Dead in the center of her heart I found a minotaur.
Of all things a frigging minotaur.
I stood puzzled as we locked eyes.
When I stumbled upon him he was sleep with today's newspaper drenched across his lap.
He bounced up in full guard.
Me being me I asked him for simple directions.
Telling him that I thought I was lost.
I planned on seeing heart shapes maybe a butterfly or two.
A big bunny shape thing or two but you, just wow.
He grinned slightly and said yeah that's the first time I've heard that one.
One step further, I added.
I take it from the amount of drool on the side of your lip you've been sleep for quite a while.
Now I don't mean to intrude on your guarding the labyrinth thing but,
How about you let me *** a smoke and we'll talk about it at the nearest dinner.
After all who can be mad over breakfast

I'm tired of twisting in my days
Looking for a thin straight line
The Minotaur looked at me
I could see the Theseus
there upon his mind

The labyrinth is not the same
It's turned into a maze
I have no more reasons now
I must be on my way

So the Minotaur made reservations
The Mediterranean
Is nice this time of year
He flew tourist class
With a herd of after Christmas deer

Minos called and made his request
Come back this instance
Was his plea
But the Minotaur was bullheaded about it
There's more to this than you , it's me

So the Minotaur stayed upon his beach
Never regretting making the call
Trapped inside our living labyrinth
Is one maze too tall

"Speak,"
Said the Minotaur.
"Speak."
"For I am tired of silence and riddles."
Said the Minotaur.
"And I am tired of being wise."
"Come," he said.
"Come touch my horns."
"Feel my velvety nose."
"Come cradle my head,"
The Minotaur said.
"I am tired of being alone."

Her mouth glittered agape
With sacred promise,
Like a box of unused
Engagement invites
Christening invites
Birthday invites
Still in the wrapper
For sale at a
Lifeline.

When you’d rather live
In a car
Than the zombie stance
Of a modern house,
Clean and soulless
With a hermetically sealed lawn,
Winter pageantry draws to a close
With bogan’s shooting-
Pearly eyed paupers
With constellations in their gaze.
With eyes full of hope and stars
That burnt bright and fade for
Flickering lens light.

Their voices murmur soft
Through catacomb
And underbrush
As only the ephemeral things are whispered of –
Dreams.
The addicts of ideals
The junkies of hope
The drinkers of despair
Have tiger soft tongues.

They lap and feast gladly,
From broken vessels
Chipped with hazardous teeth
That seek to fill their
Ermine mouths with the ******
Draught
Of truth.
Stumbling through wine-hour
They swarm, with tongues ******
And all constellations burnt out.

The hyacinth rides wild
Upon her shoulder,
Writhes in the silver brunt
Of moonlight,
Writhes in the stillness of dead perfume.

Marching to the beat
Of my enemies drum,
My hands inside my pockets.

Little bluebirds spun from dream
Sit on the holy perch,
A branch in all innocent minds.

The redeemed and patient
Make a subtle art from
Long distance perversions.

Similarly as we chase ghosts over Daffodils.

Fields of winter
under lunar glow
sway without us.

Long distance love
lingers with loose lust
along Regret street.

I hung it next to the memory
Of childhood cooking and Indian summers
Without further thought.

It slipped into the novel that took the form
Of an old coat, slipping into the lined pocket
It sank with a sigh.
Satisfied with itself.

Bombarded by the pounding
Dead eyed stare of ***** goddesses,
Broken by the undisputed angelic
And unglued ones,
All moon faced
All hopelessly optimistic
All lawfully rebellious
With green serenity
We pasted our dreams
On a wall so real it shone gossamer.
He counted the imperfections in the glass
With mind hesitation
As the whole world went black,
In a sea of much deserved discontent,
Wishing for the soft.

A moment of pure luck?
Jesus was an astronaut
Smoking Zen by the fire.

Suicidal angst
never had you in sonnets?
What a ******' shame.

Our life is but a song
We never hear.

