I was born.
I was born in the fever of winter when the silver surfs cracked into granite and the lava cooled under flakes of ice, and all the places were festooned in boughs of chiseled fir, and dark bauble berries wept like pulsating wafers dissolving in rivulets of sibilance that congealed into solemn carols of disposable cheer and mired mirth.
I was born.
The moment we are born, we begin to die so that all of living is a procession danced to a lazy dirge with frenetic notes of idiocy and the warming melodies of sacred incense flung horizontally across the bored shoulders of enemies who want to murder our souls and feast on the flabby innards and the liver pickled sour with mulberry wine.
I was born.
So the preacher’s arched words detonated prayers in prodigal ears, and skeletons woke in catapulted catacombs and clicked their bones across rural tributaries and frozen cities heavy with caustic blood shimmying through street veins and mottled arteries clogged with white fat, killing the pulse of mercy, the breath of compassion.
In church, the casket tilts, the altar shudders with sickness, the votive flames flicker, Santa Maria drips the sweet wax of poison onto penitent women (it’s always women) who drink that fine brew at cocktail hour with the priest in the drawing room, that brew squeezed from the Venerated Penis bucking backs in ecstasy and then scattering the ashes from the coital cigarette.
I was born.
The drum was brutal, and I carried a morning star that blazed across a ruby sky so my cosmic treasure could fade into a crowded port of mumbled things jostled by stricken shouts from mean mouths.
In distant ponds, I dipped my toes and declared myself ill with wanderlust as mommy folded gingham and told me the branches from the willow do not sway with love or weep nectar but tongue my sex indecently as death thrusts and crows directionless and taps, taps, taps my womb until I was forced to birth a godless Leviathan and cradled his fingers on the edge of my lips as he burped sea water and erected the throne for the reign of the rat who was foul and insecure.
I dwell.
I dwell in flowers, their ovule a spigot of wealth, their color a blaze, a fire to roast my malformed soul, an enviable beauty that alights my lips, their sweaty pollen a robe of melancholy that morphs into mania carried on a platter by a woozy Dionysian acolyte, their thorns intent on torturing anyone seeking intimacy, whispering ‘don’t come near’.
I dwell in flowers because I cannot dwell in the fruits of abandonment, the fruits of false glory, I crave something simpler and true because, before woman and her coupling with the serpent, there was an estate in a hidden pocket, steamy and scented with erupted desire, a paradise claimed by the flowers, a sinless place to meander without shame.
I observed.
I observed the universe that begat a universe that begat a universe, Lady Terror popped globular babies from that swampy place that screams bloody laughter and insinuates sweetly waltzing corruption…
I really didn’t observe very much, Netflix froze my eyes, and The Real Housewives struck me dumb, and state media screamed they have an unblemished record of heterosexuality, which actually means the opposite.
I died today.
There was no announcement to the world.
In my life, I accumulated words, collected seduction into a painful pail, crunched on sacraments, chloroformed unbearable aches with swill, sliced souls to digest, drank dangerous marrow in narrow bars, rummaged through flesh and killed eyes that gazed too long on my wicked waste, I reconciled hate with exile, I licked bones and snapped laughing hands.
Before they buried me, I got a tattoo of corporate America, Tesla and Facebook playing naked poker on my pubis as pretzel crumbs filled my seated bosom, regretting that I couldn’t feed the homeless with smudged pennies on their eyes because they were already dead like me, except their breath lit fires while mine was iced to Absolut zero.
I wrote my announcement.
She was born in winter, dwelled in flowers, observed the terrifying abyss, and died when a red swell, a totalitarian zeal swallowed the Earth and hiccuped ten billionaires who stole your pension and made you harvest crypto emeralds in dangerous, electric mines while a song played, ‘Jesus is Here’, and it was your patriotic duty to pay 30 dollars for 11 eggs (there’s always something missing), but she did none of that, she swallowed the Xanax and dug her grave under the soot and crumbling chaparral, remnants of a metropolic wind fire.
All that’s left is for you to switch the timeline. She won’t do that.
She followed the path of poets, where poets hone their craft in the mountain sanctuaries, fling stones and sticks to divine the primal juice of imagination, they become soothsayers and offer prophecies to philosophers and oracles who glean the Truth and tuck it into the crevices and corners of the political paradigm until the paradigm screams and collapses into the filth of power.
She followed the path of poets.
She was a poet.