Plastic Rosebud

"Take your punishment."
I am punished for wearing
my punishment too well,
the flogging scars blended
under buttercream layers
of Jezebel foundation.
I bear up under the years,
and the casual and too quick
see damage yet to be wrought,
merely because I thought
good might happen for good done --
inconsequentiality
laughable to the silent ones
whose eyes gleam,
red berries in the sharp holly.
To incur anger
for contending that those
whom we call simple
may be the wisest of all!
I am well, and that does not sit well.
I am superfluous, a vegetable
in a garden among many --
a mirage to those
in an unceasing search
for fresh blood,
for the meat that steams
in Spring morning air.
They mentioned seeing something there,
then shook themselves from me.
Imagine, if it consoles,
my branches laden with frost
lacquer and diamond shards
killing my blossoms and buds --
the beauty in extremis
may gall, but is it not enough
that this year, too, may prove barren?
Leave me still then,
among the others.
I will shatter with them
when the storm comes,
and leave to our tormentors
a world of splinters and scoured air.

Rosemary Encircles the Virgin

There is a heart.
The flames around it grow higher
and hotter with each word heard.
The girl says to the boy,
"Give me back that one."
As he says, "No pun
intended; there is no point,"
his hands blister
and burn. He turns
to her and she takes it
(she is unscathed) to the rosebed
where it belongs.

1898

Eunice Nethercutt was once a man
with forearms hard as oak paddles.

She lugged boulders rough as sand
from Colusa through the delta. On saddle

she could out ride any savage brave.
At the mouth of the cerulean Bay she baffled

Chan, who sold coolies. By Sutro cave
she freed thirty Chinese in armed battle.

Eunice Nethercutt once was a man
'til she met a dude who ran cattle.

Phantom of the Opera

Drape me, then, in black tulle.
It will trail at my bare feet.
Nothing underneath
but eye make-up
and gold teeth.
Parade me down Eddy Street
so I, dressed like André Leon Talley,
may finally meet,
the ghostly shapes
who speak yet refuse
to be spoken to.

Television

I

I bow and scrape
and bear a cock-eyed smile,
my saffron robes
and shaved head
as false as my prayers.
I slip behind you
and knife you from within.

II

A Spanish telenovela
in lurid color:
the tangerine walls wobble
as you slam the white-trimmed door.
I clutch at my decolletage
and turn my rodeo clown face
to see who's popped in.

III

"You owe who money?"
I take a drag from my cigarette
and back my high-gloss ass
out of the room. I close
the glass double-doors in front of me,
then run like Hell.
I'm not the only one.

The Thought Police

The cheering crowds,
my Mussolini grin--
the verdict is in:
guilty as charged.

Some dude's big O
is the gaping hole
in my brain --
in pour large

plastic bags of sin,
black and pungent as shit.
I am filled with bullets --
traumatic intercourse,

Fed and bred like a Folsom
piggy. I smile sweet
as any pink pansy,
a game laugh in the wings.

The psychic dumptruck
driven by stoners, sits idling
as I spring from a compost pile
and sing a song of love.

The Disillusionist

At thirty-three he was too old
to wear but shirt, tie and slacks
and, on Fridays, jeans.

He would sit prim
on his nun's twin bed
and call, "Bullshit shenanigans."

Burning cigarette in hand,
he broke the mold on his head
and took the men out to lunch by 10.

"Why do you always ruin our fun?"
exclaimed celebrity-voiced bugs.
His reply was silence and a smile.

What the Voices Gave Me #7

"This psychosis has the most," offered the shopkeeper of the mind.
Although tradition tells me it is Hell that bedevils me,
is there not a yet larger pattern encompassing
the men threading punchcards through my head?

It was not Charles Babbage who said, "We are parasites
on your brain," but a well-meaning onlooker
tasked first with killing me, then with piecing
me back together again. I merely suggested

Lemonade from lemons -- symbiosis from parasitism --
what orchids adorn my trunk? White and red, a unique
array of spots on each frill-bearded face
bereft of repetitive slogans, awed into silence

By the greater beauty around them. Bacterium
in the gut of a creaking old man -- the colony began
when Edison first flickered into incandescence.
Who knew his birthday was the same as Saddam Hussein's?

A normally restrained warrior, assigned
to the thankless detail of monitoring me
broke into song, like a friend -- I, whom Satan
spit back up again and again and again.