Poem revision

The Belly of a Clam

“…The wind picks up the breath of my armpits/Like dust, swirls it/Miles away/
And drops it/On the ear of a rabid dog,/And I take on another life”
-Gary Soto

I travel along a mountain.
The curve of a spoon was
too concave to maneuver.
Tossed from a cliff.
As I fall I am caught
in a pocket of infinity.

The strings of my being,
they slowly unravel.
I separate from myself, like a piece of lint,
a fibrous tumbleweed
in a volumeless suitcase.
Mother said I could
always begin anew.

Two Collins poems

Fever Dream

At night I crawl into a castle,
pull its outer walls up to my chin
and lay my arms over the battlements.

Outside there’s the roar of an army
of mice and elephants stampeding up and down the moat.
The orange, circular explosions created by their artillery
swell slowly and innumerably beneath my eyelids.

I bid sweet dreams to a winged,
sky blue dragon at my side.
We peer over the rampart’s edge,
look down the curtain wall
and see my feet sticking out
at the bottom, toes wiggling,
twenty feet below.

Viewing the back of my head

As I was free-falling into a nonrotating black hole,
several facts from my astronomy lectures came to mind
(and where were they during my exam?):
Have I passed the ergosphere?
How long until I cross the event horizon?
I could see the stars above me contracting,
forming a narrow circle in space.
I must be within the photon sphere, then…
This isn’t so bad, I think, because
now I can rest easy on that term paper.

Soon I will only see the back of my head
in all directions. How comforting to think
that back at home, my lover can look through a telescope
and see my body, stretched and disfigured,
millions of lightyears away.
A timeless keepsake.

Two-stanza poem

Glacial Age
In glacial pre-North America I creep forward.
Because I am curvaceous and shapely
I shape the land’s mountains
and smooth the hills’ curves;
a woman, I fashion them in my image.
There is someone inside me—a god, maybe,
and elsewhere this same god is inside my sisters,
guiding them in their creative paths.

A pasture spreads gently downhill,
coated with tall grass.
On a crisp, breezy day, a small stream runs,
winding, until it divides, curves,
then meets again, forming a small islet, and trickles onward.
A young boy watches this rivulet,
pondering the shape of stream and islet,
and proceeds to sing to himself, quietly,
about the footprints of his pet dinosaur.

Erotic poem

Excerpt from "The Erotic Sound"

After watching her strip
off her clothes she helped me unzip
my jeans and took no time to rip
them off. Licking her lip,
she wrapped her mouth around the tip;
but me, I just wanna dip,
so it took little effort to flip
her over and play with her nip,
steadily moving downward to her hip
where I could sip
from her until she had me equip
myself. Making sure I had a good grip,
I entered, and she let out a soft yip.
When we were done we just laid there, dripping.