Poet, The Lavender Menace

She is back and now she is a firefighter! Take that misogyny!

In the back of the bus the violence is unheard over the growl of the engine.
Seat across from me- He has long fingernails. I don’t trust him, picks his nose with them then smacks his son.
I am trying to kill him through some kind of telepathy.
Seat in front of me- says “sleepy” in markered art graffiti.
Seat behind me- the self proclaimed bathroom supervisor opens the door, sets the seat down for ladies.
Bathroom supervisor sits with a teenage mother. “Your baby has a lot of hair,” I say. She replies, “Yeah, gave me heartburn.”

The desert sun screams through bus windows landing on my pale arm. It burns
It’s square shape onto me. The window must be as hot as the engine.
The battered son watches as people pass down the isle. He pulls his gun (thumb and pointer finger) and shoots everyone, even the knitting lady.
He doesn’t get away with it for long before-SMACK- “Sit down before he hits the brakes boy!”
Game Over. The son shrivels in his seat out of my view. I turn back to the seat in front of me and read “sleepy” graffiti.
I speak to the shriveled boy in his seat. Tell him not everyone is like his father through Greyhound bus telepathy.

I want to cry with him. But who will ever benefit from silent empathy?
The teenage mother tells me she doesn’t know the bathroom supervisor. He is following her and the child who gave her heartburn.
Bathroom supervisor is a large Mexican with gray hair at his ears and arms full of tattoo graffiti.
He doesn’t hear us talking. He’s fallen asleep to the pulse of the engine.
Heartburn baby gurgles, sputters, cries a little. I ask her if she needs a break; she hands me her nine-month-old son.
He is dirty: black feet, yellow ears, smells sour, like rotting citrus. He looks at me face blank like, “Who is this lady?”

Bathroom supervisor opens the bathroom door, steps in preparing it for a young lady.
Battered son shoots her with his gun, then shoots his father and watches him die through violent telepathy.
I smell the baby’s hair; think of how he might smell if he were my son,
wonder if a newborn’s head full of hair always causes heartburn.
All the characters back here are acting in a silent movie, over the pulsing reel of the bus engine.
I look at my feet and watch the Gatorade and Arrowhead bottles roll back and forth with the bus. It’s beautiful garbage graffiti.

Pull a marker from my pack; I think I’ll write a poem on the bus seat instead of graffiti.
Bathroom supervisor flirts with me thinking he’s a tattooed savior for all the ladies.
He tells me his stop is Vegas. The teenage mother’s terror will end there, with the death of the engine.
I foresee a safe trip for her and her baby. All the way to Montana with my positive telepathy.
No more bathroom supervisors, just safety, although maybe too much bus station food and heartburn.
By Montana, I wonder the smell of her son.

One dirty, one broken, one loved, one hated- the life of a Greyhound son.
Battered boy walks up to me and smiles, his hand on my arm. I search his skin for bruise graffiti.
He is standing in the aisle. Even I fear his father and his blows that must burn
hotter on heart than skin. I think someday this boy will bloody his lady.
I foresee the cyclical violence through flashing red telepathy.
Battered boy falls backward as brakes are slammed. Bus driver cuts ignition. Smacks are loud with no engine.

Passenger faces turn toward the father in accusing graffiti.
Ladies shake fingers, others speak in Greyhound bus heartburn telepathy.
Battered son screams as father picks him up by the arm SMACK it echoes in engine silence.

Life is like angry sex,
something that satisfies and forces me to clench my fists at the same time.
Its filled with naked skin, cussing, climax rolling in alleyway grime.

The true love fantasy is painted by loneliness
an unloved hand swinging brush strokes.

Real love is linked by chain link,
found in puddles and gutters.
I’m talking sun up to sun rise,
bare feet planted straddling yellow street lines.
No clouds. That is where fantasy lays.
No clouds.
They are really lined in cocaine,
when gone nothing but the torture of a sunny day.

I find beauty in ugliness
a flower turns sick in my presence,
wilts in my essence,
I gaze at it in death and take a picture.

You tell me to relax my face,
allow the lines of my forehead to seep back into my skin.
I squint for the ugly
like living behind scratched glasses,
noting memories of scratched past.
My gaze is heavy like black bagged New York City garbage
my dreams are locked in the trunk of a 1980 Volvo filled with bullet holes
balancing on a pile of our future’s dirty diapers.

I find beauty in ugliness
so it’s hard for my face to relax.
Like Atlas I hold countries between my hairline and brow.
There’s too much to know.
Making life like angry sex screaming my way into the gorgeous.

You are magnificent
because you reveal your contradiction for me.
You could be a sweet fantasy but,
you spit gravel from your cheeks
your voice scratched with thin slivers of glass,
you blink rubber tire shredded eyelashes.

