Ramblings from a journey
Sharing my poems feels very vulnerable. It is actually what I concentrated on during my creative writing major in college. I would have loved to get my Masters in poetry to keep working on this tender skill but, I needed to get a job. My poems are lace doilies that I took time to weave. They mean things to mean which they will not mean to you. So if you don’t like them, it’s ok. Just don’t crap on my attempt unless you do it in a constructive, helpful way. ;-)
By Michelle Raskey
Traversing the path through your crests and curves
Stepping farther into your mystic land,
Watched by ancient ghosts.
At each crunch of my boot I shed
Layers of accumulated fabrics, growing smaller:
First mule deer, now coyote, next badger –
Until I disrobe completely, a snake.
Rusty red blood carries me and I
Slither across your rocks and truth.
My sacred pilgrimage complete I open my eyes,
Wet wings unfold,
I take flight and hunt.
The girl’s dreadlocked hair looks like the shower spray it has never seen;
shooting out of the spicket of scalp.
Her left armpit hair spells out the letters, F and U;
I guess the other two letters are under her right.
She asks for spare change, plays three chords on her guitar, sings a song I have never heard before. I think she has wasted her life, let it go down the drain.
She could really make something of herself, if she just cleaned up a bit
And, every time I spread the foam and shave, I look closely to see what I might have cut off
that now moves in circles towards the grate that will separate us, where I picture it riding the shit like a ship.
All the hair I sheer, all the DNA of me that rides in the sewers, surfing that internet,
shouldn’t it by now have evolved to some newer, better me?
But I stand naked in the spray of chlorinated clarity staring into thousands of pores,
and follicles, hoping to see a daisy push through,
which can be a weed,
but seeing instead a Monet, or is it a Manet? When it doesn’t matter because the woman in the steamed mirror, waiting for me to get out of the shower so we can talk is someone I have never seen before. So I dress in the dark, already feeling the prickles of hair under my arms that wait for me to send them too, down the drain.
(2008)
Oh Walmart I see you above all stores;
All my needs fulfilled on your every aisle.
Traversing a short-cut across waxed floors,
the smells in pet-care fill my mouth with bile.
Your customers are varied as your crap;
Rich, poor, pre-teen and the geriatric.
They buy cucumbers, fleece sheets and roach traps.
PTA Presidents, truckers, addicts;
People of Walmart live in every town.
Styling in mesh crop tops or pajamas,
Maybe a queen in a full length ball gown,
Will be shopping for her ripe bananas.
Excavations one thousand years from now,
Unveil Slim-Jims as sacred, and bow.
His hands,five chubby caterpillers
stuffed into his mouth,
a greedy swallow.
They grab all they touch,
reacting like tentacles of the sea anemone.
Everything goes in his mouth
where his tongue will be
his eyes.
His hands,
five long river reeds
float on my breast,
a dreaming wren.
They cup the hearth of me
holding back the sieve of years.
I take them to my mouth and
my tongue will taste
our love.
His hands,
five knobby tree twigs
grasp the aluminum rails,
a waiting owl.
They argue with the spoon and jello
disobey the nerves commands.
He palsies them to his mouth
but his tongue will taste
only steel.
