The Purple Prose in my Pink Poems

In a temple
A Temple of Diana
A Temple of the Vestal Virgins
Sacred Forest of Nemi
He waits

He stays because it‘s what he does
He can only ever stay
And they, the others
Wait still the vigil
The vigil to take his place
Slay him one shall surely do
As it is long expected
The ritual without a choice*

The virgins sleep
Without a sound
He is waiting
The fire is keeping
All is forgotten
But soon remembered
In deepest of sleep

Tomorrow he shall rise
Disturbed by his visions
Still crouch and pace
Holding his knife
Staying his life

He stays because it’s what he does
He waits for his own demise
Waiting to become the kill
As he has killed before
Awaiting his When I Die
Will fighting for his life
He does this, what he must
Thus too, to all of us

Every day I watch myself dying
In front of the mirror,
I feel as though I am in Nabokov’s Laura
Devouring myself alive
But I have eaten this way
Since eighth grade: grammar school

I watched myself dying
Line by Line and
Watching Eating Marching
In the nettle of it
I missed the day
I turned into a swan

I only know I became a swan
Because others once told me so:
You were swanning through the halls
Not knowing I was absent that day —
And still—
So busy with my vigil.

I cannot work my sailing knots
Anymore
I am slipping away
On a noose I cannot even tie
I am getting to see myself die
In enormous gulps
That I have always taken of myself
In some carefully secreted narcissism
But also
Of the pale graveyard ghost
Digging at my brain.

Nefertiti did not have Tamoxifen
And other breast elixirs or interventions
Which does not mean such tender heel
As breast for her
How did she suffer
This understanding
Of her own mortality?
Did she watch herself
Cannibilize
Her own body every day?

Body yet not betray me again
As you always do
And as it is meant to be.
Please remember
That I shall eat myself alive
Before you win

Carcinomous
Reconstructed

Flower
You are dying
Now cut and put
In water
We shall watch one another
Vibrate and Shimmer
You and I together
As you unfold, we unfold
Forgetting the deceit
The betrayal
The worm-riddled death
Of that rose.

Some say that breast cancer
Loves to go to the bones.

They also say I have arthritis
But the pain keeps coming back:

The Panther with his teeth in my groin
claws tearing my loins
I recite:
“Tyger, Tyger
Burning bright
In the forest of the night”
Like a mantra of
Incantatory powers
But it does no good
He frames my fearful symmetry
Tyger and Panther together
Like a story for a child
But not.

I feel like someone‘s experiment
A puppet getting rashes
Cancer and other ugly things
Unseemly diseases
Once hushed
Once told in dead filmmaker cinema
Those whispers, sighs and white
Victorian dresses like death
One who must persevere for science
The C.V. of my doctor
Or even the evolution of
My family‘s proud pool of genes
Swimming like frantic sperm in the ouvre
Of yet another filmmaker of fame —
Even if genes don‘t swim
But lurk and hover over lives
As ominous birds of prey —
Must persevere for past and future plagues
Assure them I still smile.

Hey Whit, Hey Whitman
I hear you whistling
My Whistler Boy, my dandelion boy
I want to roll down a hill of dandelions
With you in my arms.

Oh, sweet baby
Let the world
Not break your heart
Too Much.
Too Fast.
Too Strong.

Hungry, I would break
Teeth on a gourd
I am an animal
Animal anathema
Misanthropic social student
Oxymoronic
An introverted paradox
Self-devouring and
Destined to dance
Seldom speaking to my partner
As though dancing with a stranger
Few shall say such things
But I know I am not alone

Could we dissolve, devolve
into minutia in two more
generations? I surely am!
Minutia of my mind,
my excuse is age, so
ask yourselves if you are
devolving, dissolving
delicious young ones.
But you cannot
you are in it
I am not.

Our texts are so different
and that is just the start

THE PISSANT DEVOID
OF PUISSANCE
IS PUSILLANIMOUS*