garden(‘butterfly’ + ‘moth’)

I think of butterflies the way I think of flowers. Delicate, colorful, beauty unyeilding. Unfading. Paper thin and fragile, the flicker of wings a small miracle on a rough and painful world.

I love the butterfly with the weary eyes. The butterfly with the tiger stripes. The butterfly that looks like an oriental fan. The butterfly that is all black, with pink and red, my favorite colors.

We tend to agree that things like flowers and butterflies are beautiful. Though all have different colors, patterns, shapes, they are beautiful. We don’t always agree that people are beautiful, though all have different colors. Patterns. Shapes.

The flowers that come in mounds of blue, or pink. The tiny petaled flowers that form bunches the size of a fist. The dainy white with the striking aroma; the perky and cheery cactus flowers.

I don’t love many outside myself, and I don’t find myself beautiful. I’m a different color. Pattern. Shape. I am paper thin and fragile. I am delicate. I am not unyeilding. I am a miracle in this rough and painful world.

I don’t love you….

I won’t love you….

I am afraid to love you. You are a different color, pattern, shape. You are perhaps a moth with a massive wing span, weary in color and hard to find. You don’t strike me with the fear of you withering, of your wings being weighed down by the rain.

You are not delicate. You are unyielding. You are a survivor in this rough and painful world.

Together, we are still paper thin, but stronger than separate pages. You love light and I love flowers. You crave the sun, I crave luring fragrance. I float around through life. The wind coaxes me, owns me. You stand, sturdy, unyielding.

I flutter from flower to flower. When does it end for me? When all of the petals fade? When the current pulls me in? When I catch a ride on the wrong lily pad?

Perhaps we’ll let the flutter of the wings of a butterfly decide for both of us.

Red

Your face

My lace

The sheets at my place

Begonias

Powdered Rouge

The bottoms of my shoes

The heat in my veins

The soul of our flames

Your letters, unsigned

Our secret defined

Who Am I

Confusion is bewildering
Who am I? A wanton girl
Playing alone on the rusted swings
Dirt all in her tangled curls


Growth is necessary
Who am I? A woman? No.
A crying child still trapped within
Soaked in tears and paper thin


Identity is transient
Who am I? No one yet
Older than dust with ears still wet
Too old to remember, too empty to forget


Faith is ever waning
Where are you? strange voice in the wind
Tell me where the labyrinth ends
I froze in fear where it begins

Black Magic doesn’t Work on the Devil

I like to think that I

Captivate with my brown eyes

Wordlessly hypnotize

On a throne of butterflies

I often believe that I

Capture prey in silky lies

Pouncing while they fantasize

Of dreamy days and steamy nights

I push my pins in

You don’t let me win

Toxic slowly sinking in

But you counter with a grin

Me and my love are black magic

Your hallowed out heart is satanic

I cannot believe that I

Can’t Magick my way into it

Welcome back to the show!

Welcome back to the show! All the world is a stage

With manic depression and clinical rage

Unbridled joy and inexplicable glee

A circus of colors and faces we’ll be!

Shuffling masks between smiles and tears

Holding back aching through copious years

Cynical smiles and ecstatic frowns

Paired with baby doll eyes and an Ice Queen’s crown

It’s been quite awhile since I swung on my ropes

The noose left my neck and I danced on my toes

It was a grim show, but I digress

I distracted myself with my own happiness

But what is a show if no one is amused?

So the rope now strikes the back of my muse!

Though the lions and tigers have long since been tamed

The stringless marionette lives to entertain!

End of Song

Tell me to stay

Push me away

Tell me you care

Never be there

Hold me close

Shun me the most

Time after time

Like a song out of rhymes

Repeat the same verse

A dozen times

Time after time

Like a song out of rhymes

Repeat the chorus

Wear out the lines

Want me in the dark

Leave me in the light

Unshackle my heart

Unburden my nights

Come closer

And feel from miles away

We’ve gone on too long

Put an end to this song

Flower Massacre

A field of flowers, a plague wrought upon by my insecure thoughts:

Does he love me, or does he not?

I scatter the petals into the wind; they falter, unable to answer my question

A daisy chain is broken with ruthless pain as my fingers commit a massacre

He loves me not, or does he? Why don’t the full blooms answer?

They say a lady should never sleep with a stranger

But his arms felt like freedom to my entangled heart

The blood-thirsty lips of the devil have a taste for foolish girls

And their foolish desires which wholly satiate liars and their sick lusts

Are they any less savage than those of us who lay waste to a field of roses?

Licking the blood the thorns draw from our fingers

The pain of bleeding is far more satisfying than that of a broken heart, constantly wounded and dense in scar tissue

He loves me, he loves me not.

Strawberries in the Winter

Strawberries taste like summer, with a sweetness that gives me visions of green strawberry fields

With bright red gems glittering with the morning’s slowly dissipating fog

And fragile white, round-winged butterflies fluttering through the miles and miles of sweet strawberries.

Tasting a strawberry in the midst of a winter, I wonder how far we roam to find strawberries in a place so cold

Across the country, through the snow, to the other side of the world where it isn’t below zero

Or maybe just a little down south, where the porch is warm enough to languidly rock and watch the trucks drive by

Through day and night, to bring these strawberries out of the light and hope they survive.

A journey up the coast, to where the sun doesn’t shine and the earth is too cold for strawberries to grow

They taste like another place, or another time, as I’ve witnessed summer before with my own eyes:

It smells like the green leaves of the strawberry, tastes just as sweet and sounds like cicadas

Feels like sweat on my forehead, my bare feet on sand and a cool salty wind with an ocean wave cadence.

I wonder if strawberries in the winter taste just as nostalgic as pomegranates in the summer

To fully validate the irony in that I only miss one when I’m with the other.

Lagos

There is no wind for whispers; just the silence of the sea.

As the waves lap at my feet, I soundlessly weep at the solace the sun has given my soul.

At last, I am whole, together with the sand from which my form was span

And the salt that seasons my tears.

After so much time alone, I’m finally home to a place I’ve never been.

I long to see that blue sea once again.

Lagos, Portugal