know something of war.”
-M. Ashley
Of the Smoggy Valley—mountains, desert, ocean—
whichever climate you like
within an hour.
Of the sacred gray arteries—bloody asphalt—
broken glass shimmering in the shoulders—jaw-dropping
overpass knots.
Of the train that no longer whistles
the graveyard where railroad men rest—
the abandoned Catholic hospital
where railroad men were born
Of gunshots in the night—the green and
black—the godly ghetto birds—
NightSun—criminals who cannot hide.
Of skinny backyard coyotes—un-collared dogs
left to roam the neighborhood—the scarred
faces of little children mauled on their way to school
making the national news.
Of the withering Empire
of “these gangs came from LA”
of “we’re number 1 again!—
most dangerous city in the US.”
Of everybody’s got to proud of something.
Of heavy lungs
Of visible heat
Of prostitutes who stroll anyway—
immigrant tweens who twist their ankles
spiked heels stuck in the melted asphalt.
Of “this way to Vegas”
Of “this way to the baptismal sea”
Of kissing the corpse’s mouth
Of lying with it
one more night.
-M. Ashley
Serrano, Latino
Sunburned dark
Jeans
baggy T-shirt
train soot gray
Trenchcoat
patched leather
slain ranchers’ tack
115 degree morning
blacktop risen
shining
son of god
Round shoulders
Clinging glass
windshield clear
beer bottle green.
-M. Ashley
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
M. N. Ashley 