Poem: Toxicity #the100dayproject Day 96

Toxicity 

We digest death, 

break down its proteins like a sandwich. 

We paint ourselves toxic, wear death like a mask. 

Draw our lips blood red and brush our eyes blue; 

we grind up the medicine and dissolve it in alcohol. 

We gnaw our way to the underworld,  

gather the leaves, roots, seeds, and berries of our cravings. 

We smoke our way to paradise. An illusion is just a hallucination. 

Poison is one step closer to god, one more leap into transcendence. 

If we don’t greet death, we will never learn what it means to live. 

Poem: Water Paper Ink #the100dayproject Day95

Water Paper Ink

I have hands that write language 

in the river and ears that hear new ones 

in the rapids. Even with the spring floods, 

everything written in the river is permanent, 

recorded in the echo, imbedded in the silt. 

The sediment contains a library of pasts, 

presents, and futures; a lexicon of layers. 

All of the words filed away, settled and preserved 

until foot, hoof, claw or boat dredge 

and unsettle; the tomes crease open, 

billow up into the water as a cloud. 

Flecks of sand and soil shining 

like diamonds in the sunlight, 

each of them a new word 

or a dead language unearthed 

after millennia of silence and drought. 

Poem: Incision #the100dayproject Day 94

Incision 

Nip the bud before something  

can have a chance to grow, 

this word gathers the seams of skin, 

hemming in our body parts, 

skin, fat, muscle, bone. What is 

a body for? but to exist in a realm 

of our own destruction and doubt. 

We nip in our own image to make perfect 

where perfect isn’t a language we can speak. 

We live until the blood clot unfolds 

like a bud then blooms into a crimson rose. 

We can only control our own self-deception. 

We cannot love what we cannot change, 

and we only nip what we can learn to despise, 

our eyes are our only enemy, envy is just a symptom.

Poem: Count Up #the100dayproject Day 93

Count Up

Death is steady and not unkind, 

grows white roots of nightshade 

deep into the ground for water 

nudges apart the earth and feeds 

so it can bud and bloom its trumpet. 

Death is quiet and loud, a strange music. 

Never is it just one thing, it can be swift, 

tread water to meet its final destination. 

It is not sinister, nor does it cradle us, 

all it does is take us down into indifference. 

We are a notch on a concrete wall 

counting up to infinity, oblivion. 

There will never be a final notch, 

only the endless rhythm of the blade 

cutting a dry contusion, a marker, 

a wound of someone's desperate grief.