THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED

Did you chose to be
the middle path, not hard but stressed
as a toxic taint, your feminine shine:
how we love to loathe ourselves.
Cherries will red, victims ripen.
Everyone wants the cheddar of youth,
but I’ll be the barback teaching
tequila at the bar
while you wonder over the days
of top shelf 60.
You see, I’ve learned that this is that
and the rest is a pleasure, of which there are
as many stars to progress
into such stars of has been and will be
conjoined twins.  I refuse to look
at old notebooks.  I tweak the twin’s nipple.
If what’s there isn’t
inside me,
then let it fall by the bog’s nutritious mud.
I’m here refusing
a sheer lack of reading comprehension.
The only resistance we sense
(pantyhose silk or cotton)
was a horsefly on the shanks of spring
headed towards us on winter’s hindquarters.

I CAN’T GO ON, I’LL GO ON
                  —Samuel Beckett

In my hand, a child’s circus bell tied to a wooden cross.
Also, the heart’s bony organ swings,
made from the milk of external pendulums.  We bray into
epidermal sacks, eyes sewn full on honey and ash, lotus blossoms.
As dark as stage lights, this saddle curtains us. 
Stage right:  God is the father who rarely knocks,
thins, neither omniscient nor proud,
his heart an orchestra of wool, minxes aglow within him. 
Someday we’ll leave & become the trees without
children, our mirrored veins twisting bronze wires up
through clouds.  When you debut his panorama,
escort the fire maiden on, her strict ridiculous horsey crew.
She didn’t stash your thirty thousand
8 tracks on a basement bookshelf.
That is how her moment lies deep inside
a teardrop’s dew point:  velvet seedlings
and tiny fingers of parentless stardom.  Heart attack guilt.
Entrance redux, and how each move recedes the need
to cradle spoons and string egg whites into a yolk for order. 
We sit aloof in the deer stand alert.
Wanting, the person pulls hair on end by the seams
for a flock of knives.  You get a mechanic
to fix the engines that feed on blanket suicides. 
We brush pencil-thin, outlines stammering,
stage-dive like the albatross.
My final essay for law school:  an act of bullying
marks two long years pacing chain-smoking towns,
full circle to a wood-panel house.  Like Ghost’s declaration,
“Whooo is nobody? Cauterize the wound of what living’s like,
leave the rest to bicycles that ride hunger on.”
Such light barks up the moon.
Enter stage left the smallest deer and her parasites to feed on.  


Previously published in CRUEL GARTERS

© Copyright, 2013, Amy King.
All rights reserved.