WiLD WEST writing samples
Angel’s Trumpet
A trumpet tree blooms in the corner of my daughter’s garden.
Her treasured, white gloved plant looms over fences in decrepit yards,
pours its exotic perfume, night secrets and sweats into our ears.
Who has not sipped the tea of its stems, nor feared the nectar of the oozing night,
drunk from the poisoner’s teacups and wished for a delirium drenching the evening?
These delicious bells graze the earth with their mouths fresh and young,
old balm and ivory candle-snuffers, capture the broth of hallucination
and coma of blurred vision.
In lambent arrest, we listen to their trumpet sounds, wait in thrall of devil’s weed and
jimson, hear our funeral chord in the blandishment of every suitor.
Angel of light and darkness must we hold back, expecting to be soothed
under your nocturnal flowers, desire forever lost in endless sleep?
(p. 11)
Dread Naught
I wouldn’t wear them now
muumuus red with white hibiscus flowers
or my hair a neat beehive with dangling
black curls over large ears
music not drums or chimes slyly syncopated
with West African rhythms
but now iffy girls singing ballads
some quivering with croup or phlegm
cigarettes I’d smoke them now
pink Russian ones with scented tobacco
those slender French butts that scraped
and burned the lining of my nose
now I’d be more kind but not forgiving
I’d sit here and sew my stitches line by line
I’d loose my braids and let them dangle
to cut loose threads I’d use a butcher knife
(p. 24)
Clean Up
My fingers rummage for you
with gluttony and need and fuel of memory
corruptible as body lying in the ground.
Mother, I’ll light a candle in this delusion
say a prayer in which neither will collude.
In the drawers: shoe horns, heel trees, decks of cards,
packages of hairpins occlude though you wore
a grey wig, and nightly used a shower cap.
Plowing through plastic bags, I save the afghan.
I finger the well-knitted sweaters.
I’m in this devolution that gets me back
to the first fish that crept over mud flats.
For me, no generations no pedestals no future lungers.
This dreck, to figure out, what to keep or toss,
shoving it all into the downstairs cupboards,
marks a pointless keeping, holds on to you
who lingers here and like grass shrivels into dust.
(p.30)
We must never let go of the life we have not planned
I believe foremost in service and thence integrity combined with my need to explore
and share myself with others. As your coordinator, I relish questions on a more
abstract and higher self-level. I will be your guide on both top and bottom ends of the
spectrum. I’m a self-identified myth. I’ve sat on the boards of Exiles, Perverse City,
Hoosiers-mix, Leather Girls, Sainted Citadel, Society of Janus and SM Odyssey &
Greek Ritual. I’m a graduate of Bestial Academy and Olympic Tech; I helped organize
the Journeywoman Priestess, Dionysian Stop Knots, and Queen Dido. I discovered
my path by accident, having awakened one day in spring to the passionate dictates of
a vastly superior Goddess. By inspiration and blind insight my celibacy was tricked
out in a concrete trash receptacle on Goat Beach as buoyant white goats surged in.
Evening it was and I playfully merged into a spiritual sensual ocean of transformation.
I was pure Leda. I cavorted with my swan for the first time after centuries of anxiety.
Living before was purest Hades, even more than my earliest memory of a grueling
birth that lasted 24 hours, in which I was wrenched from mother’s side.
(p. 44)