I chipped away at the excesses
of my baroque person,
each strike took a
Railing
mounting
wall
decoration
desire
demand
exclamation
from the battlements.
All left now, a hill.

I paid for my banquet
with a sip of loneliness
and left behind the question
that asked all quiet poets
the meaning of love,
that asked all quiet poets
to answer with a villanelle
shouted from every
distant peak.

They sent the troopers
to greet me instead,
and my library was put in shackles,
and I kissed their ***** feet.

I answered that I carved this mountain
from the baroque bedrock
upon which they laid their city.
They smiled and asked about the aqueducts.
I wept and spoke of kitchenettes.

A meal provided
on a lead cast plate
my jailor asked about freedom
I answered with defeat.

There were two atoms
One questioned the meaning of existence
The other the existence of meaning.
             -Regardless they looked the same.

An apple on a branch,I took
The same way history takes a footnote.

The same way cashiers are all doctorates.
The same way trains find the station.
The same way you sing like a bird (and I like a cow).
The same way we never really wish to be writers.
The same way our final friend is made of pine.
The same way all streets lead to nowhere.
The same way all jobs **** society.
The same way we always lie to our children.
The same way a man loves a woman.
The opposite way we ****.
The opposite way we make love.
The way that I know a man who’s totem animal is a worker ant and he is unemployed by choice.
The same way we take old memories and turn them into fashion.
The very same way all sacred things become profane and all profanity becomes sacred in the eyes of many.

Dying relic of the Optimistic Seventies,
A new coat of paint for the old irony
     -slap dashed with obscurity.
Although I wear the costume of my enemy,
I will write the exaltation in blue smoke
As **** by an unsuspecting victim
Occurs in the dark.

The face of another love stares down at me.
I smile.
Yet I know it is not her.
I weep.
A sudden method sparks revival.

Jackie Pleasure wore a gray smile,
The anthem of a lost generation:
‘Happiness is lost in smiling.’

You are dead to me,
the boatman calls
I will not taste of your amber lips
I will not taste.

The welfare of all never hinged on darkness as we fear the fall,
A multitude of angels sang their songs
And never learnt to say goodbye
Or cast a long distance eye
Over half spent desire.

Drawn out caricatures,
Paraded intoxication
Flirt with our mistress death
And have her pick up the tab.
She pays with silent music.

The ***, we learn, is a bridge
Between all words and waltz’s,
Our Light Brigade to conquer art.

In the twilight of this, our mansioned night
Let us ring out true with indulgence,
Excess, abandon and the call of ‘yes’
Kali rang on the wire of a golden telephone.
Her name
“Kali, Kali…”
Like a quarrelsome minotaur
Flew through the waves of silk ideal
And strangled the babe
With cool breath.

There was ice (oh yes!) and fire and song.
With our candles burnt down to the ash of all streets
We walk then. We walk.
All life is but a song.

The ghosts of all forgotten stamps
Now echo on the wind of speech.
On High! Oh speak!
Of songs sung but never danced
With our broken dream.
When starlight meets the dust, and
Shadow eats the snow,
All our stories are satin sheer
And all our wants are gone.
We watch the memories march, until
They find a sliver of chrome that showed that place
Where all piano’s live and breathe.
My father in the wishing well,
My mother played trapeze.
My sister never saw the light,
My brother never born.
That was that,
Where stars meet dust
And floorboards sing off key.

By David John Mowers

Oceanus, Acheron, Styx and Gyges, Phlegethon,

Phaeacians lament, mourn the loss, Scheria, dissolved in froths.

Virgil’s tale, found correct, a land too good, a nation wrecked,

Nausikaa, burn the ships; their minds released, cool airy nips,

Below the wave, watery grave, submerged to bottom, fathoms by stave,

Fathoms some more, until the whorl, descending to, another world.

Through Omphalos, to Land of Sleep, awaits a beast, where time has ceased,

Darkness here, underworld, cold and frigid, below the whirl,

In solemn grave, souls released, judged and counted, by the beast,

Deeper than, the deep itself, past drowning fairies and dying elves,

Who did mourn them? Those golden men, magic mariners, Mino's kin?

