SECRETSHAKESPEARE

You are not a wordsmith whatever you might like to think. ('Smith' indicates precision and coldness and fire: words are softer than that unless you mold them strong.) It's a difficult road to follow, and not many make it past the fork.  Choose a path, Janus says, whirligig keys spinning on his shoulders: I am a wordworker, with my tools too crude, forming rough-edged carvings painted with pretty imagery. Notebooks scattered across the landscape of a child's room, to be stumbled across, read, red-penned, in the thick and choking breath of night. When the bough breaks a hanged man laughs.  He carries typewriters in his pockets, and cigarettes

Cigarette-flushed face, you never bothered trying to quit for your kids, though you were one when you started. It wasn't real until the Big C knocked. Once burned, twice shy, your cousins remembered another family member, pixie-cut hair she once permed so proudly, double-crossed and dying in a cold bleached bed. Woman with the choked-down laugh, we didn't want to believe it was cancer, chemotherapy, hospital, beloved, eulogy, grief, when your daughter can't even spell the words yet. Pam, It's all we can do to hope you hold faith like your aunt didn't, that you will end your days knowing God.  There's nothing else now but drugs and one la

psychology defines schizophrenia as an impairing, delusional disorder borne in the person’s inexorable inability to tell right from wrong, hopeless fantasy from harsh reality, or even suspicion from acceptance but aspen is a lovely, flexible woman with names of imperial animal races that never belonged to them, with the countless colors of her eyes that she makes up with named numbers written in cursive sharpie on her palms she takes pills that seem to dampen & take away those charming things she always says to me; the voices don’t haunt or tease her, they’ve always respected the way she counted with willpower & the way sh

Rose blood on her tongue reminds her of yesterday's. Lonely bones. A heart's hoarded secrets, love me pretties, & scarlet letter dreams. But do these boys know of the bitter winter churning, like a blizzard in her veins? The sharp edges of half-empty kisses, or the crisscross folding of origami limbs? Her eyes, as deep & unfeeling as the ocean;

They said she has starving little poet fingers, & lungs- filled with the heroic hearts of nameless protagonists. But, she cries tears of Saturn on too-little-sleep nights, & coffee ringed mornings. They call her vanilla. Innocence, much too ripe to fall with freckles on her wander(lust) shoulder-blades singing connect-the-dot blues.