And today my one strife is emblazoning incisions in a tome
For an open-heart surgery. And today I beat against – beat my body to a pulp –
Stone archways and doorways all through an imaginary Rhine divested of
Character. The phrase “I’m poor” wringing my inner-ear like cat candy.
Today I feel – how worthless –“I feel” “I feel;” These are completely words
I churn into a somnolent machine who refuses to transmit joy,
And cracking the code means putting your head in an oven. What?
Tag: poems
The cancerous floral proliferation of a creative-minded child
Can conjure rabies in a Dad like Snow White’s poison apple.
It goes: fresh undulating capillaries form, at dreamtime, ‘neath
The foundations of a country home conjoining not one, but four
Four children to the central Nervous system of a hardwood,
cross-borne body turning every virgin dandelion to oak
They cast each stem in pitch and resin
instill the fear of God in amber bones.
The cinders dance like lightning bugs
Over the bonfire’s conflagrating trepidation.
My father’s turn for Sundayschool unearthed
In tender minds the same way as a newborn
Full-breath, how fear could molt a ripened fruit
for squeezing like a heart to taint to taste to rule
And juice, mingled with the old pages splayed
My father’s gospel was beating drums.
To scare the devil with hot fruit fire and
His phobias, with stone bodies flexed
And I did, I smelled citrus in the cemetery.
Strung like beads of light amidst the graves
We did not wake the rocks with laughter
They’d think our feet were thunder.
You are beyond intrigue, luminescent when you fill a room.
I adore the flip of your feathery hair, the chestnut glow, your essence
I am filled with light and softness
Your laugh is the very meaning of joy.
I appreciate your nose. Your jaw, your shape, the way you light up and crinkle under your own smile, shyly, boldly, blushing.
Until you’ve slept on river rocks alone
Or worn a dying shroud of ants like lace
You’ve loosed your cold water skin from the bone
Clutched your self closed curled down, chanting grace
To the ancestors in your wounds who drink
The screams of nations for their strength, wipe the
Red from your mouth like a honeybee, gorged
On the ember of the salt and burn.
But a flick,
And their drums clamoring up,
Ashes to ancestry
Descendants to dust.
Ana Celeste Poetry 