She is alone
With her books,
In an oven
Tomes she cooks,
Cloven coven...
Her good looks,
Beyond lovin'
Library nooks,
Arcane maven
Dead Poets' haven,
Endless diary
Kabbala fiery!
No prince harming
In her farming,
Fairy tales she writes
Ev'ry Blade delights.

Notes: the acronym SWITCHBLADE KNIFE is spelled from the first letter of each line.

(C)opyright Torquemada 2013. All wrongs reserved.

When we met I had not any notion of what was ahead
My life was scattered and my heart was dead

There was nothing to set you apart
Not that I noticed at the start

Slowly and softly you grew in my mind
Just a simple flirtation of innocent kind

As I remember those early years of you
With all the shimmering grandeur to do

It curls my lips in to a wide grin
Not realizing how much it was therein

All I had was my gut instinct to go on
A feeling of tension, a coming of dawn

That red of sight was all I had to hold
While my life spun outward of tragedy untold

You anchored my heart to those fleeting times
Returned a rhythm to forgotten rhymes

Time has long passed since those days of lore
Now I know how little I loved you before

Today is one to put to memory and thought
As you are all I look up to even when fought

It is not fair, I know, to be placed so high
Not being my intent that you can never die

My mind keeps you close and safe inside
Your voice pacing my step as a secure guide

Above all, you are my only fiend
Where I can seek truth, subtle and lean

Just know that in my quick life, you have done well
Never let anyone suggest otherwise of you, they can go to hell

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I spent what light Saturday sent sweating
And learned to cuss cutting grass for women
Kind enough to say they couldn’t tell the damned
Difference between their mowed lawns
And their vacuumed carpets just before
Handing over a five-dollar bill rolled tighter
Than a joint and asking me in to change
A few light bulbs. I called those women old
Because they wouldn’t move out of a chair
Without my help or walk without a hand
At the base of their backs. I called them
Old, and they must have been; they’re all dead
Now, dead and in the earth I once tended.
The loneliest people have the earth to love
And not one friend their own age—only
Mothers to baby them and big sisters to boss
Them around, women they want to please
And pray for the chance to say please to.
I don’t do that kind of work anymore. My job
Is to look at the childhood I hated and say
I once had something to do with my hands.

some days

or some nights, rather

i feel like my soul could burst.

because i can’t see you
or talk to you

and yet somehow i do anyway.

and then i hide myself away
to read letters i’ve looked over
dozens of times before
because i imagine that they can still carry your scent.

and my heart manages to feel
more and more pricked with needles

every time i think
how i’d prefer you hate my memory

than smile fondly

and vaguely miss it.

Falling for you was the last thing on my mind
Into a Black-hole I was drawn and confined,
Rocket and Crew flying a course undefined
Emerge near our goal only to Chagrin find...
Blurred visions and Whirlpools thus entwined,
As time slows we collapse like a Sun and unwind
Linked together our molecules are aligned,
Luck and Chaos have smiled and been kind!
Solar Storms to ride in a Cosmos I designed.


Notes: the acronym FIREBALLS is spelled from the first letter of each line.

(C)opyright Torquemada 2013. All wrongs reserved.

Homo will not inherit

Downtown anywhere and between the roil
of bathhouse steam—up there the linens of joy
and shame must be laundered again and again,

all night—downtown anywhere
and between the column of feathering steam
unknotting itself thirty feet above the avenue’s

shimmered azaleas of gasoline,
between the steam and the ruin
of the Cinema Paree (marquee advertising

its own milky vacancy, broken showcases sealed,
ticketbooth a hostage wrapped in tape
and black plastic, captive in this zone

of blackfronted bars and bookstores
where there’s nothing to read
but longing’s repetitive texts,

where desire’s unpoliced, or nearly so)
someone’s posted a xeroxed headshot
of Jesus: permed, blonde, blurred at the edges

as though photographed through a greasy lens,
and inked beside him, in marker strokes:
HOMO WILL NOT INHERIT. Repent & be saved.
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At Ishinomaki Where Matsuo Basho Once Wrote a Poem
Gretel Ehrlich

Finally the twisted roadbed drains
and the daily floodtides at
Ishinomaki dry out.
The sky unmists itself and
loss upon loss begins to
feel like company.
Nothing touches. Nights are brittle and soft,
ink scraped smooth.
To the south Fukushima Daiichi blazes. Flames
we can't see. Sixty-six years ago
two other seacoast towns vanished.
I stick my forearm out
in moonlight. Looking seaward
my skin burns.

Can you love the dawn and hate the day? I do.
"Addicted to the beginnings of relationships,"
as I've been told. And told. And told. The new
light looks as something else when it first hits,
something more like Catherine standing up
across a strangered room, that promising look
she had before the promises, still stuck
with sweetness to her face in my notebook
of pre-day ecstasies. I love the feel
of gray seeping into black-what it represents:
the casting-out that could occur-and the real,
truant world opening, before it grows dense
with light and the need for endings, setting free
that inkling some lasting love might come to me.

They tried to colour me crazy.
Filling my head with As and Bs
but only As because a B is for low life
dirt pushing fuckers with no dreams.

They told me to read.
read books of a history, not mine,
and plays of troubled souls
speaking in tongues and soliloquies
that I dont understand but I nod and agree
as they crank their hands and the climax is saturated
in self satisfaction when their hands plunge deep.

Not for me. But for they.
Degree wielding warriors ready to educate
on who to be but remember no Bs if you want to be
somebody recognised by me and she, he, them, they,
won't stop till they colour me crazy.