I am the ghost
Who forgets she is dead.
I wander bare-toed
Screaming at strangers
On their own land
For speaking in foreign tongues:

They do not see me anymore.

I was a little girl here.
I played hide and seek,
And sang my little ditties
For the men I thought
Were noble merchant sailors-
Pirates! Pirates,

And I was lost.

I have a mortal wound
That no longer bleeds
Every face at whom I stare
Reflects murky visions of murderers-
Every voice over my shoulder
Is the vague whisper in my hair:

An echo of the last whisper I heard.

They all took turns at the stab
Did they dump me in the river?
They were unafraid
Because I am unloved.
My Father returns.
He rides through town.

He is searching for me.

Oh, the mess He will find!
Wandering out of place,
Out of mind, out in the cold-
Like Phantom Ophelia
Waterlogged and wrapped in weeds
Dead skin sticky with river alluvium.

What will He think of me in this state?
What will He do to them?

Across the bridge

Inflated heads on weak spines.

Cold hearts.

Clenched fists.

Cloven tongues.

Degradations and assumptions.
Apathy and derision.

Desperation thrown to the coyotes,
Put out in the cold

To die

Alone

Maligned.

May justice roll like fog
Over the ones who lick their teeth
At widows in whitewashed bones.

May grace restore
The pleading heart discarded.

What is the hidden substance?

Reliable when contained,
Framed on the wall
Like mercury.

All in flux is all in danger,
The stranger to stay
In shadow.

I pray, in wing and talon
I bate at every shift
In light

At rifts, I screech in alarm
If harm discerns
My exposed brood

I yearn the end of my quest
To rest on the breast
Of the great mythic unicorn

Named Security.

Can she be found
In this place of brutality?

Staring out past rooftop and treeline
Into the stoney-blue Illinois skies,
Waving like fields of heather,
Clouds in ever-shifting disguise:
Beauty is the lullaby that soothes
After the dark surprise.
Truth is the root that defiantly grows
Through the blackened ash of exposed lies.

In the consummation of Beauty and Truth,
Love inhales, and opens her eyes.

Light and sound.
Water and air.
Collisions and containments.
Gravity and propulsion.
Static resistance and dynamic flow.

Hidden wishes
In a state
Of constant flux.

As the dove departing from the ark
Sent out like a sonar ping
To the end and back again
With awareness under wing,
So these synchronicities increase
In both meaning and frequency
Reverberating as sound waves
Off the inner wall of shrinking
Time, closing in

Closer to the end,
Completion and consummation:
The eternal rock mountain.

Daniel 2

It’s been so long since I’ve seen him
Even from a safe distance.
I’ve petrified into stone
Reinforcing my resistance
To coffee galaxies
Swirling in the deeps;
To allowing the yearn
A knee bent to relief.
I am thoroughly untouched
Because it’s safer for us all,
But I lean against the wind
Sensing an endless fall
If rock yields to water,
And cold, and gravity.
In the final days
They abandoned me savagely.

I still miss the grins,
The lightness, the fun.
For a moment, I was someone’s;
I was someone.

I am wiser now,
But I’ve always known why
No one is capable of loving me
Past the goodbye.

Things for which I can thank the company:

I believed men were varied in sort,
Good and bad and ambivalent
But in ways essential
They are all quite equivalent.

I believed humans needed humans
Connection a cornerstone
No man ought to be an island:
But I’m better alone.

I believed people, in their soul,
Had a worthy aim in sight,
But they couldn’t care less
About doing what’s right.

Naive, my lofty ideals
Left me perpetually exposed
To everyone’s passing consumptions
With no hope of repose

But they have disabused me of many notions.

Good men do nothing
And as such, are worth the same.
They may recognize the war,
But they prefer the game.

Bad men do things
Because they can
There’s no one to punish them
Or prevent their hand.

Women aren’t afforded
Reductions of like divisors.
Given the state of men
We may only be victims or survivors

Based not on what we do,
But what we will take

And what we will not.

Some phases, my thoughts are sheer
Drifting as simple cotton clouds
Reflecting on still waters clear
Stately, demure, unbowed

In quiet, single-file procession.

Other rotations, expression compounds
In capillary network transmissions
Tangled complexities abound
In spaghetti-junction compositions

Chasing ideas and tracing confessions.