Deserts, Flower Ghosts, Eighth Dimension, and Venus

Deserts

When the sun sets bleeding red and burnt orange over the sleeping mountains, here is what you’ll do:

Stumble across the dusty ground littered with rocks and hardy little plants,

Wave hello to the men and their animals painted on the solemn-faced cliffs,

And remember to smile, even when the desert winds lap in colder and colder around you.

With your eyes bright, look up and trace the noses of the mountains, moving up and down as

they snore in their sleep until you see me leaping down,

And be ready to catch me, darling!

Flower Ghosts

flowers: dead all at once/ the ghost: always dead

the ghost is flickering under the pale moon glow of the basement lights

white limbs limp like the faltering stems of plucked flowers

lips as pink as lilies eyelids fluttering like petals in the wind

flowers without roots in vases their whole lives, fragile beauty that wilts without exception

existence for the sake of possession,

possession for the sake of destruction.

take the ghost; the echo of a person that has wilted away, the eternal, undying, rootless flower

can you love a shadow, a skeleton, empty space?

you can love anything,

you can love anything like a flower,

just for being beautiful, just for being dead.

Eighth Dimension

eighth dimension filled up with four cardinal points

a dying light that briefly illuminates the breathing sky

connected with sixty-two ropes docked to a ship with a porthole leasing out six different versions

of a spinning wheel

disproving the existence, then turns into dust and into a harness made of moths

a wailing baby screams into another galaxy filled with cobwebs linking to a sixty-third rope

a prayer from longer than ago written in another dead language made of breathing dust

against a hollow ladder with twenty-three rungs

leans a set of stairs going straight up with seventy-two steps leading to two-hundred and seventy steps leaning

against a ladder hollow with rungs counted up to thirty-two

a sixty-fourth rope tied to a wheel breathing in the sky strangles a dead baby

a dimension with cardinal points in all directions made of a seventh spinning wheel

breathes dust into an empty lightbulb and breaks it in the empty sky

a spinning prayer written to honor a god with no feet is torn up and destroyed by a storm made out of shards from

the empty sky

the runged ladder breathing.

each of the seventy-two and two-hundred and seventy of the stair’s steps breathing.

breathing sky.

breathing cardinal point.

breathing baby.

breathing spin.

breathing wheel tied to a sixty-fifth rope docking a wrecked ship to another world made of dust.

Venus

white as cowrie shells fresh sand coral dying under the sea

pink as trout shriveling out of water seaweed washed ashore in clumps oceans shedding hair

star of the sea she’s pretty like a pearl

she’s wandering the shore at night kissing shells touching herself

when the moon glows over the beach it lights her up like a lantern backdropped by the rolling ocean

she’ll eat the stars in the sky one day,

but settles for crawling across the rocks to suck the suckers off sea stars

would be elegant for her to have a dress made of foam or a cloak made of scales

but she’s a real Venus with her tits bare and covered in salt