Writing Life
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
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.
M. N. Ashley 