What wrong was seen? What vice not true? What awful sin? What did they do?

One thousand years, first black age, Two thousand more, to find the stage,

Cast off Aries and cast Orion, to find beginning, of Golden Lion.

Man of Heavens, Beast agrees, Bull of Sky, Ox of seas,

Land of Punt, Land of Éire, Ogyges blue, hearts on fire,

All the seashores, all the mines, Tribe of Dan, from ancient times,

Port of Sais, Port of Thera, Port of Lagash, bygone era,

Sailor’s horse, Minotaur, a lyre is crying, strummed guitar, nation dying, abattoir.

Ochre foams to sanguine depth, there they rested, where Kronos slept,

He’ll never answer, he doesn’t care, we’ll never know, if this was fair.

Our hearts in sadness, hands on the gates! I curse you Poseidon!

. . .and your Sea of Fates!

The mahogany table-top you smashed
Had been the broad plank top
Of my mother's heirloom sideboard-
Mapped with the scars of my whole life.

That came under the hammer.
That high stool you swung that day
Demented by my being
Twenty minutes late for baby-minding.

'Marvellous!' I shouted, 'Go on,
Smash it into kindling.
That's the stuff you're keeping out of your poems!'
And later, considered and calmer,

'Get that shoulder under your stanzas
And we'll be away.' Deep in the cave of your ear
The goblin snapped his fingers.
So what had I given him?

The ****** end of the skein
That unravelled your marriage,
Left your children echoing
Like tunnels in a labyrinth.

Left your mother a dead-end,
Brought you to the horned, bellowing
Grave of your risen father
And your own corpse in it.

I have always been fascinated by mythology. I remember seeing my older sisters with a greek mythology book, and wishing I could be in high school so I can know it already. I was interested in the mythical creatures, in the gods and goddesses, in the battles, and just like everyone, I was interested in the love stories. I wanted to learn it with passion for I heard it was the inspiration of almost all the modern literature that I love. I could still remember feeling excited to be in class and discuss it. And now that I have reached high school, and I also reached my dream of studying greek mythology and not only that, because I reached it with you. We learned about the titans, the gods and goddesses, the olympians, the monsters, the stories. We were both engrossed and captivated by it, that mythology was the only thing we ever talked about. We even related it to real life, we related people to the characters. Whenever we see a person we know, we would think of the character that best resembles them, and we will start calling them their characters that we decided them to be. We called our friend Athena, we called your cousin Apollo, we even called someone the Minotaur. And that’s what our teacher told us, that not because it’s fantasy that immediately means it cannot happen in real life. The stories there, are reality, the only difference is, they added magic into them. We loved greek mythology so much that we related it to everything. However I realised something, we related it to everything except to ourselves. So I asked you, “Who are we?”. You told me, “Baby, we’re no one there, for we will make our own mythology. We will make the greatest one, so beautiful that it would surpass the best literature of all time.” Your favourite one was Plato’s quote, you would never shut up telling me the story that “humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.” And you would always tell me, that you wished to tell Zeus you found yours already. I expected myself to love the romance most, for myself to have the love stories as my favourite. But instead, I loved the opposite,  I loved the tragedies.


I don’t know why, but I found myself loving the tragic stories. I found myself loving the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. The ultimate tragic love story, in which Orpheus would have brought Eurydice back to life if only he had done what Hades said. Orpheus went to the underworld to ask Hades to bring back Eurydice, but Hades had one condition, he should not look back while his wife was still in the dark, for that would undo everything he hoped for. He should wait for Eurydice to get into the light before he looked at her. But then, Orpheus couldn’t control himself, he looked at Eurydice and hugged her, then suddenly Eurydice was drawn back to the underworld.