I can’t feel clouds,
can’t see true love picture books in my day to day.
But your flesh feigns no store bought fantasy.

You’re sarcasm
splattered over long body and gray eyes,
the metal in your iris’,
the scars hidden by lace,
the brown beer bottle bits
beneath your nails that I revel in as I hold your hand.

I slide my soul
beneath your coat
and feel cold steel sweating like skin.
I feel hard love. The only kind that exists.
I taste rust in your armpits,
feel your knees slice my palms jagged.
I revel in the reality of it.

We both feel the cracks in sidewalks with bare heels and snap pictures of death.
Black on black is colorful,
our snapshots compose reality as hard as falling on curbs
crashing into car doors,
fucking in gutters.

Together we find beauty in ugliness,
We were forced face first into the sidewalk,
then kissed with mouthfuls of wet cement
and stroked statues with our tongues.

You and I overcome,
live in humble, ugly day to day
and love.

You are 50% cotton, 50% spandex. You are a size small. You are made in Bangladesh. You are made in Taiwan. You are a cool iron after wash (if needed). Tell me what are your ingredients? Sum yourself up for me in three words or less, ridiculous?

Straight Edge kids preach and sell drugs. Christian kids preach and then fuck. Queer kids preach and discriminate against their own. Republicans wear Democratic underwear. Everyone’s grasping for labels like air-needing to preach to belong. Searching to live with tags at the back of our necks like size 8 Hanes, only wash with like colors. It’s that simple, we all have a tag and just flip it- see reverse side for care. Now I know just how to treat you. Now I know who to be for you Organic fiber blend, cotton-polyester friend.

Tags just fade after hundreds of washes. Twice a week Tide, Downey and bleach and before long the words are washed down the holes of the washing machine barrel. It all turns blank. Then we have to start from the beginning, naked and begging for a tag to wear. Vegetarians preach and sneak hot wings at midnight. Feminists call each other bitch. The sun rises and the moon forgets to set and there’s a contradiction- an apparent apparition in the sky. There’s only so long a person can live two lives before both appear in the same lie.

Preach hard or go home, join our club or live alone, sign here…it’s your contract for friends-break it and it’s the end. Become a hasbian an ex-vegetarian, a born again virgin, a drunk with edge tattoos. I’ve been a jock, a Mormon, a Born Again, a slam poet, a lesbian, a drug addict and back again. All just part of my equation.

I rip all the labels off my t-shirts now. I am whatever I am in the moment that I am in…that’s all I can promise. To be Suzy La Follette with tagless t-shirts. But I am more than just that. I am my name and all the empty spaces in between, all the dark secrets that no one sees.

There just isn’t enough room on a little white tag. It would take pages of healthy forest to touch the smallest part of us. So, stop writing labels and start writing poems. They won’t spend time bleeding their ink into the barrel of your washing machine.

We, as human beings are forever transforming constantly cacooning pieces of our souls and freeing them. Our poems are written on the backs of butterfly wings fluttering so rapidly that our definitions of self are always morphing. Could you imagine: “Hey man, I thought you were like some cool caterpillar but your really just a wimpy butterfly, whoa, lame.” No, bro, yesterday you just saw a piece of me that underwent a transformation of time. Every day goes by and I am writing new poems on the backs of butterflies. Stand back friend and allow me some cacooning room. You think I’m different now, give me a week. Your label won’t last that long under the bleach of misunderstanding. I thought you were…I thought she was like…I thought he was a…butterfly and caterpiller wrestling each other, perfectly polishing this art of living.

There are a million souls co-existing in every human core all attemptimg butterfly status. There’s just so much a person must experience before cocoons may be shed. Imagine a human at the point of enlightenment a million different butterflies. Their wings covering the sky, blocking out the sun. Wings fluttering in unison. Butterfly markings form poems flying across the sky describing this enlightened one. Then, we could all read a poem of humanity. See poems for care. See people for who they truly are.

You are 85% truth, 15% hope. You are 90% future and 10% history. You are 60% love and 40% doubt. But we all are 100% people.
See poems for care.

The night we saw Saturn through telescope
I swear it had cartoon yellow rings turned
toward us, like planets showing off for us.
You bought some glow-in-the-dark plastic stars.

I swear they had cartoon yellow rings turned
against us, like constellations at war.
You bought some glow-in-the-dark plastic stars,
stuck them on the ceiling above my bed.

Against us, like constellations at war
stars hang omnipotent slyly grinning
stuck on my ceiling above my warm bed.
We make love under the stars once again.

Stars hang omnipotent slyly grinning
toward us, like planets showing off for us.
We made love under the stars once again,
the night we saw Saturn through telescope.