heavy metal

I live in a house surrounded by heavy machinery and heavy metal.

Sometimes, if I listen, I can hear singing
through the black and white noise of rap and electric guitar solos,
a little gray piskie on my windowsill
with a deep vibrato and an unnaturally high range
like a flute played through a bed of slippery sea grass,
tracing the soft back of a stingray, with the same prick of enthusiasm before the numbing pain.

I lie awake and listen until my eyes turn black.

It’s nighttime again, the crickets are chirping
in the glass fish tank on my bedroom floor—

I lie on my ink-stained sheets and study the ceiling,
tracing the star lines and fracture marks in the rough plaster,
making up stories about the myriad faces
staring back at me from their places in the finished wood door—

if you look just so, you can see them smiling.

I scatter rose petals and ashes on the polished wood floor
and burn incense in clouds so thick
my cats flee with their eyes running—
it’s easy to pretend they’re feeling empathy
for poor, little me,
slipping through the mouse-holes and ant-holes in the floor moulding.

I can’t let you slip out of my mind
when you do, you’ll leave a hole
like a parasite ate its way through my brain
and gave birth to its child, despair, in the recesses of my heart—

I read Revelation and Song of Songs and look for God in the dandelions,
I paint my ankles and burn my hands--
you were a fool
to pretend I’d fit in this crowd of Technicolor somebody’s.

I look for piskies in the woodwork and faeries in the smoke,
sometimes, I take out my flute and play along
with the enchanting melody of the clockwork fiddler
who joined the gray piskie on the windowsill,

serenading me with a soliloquy of dissonance
to mirror the unsettled puddle of my mind—

the puddle which you stomped through in heavy combat boots
when you decided you knew my soul.

You were my Buddha, my Krishna, my Gandhi,
you kissed me in my kitchen and made my head spin
you traveled hundreds of miles while the world looked on,
picked up that first handful of salt,
and threw it on my wounds.

In the aftermath of the blinding pain,
I wrote stories on my mirrors.

In my world of half-sound from my useless eardrums,
I memorized the reverse of poetry,
the final and over-dramatic death of art
in a mire of misused words.

My heart flies like a bird trapped in a net, a constant struggle against myself—
I toss and turn against my million nightmares
and dream in French and rational equations—

One night, an eagle flew down from Eden
and ate the gray piskie singing on my windowsill.
That night, I forgot about Paradise.

I live in a house surrounded by heavy machinery and heavy metal—
last night, I picked up the microphone
and taught myself to sing.

[6/23/05]