And who would ever forget Pyramus and Thisbe? The star crossed lovers who had families who hated each other and whispered sweet nothings through a crack in the wall that separates their houses. And they decided to run away, but when Thisbe showed up under the mulberry tree, a ****** jawed lioness was there. So Thisbe ran, and just when Pyramus arrived, he saw the lioness ripping apart Thisbe’s shawl. Thinking that Thisbe died, Pyramus stabbed himself. And when Thisbe returned and figured out what happened, she stabbed herself too. To this day, the formerly white berries of the mulberry tree are stained red with the blood of these tragic lovers.


Here comes my favourite story of all, the myth of Icarus. Icarus and his father attempted to escape from Crete by means of wings that his father constructed from feathers and wax. Daedalus cautioned him that flying too near the sun would cause the wax to melt. And because of hubris, Icarus ignored his father’s instructions and flew too close to the sun. Then the wax in his wings melted and he fell into the sea.


When I was reading the stories, epiphany suddenly hit me. Perhaps the reason why I loved tragedies so much because we’re turning into one. I finally got the answer to my question when I asked you who we are. Maybe we are Orpheus and Eurydice, we loved each other too much that we would do everything just to be together. But we ignored all the warnings, we thought love was the only thing that really mattered. We never got to control our feelings and we forgot everything, because of that, we were separated from each other. Or we could also be Pyramus and Thisbe, we are the perfect definition of lovers who almost made it, who almost achieved happiness, who almost became the greatest lovers of all time but then we never became one, we became tragic ones. And darling, perhaps Icarus resembles us the most. We are both Icarus, our wings, are ourselves,  and love, is the sun. Everybody told us not to get too near the sun, for the wax in our wings will melt, we will lose our wings because we are too close to the thing that could save and destroy us both. And just like Icarus, we disobeyed the rules.  We flew too close to the sun, look at us now.

As we were walking out of each other’s lives, I realised something. We were not meant to create the greatest story of all time that it would top the best literature. We were never making our own mythology, because we were just bound to become another tragedy. Another tragedy that people will love, and I still don’t know why, but people tend to see something beautiful in it. And maybe, just maybe, people will also see something beautiful in our tragic story. But just like Orpheus and Eurydice, Pyramus and Thisbe, Icarus; one thing is for sure, my love. We will achieve a thing we both wanted,  **we will never be forgotten.

[Lost Animals]
Cats probably aren’t even lost
Dogs are trying to find the way back to you
And then there’s butterflies and wild geese that can fly
thousands of miles and back every year and just know
The way home  

[Photographs of Abandoned Places]
Empty rooms filled with flotsam and jetsam
once colorful but now faded and dusty
what draws us here?
The emptiness, the mystery of why we would leave
our dwellings and go elsewhere

[“Don't Lost" Sign]
Our faces were cold and it was windy
we smiled and laughed anyway
warm from the dim lights and food we’d left behind
Don’t lost what? Don’t get lost? Don’t lose yourself?
Cryptic commands posed by an unknown painter with bad grammar  

[Labyrinth]
Isn’t it strange that we make a game out of getting lost?
Ariadne Gave Theseus golden thread to solve the Labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur
Cathedrals have them too, so we can meditate and walk through them
But what minotaur lies at the center of our labyrinth?
More importantly, can we defeat it?  

[Cultural Appropriation]
A clinical term for the simple act
of erasure, of losing.
A people, a nation a culture, a shared memory
who are we without these things?
Such power in taking them away and reducing the people to shadows.  

[Photographs of Chernobyl]
An eerie empty city of ghosts
The pictures show that nature will take us all back one day
there are trees in living rooms and schools  
The photos of howling, pain, mutation are a warning that we shouldn’t seek to have
So much power.

[Losing People]
Stoics say that when someone has died you have ‘returned’ them
This sounds better than losing I suppose
because they aren’t lost
they are gone. And they’re never coming back
No matter where or how long we look we won’t find them  

[Guiding Stars]
The palest of light that seeps into our atmosphere
we are under the same stars as everyone else wherever we are on this lonely planet
that ought to give some comfort, when I look up at night that I see the same stars
as you. I want to brush them into the palm of my hand and offer their light
to you so you could maybe see your words are what is painted on the inside of my soul.  

