grimm-child

i've been told it's a crime to need anybody,
to build a house around anyone,
play lost boy to their wendy-bird,
honeycomb walls up around them.
will love be always stillborn, pulling away
on a train before it breathed its first breath?
the windows are too far apart and we're rattling
around like the only two coins in a beggar's tin cup.
i was the sparrow to your hawk, the doe to your wolf,
the girl to your boy, and now i'm writing my own map.
i'm an apple, cored, my skin's growing thicker, red and serene.
i found my voice; it was hiding in my mouth:
i was the goosegirl, combing my hair, and you
chose your hat over me, over my hair the colour of
old coins, old coins like all the days i spent.

fill that menagerie

we're all looking to corner that one thing that is life.
we begin the same, with one heart and two hands,
then of we go, our hounds baying.
we all catch different things in our traps and some of us
instead use guns. the longing is the same, but we all find
different prizes: lions, acres, gold, boats, bears',
and steinbeck's charley-poodle. if you can tame it you should
know straight away, you've caged the wrong bird. the best
we're hunting would never fit behind any bars.
and the creature that we're following? it's hunting you.

alexander the great

the dream-tigers chew their way through
my school house, the burly one shredding, slicing
villages and hemispheres, the golden one nesting and roosting
on every page of every book, and their mangy cub swallowing
mustaches one by one. dream-beavers, dream-termites, brown
and orange teeth. they're trading my days for dimes, whole
months of dimes, and slurping them up
whole. while our eyes flip the world upside down and over,
the present becomes the past. when i read my palm, all i see
is tunnels of teeth, honeycombs of molars. it's all eaten up.

wallpaper swimsuits

kirchen, kirschen, an der kander,
auf der erd', allein ich wander’.
the lightning man lives in the lavender town,
one eye cocked at finland, the other down,
i would plant you a lilac-dowry if you'd
let me ladle up some soil, a hole for my fox,
a den for my fox to rest his heavy head.
you can't build a town out of one way
streets, you've got to come and go,
ebb and flow. when you leave a home,
it's never gone,
it gets layered up, papered beneath the new one,
until you're coated with homes, fat with
homes, wandering and plump like little hansel.