Until I die

Some of the ants don't follow the pheromones

Everyone wields a machete, everyone cuts leaves
and those little trails get wet in the rain

Some storm clouds never disappear, they just roll
over the mountains, a perpetual misty fog threatening
to unleash the known unknown on muddy slopes and tiny
settlements of forlorn humans under tents and tarps
and nylon

These six legs scramble across strange surfaces
and this hardened skin shouldn't feel the weight of
the day but it does

And so they stray

Experiment 2

Gut wrenching guilt. The power of words,
speaking them aloud makes them true,
truer than they were before.
This is why we joke not about accidents, misinterpretations,
heart attacks, cancers, one-hundred-year-old women dying
in hospital beds against their wishes.

Death

we die many deaths

Dark chocolate used to make my brain tingle
and the high trickled down into my fingertips and
made me a new woman: bolder. More in love.

After I died for the seventh time I could no longer relish
you, your smoky texture. All you left me with was
bitter aftertaste, a gritty tongue cleaning teeth,
thirst.

Parched
waiting for number eight
skulls and bones nudging my addiction to fear
heckle me until the new dawn

Experiment

A new stilted walk in plum, forty dollars you'd have rather
spent on the fruit. Shadows and smiles and a seedy bar along
old haunts, dotted with stones. You feel every one, a princess on peas,
big toes butting up against long steps down a dark alleyway:
the full moon blushing behind the lone patch of clouds,
fluorescent lights fluttering like moths' wings, morse code for
a city that people's hearts leave behind before they move in.