[Feeling at a Loss]
My tongue is tied and I can’t even think of words because I can’t breathe
around this knot in my chest that forms when I think of you and how I lied and why I let
myself lose you and so for a long while my heart cried oceans and I begged it to stop
So I wouldn’t have to think about the words that I didn’t say and the light I lost,
the brightest that came from your heart.    

[At a Loss for Words]
When someone says something you’re not even sure you heard right, you’re stunned
because you can’t even think of a response while the blood rushes to your face and
pounds in your ears like waves on the beach will you sit silent, stoic
not wanting to give away heat you feel just under the skin.  

[Losing My Religion]
How can you lose your beliefs? Unless someone stole them
Or the disgust with hypocrisy built on good intentions breaks in you until you lose sight
of what you believe to be real and all you can do is renounce it.
What happens if you never knew what to believe in the first place?
A crisis of faith is averted? But at what price?

[Lost Clothes]
The left sock, left glove, that ugly winter jacket you had as a kid.
Where do they go? Why do they just disappear? You just never find them. What do you
Do with the extras? What happens to the lost ones? Is there a land for lost socks? Are
they lonely, trying to find their other half?  

[Missing Person Posters]
Can you lose a person? No, surely not. How can let someone fade from you so far away
that they go missing? Maybe they let themselves fade. Pulled away.
Of course, they could be stolen, or forget who they are, but that is almost less disturbing
than thinking of than people running away or being lost by people
who are supposed to care.

[Lost Cause]
Maybe not so much a cause going nowhere as one that people tired of
too much work with no end in sight. So they left and let the tenacious ones
the true believers take over, to finish the ***** work and clean up the mess
is that how this grace thing works? Holding your tongue while someone else chases
glory only to abandon it when it is too difficult and they leave you to see it through?

[Lost My Mind]
My mind is currently wandering through some forested path on a mountain almost
on the way to touching the sky or lying on the bottom of a the clearest blue ocean
looking up through the kelp leaves and shimmering fish. Or between words of a book.
So forgive me, I missed what you were saying. I’m sure it was important. I was just
trying to follow my mind to those places. And be somewhere else.        

[Lost Souls]
The kind of thing you say talking about a girl with empty sad eyes raccooned by liner.
Or a boy who is always angry or in an altered state of consciousness,
so he can face his everyday. It is reminiscent of ghosts, who wander, not sure where to
go, or who to trust so they hold their despair and fear tightly against their chests.    

[Lost Time]
A euphemism for fainting. Or maybe used by historians for a time with no records.
It sounds more mysterious, Where can time go, except forwards? How can there be a
lost part of time? it sounds as though time has a private life, that it won’t share.
Unless asked politely. Which is what we do when we investigate the past isn’t it,
Looking for the lives of others.  

[The Lost Generation]
“Don’t wanna be an American Idiot” said Scott, and Ernest, and Gertrude.
So they sent each other invitations to their chic Parisian salons on creamy white paper
and said ‘darling let’s make it a holiday!’ and had a divine time with the French
so they wrote novels of despair and disdain and the pain of being human.
and drowned the pain in champagne and beautiful women and men.  

[Lost in Translation]
Some words that cannot be translated in English especially
ones that are raw and tender and romantic
ones that are universal feelings with no name that everyone understands
but the meaning is changed to make it something no one understands in English
So something universal becomes something ungraspable to all.   

[Lost and Found]
The one who crawled out the cave
out of the dark into the pure light so they were blind
Gave so much to come back for the others out of love?
Or a sense of duty? Or maybe they were just returning, as we all do
as we all will do someday.

A Verse In Time: A Trickster’s Alchemical Approach to Memory in Three Waves

(Warning: The following collection contains depictions of three waves
of the psychedelic experience—particularly with God’s allies, Los Aliados, the mushrooms—and like the psychedelic experience each wave possesses its own waves within itself.  Ride with discretion.)

