I regret to announce that, for the time being, I will no longer be posting on this blog. This is due to publication and copyright issues that have arisen and may continue to arise in the future. I will, however, be working hard to get a private blog up and running. If you’re interested in continuing to follow my journey as a writer, keep your eyes open for a post detailing this new blog. In it you will find the URL and password needed to view my work.
Much Love,
-RW
in a tub full of maggots
he bathed off the western seaboard
floated in negatives
ghost strips
father Eric did warn him
of writers and tripping
said words like they know
and why you do not
and sleep
barren the landscape
of windows strewn with salt
fantastic crystal formations
growths that do not exist
when wiped from the corners
the movement was like foam
rollers and mattress toppers
oceans and coasters
water wings and coffee rings
he absorbed everything
temporary and spat poison
bed sheets in face of the spring
today is not yet existent
father Eric
the only truth is conjecture
the only surety is faded
I have it here
inked
polaroid
scriptures
all that you embrace is rift
in ice fragments of fingernails
left in trenches from the pull
watch her skin
see it dry
see it shrivel
there at the joints
there at the center of the belly
it is separating at the seams
tearing like shoe leather
tugging at the laces
the time of the living
is a ghost cat
she is elusive
she is the cruelest mistress
the most cunning feline
she is the falling snow
in the shadow of the leopard
-RW
Leaving is religion,
you named yourself a priest,
you will become a waterfall
and age yourself away
one unturned stone
after the next. Farewell
to the carcass, stripped
save the esteem of a fin,
and to the riverbank giving
way to oceans. Simple,
yet never more fallible,
this canine tooth suspension
bridge to departure, or
nothingness, or discovery,
or home. Fancy yourself
cancer, imagine growing
up in the inner workings
of a city of gemstones—
rubies inflating, sapphires
jolting awake in twos, emeralds
begging the sun to melt
their bodies into the topazes,
quartz swearing an oath
on the amethyst shell, I am
not transparent, opals beating
to the blinking of the stars
inside them— conceive
overtaking the one you are
within, twisting and stretching
and budding and finally, blooming.
Will you become ear petals?
Burst forth from beneath
the floor of heaven, force
yourself through the mechanisms
that the homeless consider creation.
This is the fourth season— touch
the sun, waxen beauty, meld
yourself to the sands, fuse
into the house of glass.
-RW
You always have desired to create
in her
a centipede, time as a current—
immutable and manifested in black
ice evergreen— legs
like picks in the pericardial walls,
cliffhangers
rusted nails
extraterrestrial sky
veins. Feast
your leeched skull
on necktie sutures
pulling her Thenar Space
to your own, compressing,
squeezing out the vacuum of stars—
pretentious blue
with implosion, cancer-riddled
with first-world love
story sorrow—
not every lumbar is constructive,
not every motionless body is death.
She is Ouroboros
writhing on her back,
feigning receptivity, swallowing
tales
fucking
tails
forcing consumption— regenerative
religion earthworms spitting themselves out,
controlling circle,
amputating heads
growing the same
brain constellations—
you are presupposed—
there is no change,
only cyclic divisions.
-RW
There is a spirit within the doors
reflecting nights spent sleeping
within another, mornings empty
of rest, eyes hollowed with boning
knives, wings shedding the feathery
overlap of past and present— it is here
that nothingness is tangible as far
as the glass can stretch— letters
r outdated, fear is eternal— thanks
poured from his body like fluid
from lung punctures. At 2pm, pain
of self-inflicted mutilation to the ribs,
the arms, the abdomen, the memory—
Timothy is floating among the strings
of protein before your eyes, inescapable—
kill yourself for him & prove your worth
to his vision. This is the image of mirrors—
flipped, lacking skin, amputated facial muscles,
permanently stunted growth, fields of death,
salt mines evaporated to dust mites— loss
of compass, destruction of who u were.
-RW
His uvula turned to honey—
disease
riddled,
inconsistent,
paraplegic
parasites,
educational
departures—
down his throat like molten lava,
like forest fires, like melting cities,
like the smell of burning hair,
like his old man. She stood there,
icicle, murder weapon, clean
getaway, upside down eyelids,
waiting for the pursuant to follow
fallen trees, misconceived foreign
leaves, antibodies, force fed dreams.
He choked down bee vomit, spat
out venomous word creations, punctured
inner ear conundrums with tower-top needles,
emptied answers before questions— she spilled
flowerpots and love-me-nots, grateful of his
longitudinal
envies,
american
visions,
interdependent
narcissism,
gardenias
shaped like a paradox.
-RW
Falsehood of everyday hand signals,
of smoke gestures— this is acceptable fog
planned like conception, expected like cancer—
sometimes she grows within you undetected
save for the subtle swelling in the chest
when floating through the oxygen of eyes,
the fossil fuels of faceless faces— you are
the seventh trumpet of Joshua to the epidermis
of the city suspended in you. Sweet gemstones,
rock candy, frozen staples, fangs made for eating—
saint maid blessed your sneeze-less shame
down the staircase in her hand, above her hip,
inside of her skin, acting as a human glove
puppeteering the blind man puppeteer,
swallowing the ventriloquist tongue— throw this
across memory, you will die alone and she will
promise to drag her rotted bones to the ceremony,
but when everything has poured empty into caves
the heavy will displace the blue, the void will penetrate
the tension of the surface, slither its way past
in the manner of needles, expand like tentacles,
spread like lubed legs and oiled quill pens—
she is antimatter, anti-mother— these streets run familiar
as her veins and you are map-less amidst the stars.
-RW
Go check out and “Like” my bandpage on Facebook!
you bared your teeth at me too often
to be another beaker of brown sugar
and cinnamon— I filled you like Alley,
spilled myself like wineglass, this glove
matched with those sea urchin spines—
keep waking up in different places then,
even now, some lifetimes later. In curtains,
in living rooms, reaching for lamps, words,
bodies, always returning with memory,
with intangibles. I had a straw inserted
just above the left ear in hopes of sucking
the skull venom out— I need to hold it
again. There once was dark with lambs
that continuously changed into ravens—
spoke with the metallic crunch of horns,
pierced with the feedback of loneliness.
-RW
The subtle hum of piano skin
peeling to the accompaniment
of the Richter scale—
these are the mornings that break
without the breath of sadness—
reveling in the birth of clarity
that comes with nudity, that spills
from the cracks in flesh—
she has been stripped like an orange,
exposed in the dressing room,
exercised by the latex-wearing priest
who empties God into single-fingered gloves,
fucked into honesty by obsidian mirrors—
she is contained in glass and cotton
and sexually frustrated fish and stuntmen
and calf bears and children’s socks
stretched over the star of death,
yet she cannot see herself in the surface
of the self-made lake that sticks to the faux marble basin—
these are the nights that gouge
at the leeches under the scalp, anchored—
18 hands, she was a big one
and handled her meals with a shallow throat,
but when faced with a rider, shot
straight through the tired wire, snapped
hungrily at harnesses, but kept the blinders
secure, kept the lather like a crown,
called them hatred, identified—
these are the days of mind-bees
that sing to the stars, the gaseous planets,
find only horses in the constellations.
-RW
wordmusician 