Blood Red Roses

Blood red roses
Booming bloom explosions

Spurting fountain dark in deep red arcs
Thick spreading like syrup pooling at our feet

Gunpowder on my trigger finger
Burn marks in my heart

You bite you tear you scratch
I wear the scars of you on my eyes

Let’s kill each other
In unstructured coitus

Let’s strangle on these vines
That twist tie lock bind us together well

Us blood red roses
The thorns of our lips curled cursed pressed mingled

Blood red roses feeding the ground with spilled wine
Igniting the stagnant soil to try

The Ghosts

The ghosts lie chained in the bellies of the slave ships.
The ghosts ride along in the eye of a hurricane.
The ghost haul bricks. The ghosts build. The ghosts pick produce.
The ghosts are forced to give their bodies.
The ghosts live in shacks, in workhouses, behind bars.
The ghosts imagine poems that they cannot put down on paper.
The ghosts ride along the waves of the sea and crash upon the rocks.
The ghosts hang from the sliver of the moon.
The ghosts come at night.
The ghosts come to haunt us as we sit on our soft asses and complain.
We are them and they were us.
They show us their chains and their scars.
We avert our eyes by looking down at ours.

Scapulary

How is it
that I know
you will wait
until news
that my casket
has been lowered
into a hole
in the eternity
of
ground

(pounding on the windows of your glass cage
with wings that have just rediscovered mobility)

before
you renounce
your scapulary
mind
and
its matriarchal
thoughts
that forbade you
to love me

in that time
before
when I was
covered in
only soot
and not
the dirt
of
the gravedigger’s
eventual
inevitable
spade.