.

Wave I: The Allies’ Nursery Rhyme

The Allies
came to visit
and take me
on a trip.
No need for boat
or bus
or plane
or even rocket ship.
The galaxy, as they explained
resides inside your mind,
The portals to the universe
are windows you call eyes.
Instead of always looking out
you should try to look within.
The ending you have always feared
is exactly where you begin.

Yes, all the spans of time and space
exist in you behind your face
and yet you cannot understand
that nothing is a race.

Oh wait, please be careful with that mirror
when we are here and you draw nearer.
Don’t let the face of everyone replace your face with fear.
You are Horus, Mary, Jesus Christ, Cervantes, and Shakespeare,
and all the men from beast to mice, from oceans down to tears.

And so they pried behind my face
and pushed me on through outer space
and soon enough I understood
there never was a race.

It all exists right here, right now—
the past, the future, the grass, the cow,
the vast, the nature, the cash, the house,
the king and the savior
the beast and the mouse
are all your creation,
your relation,
your spouse,
your Path,
your Bible,
your ‘Gita,
your Tao.

It is all
of your moment,
It is all
of your now.

For you are the mystery
of that which you seek.
You invented the minutes, the hours, the weeks,
the deserts, the rivers, the valleys, and peaks,
your digits, extremities, elbows, and knees.
You created the cure, you invent the disease.
The labyrinth is you and
You defeat it with ease.
To master the Minotaur just follow the string
Discover the dinosaur, discover the king,
discover this grandiose song that you sing,
and uncover the truth of the message you bring
when you ring bells or

Stroke piano keys
and make the doctor sweat.
The pranksters shifting shapes again,
it’s time to make a bet.
With silly laws of threes and fives, this riddle I repeat, replies
that by the time the rhyme is over, the trickster will arrive.
Gliding up in cycles by, the prankster grins and winks his eye.
He fabricates a fluffy fix with fuzzy snow white lies
to bring the doctor to a six then down to four inside
and bring the tempest to a wave
on which the four can ride.

Do we glide?
Do we slide?
Do we fly really high?
Do we bobble and sink
with the rise of the tide?

I remember the brink
the cellular stride, the following leap,
the primitive mind
I remember the dirt, the water, the fire,
the wind and the ether,
the passion, desire.
I remember that art
can never expire.

Do we depart?
Do we retire?

The answer is yes,
The answer is no,
The answer’s the same wherever you go.
It’s never too fast,
it’s never too slow
and you are never the last to not really know.
For the sun always shines,
the moon always glows,
the old always die,
the young always grow,
The seeds that you plant
are the trees that you sow,
from the bees and the ants
to the bulls and
black holes.

It is all
in your stance.
It is all
in your
soul,

When you follow your dance
the bliss
takes control.
Take your place
in the play
and master
your role.
The Aum
is your home
it’s inside
of your dome,
Whatever
you wonder,
Wherever
you roam.

And so it flows behind my face
the universe of time and space
Now I understand that time
is invented as the race

Yes, you are Borges, and Buddha, and Krishna,
and Lorca, and Vishnu, Dickinson, Lennon,
Eliot, Gandhi, Marley, McKenna,
Campbell, Picasso, Alpha, Omega.
You are your enemy,
your stranger,
your neighbor.
You are the peasant,
the king,
and the savior,
the mandala man,
the cosmic *******.
You are the taste
You are the flavor
and you are
the wave
the unwavering
Creator

Even us
as they explained
merely extend from you
A mirror to the macrocosm
for you to gaze into.




So when you get lost
within your lies
and cannot find
your rhyme,
Gather inside with your
Allies
and master
the maze
of
time.


Wave II: Contemplating The Allies’ Advice

Thunderbolts of cackling giggles
shutter through your vitals, shaking shoulders
and squirting tears from squinting eyes.
Exciting when dimensions hidden creep into your line of vision,
morphing mapping iridescence with a fleeting fuzzy phosphorescent
undulating elfin presence following your every contemplation.

