so lazy

Today I’m going to be all lazy and self centered and just post a couple poems people have written about me. But wait, they’re interesting!

This first one was written when I was sixteen and living in Arizona. The guy who wrote it later chased me around with a knife trying to kill me in LA.

In the time between two sunrises,
On a trip that began after sunset running toward the dawn,
and the rising sun born each day
at the city named for the bird of sun which rises from the ashes
but phoenix didn’t rise just yet in this city which bears it’s name.
Farther on down the road the sun rose bright,
a new sun for a new day, and an old freind for a new meeting.

I knew she was there and I would come to her house
the house she found herself, for herself
but she is so young to find a house.
She is all grown up and old with the experience of years on hers houlders
and the lessons of experience reflected in her eyes.

There are dogs there and her friend-child and she is mother
and she told me she wants a mommy
and she told me she wants a home
and she’s all grown up with her little girl voice.

In the mothers house no dog goes unloved and she makes a home for all
that go stray.
She heals their hurts and attends to the neglected
she trains the untrainable
becasue there are no bad dogs to her.

And children don’t go stray there either – not where the mother stays,
not while she has a house, (and even if she doesn’t)
even when she has no home, no mommy,
and I wonder if she asks if she’ll find herself there
among the stray dogs and lost children
and if she gives them a home, shelter, love, and comfort,
that if she finds herself there will she give them to herself? A home? A mommy?

Who can see that she is too young to have learned that
you can’t kill a mothers love with a bent hanger
that it doesn’t hurt as much not because it doesn’t hurt, but from the shock
of what could be ripped from her, and she too young to even scream
and even now she can’t feel the fire when it burns.

So she mourns her lost children
and all lost children are hers
and she will keep them
even if she doesn’t admit to love herself
even if she has to love them alone.

Mother have you ever felt
a hand take yours in comfort
a carress that gave instead of took from you?
Have you ever slept
in arms that held you warm and safe, that held you to keep you that way?
Who will wipe away the tear on your cheek
like you have done so often?

Between two sunrises
I saw the mother shiver in teh warmth of day.
I saw her not cry to keep her children safe
and take comfort from teh dogs, if nobody was looking.
I saw the silent tear run down her cheek unrubbed by caring hand
and saw her offer me comfort that she doesn’t take herself.

As Pheonix fell to the ashes for another night,
and I run away from dawn to home and my own night
and she faded in the distance I reached back with comfort
but couldn’t quite reach that far, through my unease.
————

Crazy, huh?

This one was written more recently by a friend of mine after the first fetishy client she saw with me (I know, she makes it sound like we were straight up whoring… really we just walked all over him. He loved feet and being walked on. But it was all new and exciting for her and she wrote this poem about it. Also, we are re-appropriating the word “whore” and often use it to refer to things other then sex-for-cash, cause the spirit of the thing is the same. Just so you know.)

me and tara
left late last night. adjusting tits and reddening lips,
shaving armpits in the hotel parking lot. we are only two girls
in a man’s world
six billion miserable souls strong. what do you expect,
the cosmic mother?

raid the mini-fridge of wine and dark chocolate
while the john’s waiting on the bed. she says, “undress”
she says jump. he says how high
are the prices?

no, there’s no cultural context for this. except guilt
and sharing pain in a a world writing, “shame
between her legs.” we lift them up and we kiss each other,
but he’s not allowed to touch.

me and tara left late last night. she had a soda
i had a clove. we got to talking
about what makes the stars go in their slowmotion,
what moans in a man when you’re down on him
like birds of prey, like sirens who were singing
to no one in particular
but got blamed anyway.

yes, eve was a sister. and aquinas never understood
why he masturbated every morning
with those devil women witches in his head. if he would have heard us
in her truck at midnight on the steel city overpass
proving the pi fibbonaci sequence
in the spiraling of hips, in the serpent woman dance
of the ancients, he would have seen god
so certainly clear crowned with seven nagas and curls
of dark brown. he would have found his name
in the fire-letter flicks of our tails’ arabic allure. he would have said,
i love you, whores.
but he decided to stay a man
wholly Other.

me and tara left late last night
and came back four hundred dollars better
but who can quantify the worth of our words,
our healing practice? our whole body science?

tara knows chinese medicine, herbal tao-ology,
eco-feminist folk remedies
for the white-man sickness in every head. she’s been through hell
like isis-diving to find the osiris
we lost and needed.

we get back early morning. we are sleepy sufis.
the sun’s seeping
through the dark musclechords of another night over.
we’re laughing so loudly. laughing full-body
cash on our laps, cigarettes and eyeshadow
indian skirts and erikah badu on the radio.
we are laughing,
talking sex and sin and sadness and soulretrieval.
you heard us
when your own sleep shifted
from nightmare to dream.

quicksilver,
like the sharing of hands.
———-

I like the evolution of them, it makes me feel like I’ve come so far.