Under the Stage Lights

I can’t breathe!
Some vine has snaked its way
up my throat from my belly below;
it lays heavy on my tongue.

I’ve been here before:
abandoned by Confidence
in a last-minute ambush.
My heart punches mercilessly.
I fear it will break through, and flop,
like a fish, on the wooden floor.
My trembling hands clench together for
comfort, but find none.

At last I open my mouth to speak.
Out falls dead leaves.
The wobble in my voice is not vibrato;
nothing operatic unfolds.
...

I will try again tomorrow

Sunday Morning, After My New York Recital

Drenched—yet again— in failure
I rise from the ashes in holy strength
White, and red with determination
to untangle the beauty inside me.
I arise to be a Me I don’t yet hear or see.

Dead Flesh Erected on Walking Sticks

Click…
the sound of robots


Click, click…
the sound of imagination suffocating

                                                           
Click click-click…
the sound of existence waning      
     
                                              

Clickity-clickity-clickity-clickity-clickity, click…
the sound of brains decaying

Offices cloistered, phobic with
Bugged-eyed, severed-wrist zombies
Erected at electric boxed screens
Paying fruitless homage to unfulfilled dreams
Eight hours a day—eternal damnation. Stuffed

Between dingy-white pillars perch, as peacock tails,

The ignorant learnѐd : mere regurgitations of previous
Regurgitations of the esteemed regurgitated, feasting on incestuous
Vomit, segregated from society by empty, meaningless puffs,
Not knowing they are dead flesh erected on walking sticks

Pieced together with insanity’s glue

Click…