Concentrating on a caterpillar crawling up the wall
how curious, this furry beast has fingers not to fall.
He folds into his fuzzy form, a sleeping bag to keep him warm,
a little home as still as lead.  He hibernates and contemplates,
waits and waits and transmutates into a gilded butterfly
that flutters through my head.

Violet translucent landscapes bleed through grass and trees,
focus on a precise place of time and space and witness the birth of the human race.  Projections made in fuzzy fourth dimensions quickly fade
if your gaze should wander.  Positioned to ponder,
you plunge into prepubescent wonder as a shooting star splits the sky wide open revealing heaven and everything under the sun is tune and the sun is eclipsed by the moon.  And once again, the music comments chronologically on your moments, as if all these notes and lyrics were cataloged to sync with the scenes of your epic voyage.

Destroying contemplation again, the sea ***** the wind through the trees
and blows a blue marine breeze through your hair.
Do you dare take the time to recognize the punctuality of the gale?
Should your frail and fragile mind be dangled from a line
to flap and fluff and figure out the nature of the rhyme of our mother?
You are your brother, your keeper, and your lover.

All the lines align and oscillate in cadenced flow,
the more you see with your mind the more your mind will know.  
A ****** brain may strain and throw a fit
if faced with the tricky truth of the third eye
Surprise! Who knew that Jesus Christ could sprout from cow ****?
Can you believe it?  Wow, Bob, wow.
Where do you think we got: ******* and holy cow?
Heaven is the here and now
and every time you try to leave
you lose what you have found.

(* All words in italics come from    
   various songs, films, works of        
   literature, etc. and are not the words    
  of the author.)


Wave III: Los Aliados Wake

An apple carries a story deeper than the tree,
More nourishing than the luscious skin,
More central than the seed.
for the apple gave original sin
and knowledge from within
and fell upon the head, announcing gravity.
Have you ever heard the tale of Johnny Melon seed?
(The apple is global, so I wonder why,
what could be patriotic of pie?
Is it not just a strudel,
a pastry disguised?)

The colors we create
distort. manipulate.
The fools who follow fear
are doomed to find their fate
between their ears
where the colors seem
to blend and stream
and almost disappear.
To wonder why we’re here
all colors must appear
and merge into the blinding light
that obliterates our fear.

All your dreams, your fantasies, your symbols, and beliefs,
all a compass pointing you to endless mystery.
The treasure that you seek
resides inside the Self,
A jewel within the rock,
A book upon the shelf.


I bought the ticket,
I’m taking the ride.
I’m spiraling miles through the bowels of time.
I’m spinning and laughing
and losing my mind
and finding
it always returns
just in time.
It’s right where it left me,
so I’ll leave it behind
and return when
I’m ready
to relish the ride
with a bite
from the apple
of my
holy
third
eye.

