Bohmerwald

Even though I miss you, I'm better off missing you
than with you while envisioning
what I thought we could be.
I'm better off with others,
many filters for my fractured
sense of unity.
When your words are barbed wire,
and your skin is too distant to touch,
and the skin of your arm is this cool,
and your eyes are cold,
and your voice is invulnerably male,
I crave the middle distance
of a day without you.

In the fragile middle distance
of a room behind closed doors, I listen in
to conversations
when you don't know I'm there,
or when you've overlooked my presence
like so many times before.

On your way home late this evening,
I'll be singing under water.
As you wander in the darkness
I'll be passing through the glossy wooden

hall. You turn the handle
of our heavy wooden door,
but I'm already sunk in shadows
in the green room, Bohmerwald.
Behind the forest's door,
the middle distance calls.

Goblin Fruit

Goblin Fruit
February 3, 2010
5'' x 8''
Pencil on paper


i)
I loved you because you were sad,
damaged goods, lost and
(ir)retrieveable.
Am I really one of those ♀
who yearns to find and repair old broken souls?
Soothe, stitch it up,
wish,
wish,
wish it was up
to me to make everything right.
Me to make you right.

ii)
In some villages, in some
times, there was some-
one called a sin-eater, struck
dumb by the weight of
sorrow ingested
along with the meals she was offered
to consume the bulk of the departed
one's crimes.

Times
have changed, you say, but still
you pay
me with sweets, sullen meals,
grudging generosity,
to swallow,
and swallow,
and take in your misery.

iii)
I loved your poet's eyes,
musician's hands,
I loved your nineteenth-century soul, so full of
aching empty spaces.
I dreamed you an enchanted lover, tree spirit
of the ancient dark forest, your
bed a nest, your
room a cave.

iv)
Ah, child, but child,
you knew
you've heard the stories,
how those who enter the wood
in autumn, time of turning
too often lose their way
and stray
unknowingly down, under
root, under
ground,
and to once taste the goblin fruit
is to stay.

Ah, child, you slept in his nest, you
ate of his sickly sweets, you
ate of his sickly sins, you
stayed.

Witch of the Hawthorn Wood

Her eyes are through you,
eyes of the hawthorn wood.

Brown-crimson
from too much inner sight
and old, old blood on white
skin, white as snow.

Beware the witch,
witchy eyes as eat
when you thought she gave so freely.
Hawthorn russet eyes will soon prove all-consuming.

Eyes and damaged lips,
and ivory skin,
bruised beneath the jawbone,
vulnerable,
enticing.
Trust not.

For every knight who enters
of his own free will
discovers later,
a critical instant later,
that Lamia, Lamia
lies coiled about him;
scales
secure his fate.

Softly crooning hymns to the dying, she writes
poetry and spells on her
inner wrist
to ward off evil.

Beware.
Hawthorn-russet eyes will soon prove
all-consuming.


Witch of the Hawthorn Wood

January 9, 2010
9'' x 12''
pencil and coloured pencil on paper