Turquise Daughter

 



The world it does spin. This we know
Not in space as we are told
It spins in time we feel and see

Two hands you have on two long arms
With one hand pull at ocean's tide
The other one is gauntlet gloved

Two brothers borne and lived and died
One -- a knife plunged hilt deep in hot flesh
of girl and man. Contentment was beneath

The other was a stone, silent and still, but seeking
was dropped into a well      <Plop>    was the only sound he ever made
Finding depth plumbed was done

Their sister is a circle ever growing
she whispers in men's ears
Oh turquoise daughter, this world spins too fast for me

There is a pile of leaves that smolders
There is a pile of leaves conceals more death than I have ever seen
There is a top between our legs that spins perpetually

A man stands waist deep in the sea
Rip tide cleaves him in two
Turquoise daughter, birds fall from trees

Turquoise daughter, darkening aflame
The sun is burning the western sky
Turquoise daughter what are our names?

The dog stars fly, the wires scream
There are two breasts,
but children three

When she dies she becomes the great white pelican  
wings drawing on the water
She cuts piles of leaves apart in flame

She cuts the breasts from off her chest
She cuts the marrow from her bones. The great white pelican
she cuts like no knife nor tide nor sharp stone can  

She whispers in men’s ears
She says it spins too fast for you
and wire cuts too deep

This we know, we feel and see –
the great turquoise pelican can cut the tides
but cannot chase the sea

Like everyone and everything
she was born from dusty effluent
of morbid stars.  She was carbon bright
A filament bridged and glowed

Like everyone and everything
she was born a bursting prophet of origin
Rare to rich over-burn of eventuality
She was born a single treed forest burnt crisp

Like everyone and everything
she was born tossed and caught
From blank non-being into being
From blinding gestate to cold dark earth.
                        A stone

Like everyone and everything,
she was born to veiled
nursemaids of pain and pleasure
One called need, the other want

Like everyone and everything
she was born crying out, to mark
short span of being. Compressed
together, screaming apart

Like everyone and everything
she was born fissured with impurity
That is the crack and split
of pyrophytic seed

Like everything and every being
she was born highly charged.
Repulse and attract imminent
A spark seeking the touch of circuit

Like everything and every other being
she was born a one time thing
in everlasting experiment
With potential toward all else

Like everything and every being
she is diminished by neglect
As semi-precious as core clustered diamonds
As underfoot as turquoise

Like every being,
she was born with unspoken name
Like everything
she was born with no spoken name

Like everyone and everything that must be
she was born blankly
grasping for a given name
Oh Turquoise Daughter




All things, beings all, are born clean
into a well worn and weary world

Stars glow red and every cell has death drive
Rivers -- metal ochers, metal yellows –
like bony fingers reach to sea.


Big waters barely beat.

Big waters filled with skeletons of all things,
like old coral, oily algae green
The surface is a sick skin, a fever sweat
for greasy rain-starved winds



A new clear creature comes up from mud
and squirms grub-like from chrysalis of debris

She does not slouch toward pestilent future or from corruption of past

For a moment she is pure and unseen

She opens eyes as blue as treasure-held fragments of that old sky



This world is putrid.
Each step sucks up the smell of sour decay

each shuffle through the plastic shells of shotgun wadding,

old bent butts, of straws and bottlecaps, clears infertile crust away

Each step pushes blood poison, brown and veined, up her legs



She moves toward exhausted alkali – the world as desiccate as leaves

She moves through and to a place where other beings might be or might have been:

the strange mindful intention of piled debris
hard ground stained by dirty fires

corners strewn with dried black chips of feces



Everything has one property to possess and share: every being has smell

Every sheet of paper bound and stacked, every book broken spined and outcast --

all dim deciduous memories, trustee of image and word --

withers in the infrared and speckles green in mildew damp

and smells like old pornography



All things, beings all
are death drive born -- seeking
starving for the echo source

of clear of bright of clean

She comes to a cityscape
The world cannot help but change
Everyone and everything pushes out
The city has burst unfilled, a hollowscape

Wide avenues lead to center, radiate
Only laterals crowd with argument and debris
No one, nothing meets or challenges her
but the blasted glass ground beneath her feet

The sentinels are empty and everything
remains is scurry scurry
Heat is frivolous spent
without movement - tangled

Everything pushes out
against what it may find
looking out with
city center empty eyes

She stands at epicenter
that is like a weak star
Broadways radiate like light
did it explode? vaporize? did it collapse?

She walks upon ashes and looks
around clear blue, no second sight
The beast has been still-born and yet
has lurched away, pushing out

She feels threat inevitable
One thing overcome by another

Push turned inward

She breaths it finely in



Her hands are metal black

what did she touch? Somewhere deep
there must be clay and hummus

untouched untrammeled  and unstreaked



From chromium clouds
the suicide air lays acid down

Toward quicksilver skies

the earth pushes up its alkali



A shadow flits across her eyes

Then another and another still

Some ancient creatures cloistered up

ooze across the formless sun



The wings push down push down away

She pulls up her feet and follows

Every girl in this hostile world

needs walk on, every girl needs a dog

The old birds move across the sky

they look down, lantern-like

at weary angles with the weary world obtuse

She follows them with long strides. She shears
She pursues strident and acute



Decrepitude falls away
fluttering like old lace
The paper clothed ground peels up
and flickers like grey flame