it is february, and outside it is twelve degrees.
in winters past,
you dragged me to the shore every day to see if this time,
the ocean froze, and we could
walk away from here together.
sometimes you stood in the water for hours.
[but that was long ago.
thats in the past, waiting to be forgotten.]
it is february, and this morning you asked when it would end.
it's been seven thousand days,
you told me it gets better in time. how much time do i have to give?
you threw out every lock in your home.
you bent to kiss the bonfire goodbye and your hair caught the flame like
a hand catching a moth, and now
every room is full of candles pressed wick-to-wick,
melted wax hardening on the floor like cooling lava,
or congealing blood.
aren’t you sick of being somewhere between a natural disaster
and an emergency room tragedy?
aren't you tired of being sad all the time?
arent you sick of wearing the scent of burnt hair like perfume?
aren't you tired of crushed wings in your fist and careless,
accidental strength?
[or perhaps this is your dream, god knows
i've had stranger.]
maybe you always wanted to be a terribly sad monster,
a giant with the blood of a thousand bulls,
a titan preparing to birth
the gods.
picking at the skin 'round your nails till you bleed. broken teeth
embedded in the wood of the stairs.
you wanted to be zeus,
wisdom bursting from your skull like a bullet,
daughters like grey matter,
but you're just a labyrinth.
you're nothing but a prison,
a maze with a monster in the middle,
swallowing children and thread.
were you made for the minotaur or was it born for you?
you've been gathering sickness like moss on cave walls.
you've been pulling up the tiles from the bathroom floor.
last night's dew froze and clothed the stairs in ice.
there's a body floating in the bathtub and you promise it isnt mine
[i don’t know if i believe you].
you are undoing every knot i tied to keep myself together,
you are looking for anything in me to prove that i care. i do, i love you,
i love you like an ox, i love you like a child,
i am bursting with the lymph of every mother in my bloodline and i care for you like my own, but
in your mouth,
"loving" and "mother" don't fit together right.
a mother is someone who has too many monsters in her bed to fight the ones under yours,
"motherhood" is a synonym for "natural disaster,"
and all you can do is try to survive.
at this point i'm inclined to agree.
you make me feel like my womb is full of crude oil
and the distal phalanges of both your hands.
ive been sleeping with statues and dreaming about metal bones.
the only love you know is the kind where your clothes crumple on the floor.
you're always finding someone new to be the minotaur in your heart.
you don’t want theseus to find his way,
trailing thread as he traces mossy walls,
kicking bones aside.
when the minotaur dies,
you'll be nothing but a cave.
you already feel hollow when it sleeps, you say i don’t know if if you’re my minotaur
or another sacrifice.
i say [i don’t know if i’m your friend or
the closest thing to a mother
you’ve ever had.]
you have broken every tile.
you have cleaned the mirror countless times but your reflection still shows.
drink some water. wash your passageways with floods,
you don't need the bones of every failed theseus
littering your veins.
i can teach you to live with a minotaur like
a bezoar in your stomach.

“Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout ******* and ovaries rather than ***** and *******;to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars - to be a part of a scene, anonomous, listening, recording - all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to ****** them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...”*
-Sylvia Plath

all the streets i’ve walked become a neat little maze
under crete is a labyrinth
under los angeles is a cage
in my head forms a neat little map
cover your legs with your napkin
the monster in my head
says to cover my back

she’s looking for a sweet little life
she’s slumping over in her seat looking white
she may seem a little lifeless because she is
are you okay, are you okay?
are you?
no.

you put on a little periwinkle dress
you reign in your red hair with barrettes
now you shed the little periwinkle dress
in a gas station bathroom
to be less like a girl and more like
the smoke in your lungs
the pain in your heartstrings

you rip your red hair from the barrettes
it doesn’t feel good anymore
they don’t feel right
you go to goodwill and stare at the men’s button ups
in gaudy patterns and colors
shaken and sleight like your mind
some people’s eyes just chill your bones
you think it is safer to wear camouflage
in a city where pretty little girls
are devoured by minotaurs
when they wander out alone

don’t think about strange boys on the boardwalk
who are stuck in your sun glared eyes
the less you told
keep telling yourself it was wise
the lies you told
keep replaying through your mind
the wall rears it’s head
when he says the word *****
you ignore the warnings
you ignite the warnings
you forgot the warnings
hand him the lighter and watch them burn

they say they can feel your lightness
you tell them you are looking for a life full of light
and it lessens, as the sun drops
learn your lesson
they only want one thing
and you don’t want to think about it
but eventually they say what they really think
what they rashly think
what they readily think
the sniffing nose around the corner
you barely blink
the bull shows you the horns
you know you stink vulnerability

and you always get up to leave
just in time, the warnings
you disappear back into your well memorized labyrinth
your body and mind are warring
the minotaur is bearing down
the moments are fleeting but you carry the feeling
the moments are feeble but the fear keeps on teething

maybe tonight
you can do something different
try not to haunt
every place that you live in