Her legs lift ponderous as wings

She is leaving but wishing won't make it so
Legs and wings astride as if willing

only made it so, they are away




The bird and her describe a whirl against itself

Then, whirl against the broken back of world

-- all its own armatures corrupt

its chemical sky collapsing into sea

Firmament slides delirious away

Guide-wires burn and snap like filaments


One by one the wings collapse and

fall along guide wires arsenic and lead

Still, she persists her vom'tous slog

nearer still against the blasted sun


But look, a smudge across the rarefied

A listless smile that is primeval tusk

and two black shines that are mockeries of eyes

The stillborn beast remains, a stain

and like a slug, consumes the world decay



There is a bright white –
a pelican astride being of legs and wings

And there is a sallow white
that is a fade, consumption

Please tell your children that you are coming soon

Please tell our children that you are

Please tell your children of your imminence



Last night a sickly light scarred

the low hung steaming atmosphere --

a load shot into the seeded sky



Tell me your children are imminent



In this morning's feeble dawn,

eyes old and wise, wings

spanning three meters wide,

the great grey pelican -- ocean's hound --

filled it's gulping beak the final time



And then Leviathan

blood plumbed with mercury and lead

rolled its eyes back in its head
White ribbed belly stretched to convecting winds,

oil covered -- a suffocating new blubber

Today is merciless. Wisdom is dead

Please tell our children anything


They are compelled to scratch

their spoken name in open osseous sand --

our children -- exposed and bounded by

the scaly crissing crossing trails
of mucous webs of slugs



Our children signed a blind consent

and they will desert wander

they will, our debts, pay

They will grow mute illiterate



They will be burdened by old laws

scratched in cuneiform upon

chipped slabs of clay

They have signed away

in aggregate, inheritance

Please tell them their secret names

Please let our children know

the fertile laws of nature will

supplant the fetid laws of man

We know it is too late in our cities

seamed and chipped, utilities choking choking

We know it is too late in our nitrous fields

collapsing into blue-green waterways

We know it is too late upon our greasy seas



We know that our mighty, ocean striding
derricks stand upon feet, iron-oxide red

Our valley spanning damns rest on feet of clay

Drown the wise men, may as well

let their harsh God be their judge



And we know it is too late for lightest sky

Turquoise daughter will not ascend, broad winged upon

now white pelican. She must at last return to ground

Life itself is there, tenuously choking
choking pale & self consuming



Is it too late?

There is a pimp and there is a whore

He cuts a dripping peach

Between his stained and crooked teeth

he sucks last pith from pitted core



He spits it out to speak while beating her

You bitch. You cunt. You piece of shit

Why does pimp hate whore? Why

do slugs use razor tongues

to drill in shielded shell?



Is it too late, turquoise daughter for sperm and egg?

Is it too late for germinate seed?

Too late even, for dormant tuber & wind-held spore?

Too late, the mollusk pimp will spit

Too late and more. Too late and more

The story so far is bleak. Here is reprieve:

Writers often do despair of staring blank at blank white sheet

The naked onus is to fill judiciously

To silent say what is a need, no more no less

To mete out hard truth and fragile beauty like rare thread



But you will seldom hear despair of staring darkly into inky well

The truth is there -- that every word drawn out of it is destined to fail

The truth, I fear, is bleak. The well is most opaque,

into which a fragile truth might, like a penny wish, sightless sink



Ink black, paper white, the writer knows his own hubris

and fears any hope is a like mistake

But must hold truth that blackest ink and whitest sheet

are last exhale of pulpy carbon tree



Poets task is not as engineer. Ink in words

is only slowed and followed spill and swell

Lines laid down like ordered thought are dark waters

cutting courses to root rich earth and thirsty fertile ground



The story so far is bleak, yet it persists

of its own power, not by me but through
with the same natural mystery that drives toward dark well

both sunlit stream and obscured roots of tree

Turquoise Daughter, sink some ships
No man alive can comfort you
Let flesh fall like so much drifting slag
sparks brighter than our meager sun
[cancer causing animus, tumorous]

Turquoise Daughter, halfway flayed
the broken earth thrust between your legs
It hasn't always been this way
Remember that – it’s your great pain

Let the great putty-men flake away
From that land raise a great wail -- alone and whole
See the silver raven speak on black water's face
Sink some ships and follow her. Collect the wails
Sew them up in womb and crack your mighty legs

Turquoise Daughter create a scream
A scream complete, more mighty than the Word. Sink ships
Send bodies flaming into black seas crushed
I may not know to not fight back
 
Turquoise Daughter bury me
Use my blood as grease
Let Annihilation be your name -- create!
There is no man can comfort you
There is no man that does not fear

Not in you but of you. Breath communes

The sun yearns red

Great storms batter the eastern seaboard

The west burns earnestly toward sun setting end


We are not unfamiliar with his desires

Each day some burning man at his own red meridian

loads up and shines down bullets, pitiless

Down and down, we are groomed for this


A pitiful man holds downward his gun

The sun seeks red
The pitiful man seeks gray

The sky moans with ash and haze



Not in you but of you. Breath communes

We have been groomed for this

It is pitiless how long and how

the child seeks love from her tormentor


Lead hot sun and crouch behind

Mask on because breath communes

Active shooter drills, the sun's own red desire

is a gray earth, a charnel house


Who loves color like a child?

But unburnt waters rise, subsume

Where is color-loving child?

Where is gray man?

Where is rapacious sunlight?
Subsumed



Not in you but of you.
Breath communes. Alas, submerged

But all colors start in lightless deep

From spark, from movement,

from vivacious seek