I dream I’m fixing broken things.
Manufactured people hunting me.
She never knew who she was, she never
knew me.
Trailer parks and railroad stops
I dream I’m fixing broken rings.

She’s travelin’ through time
fixing rhymes
finding addicts
erasing lines
She’s tearing down their walls
and counting up their stalls
and all the way down the aisle-
way, trying to reach his heart
She’s travelin’ through time
fixing rhymes
finding addicts
erasing lines.

They tell me there’s a support group
for women like me;
who rescue the dog takin’ the greed
who handcuff the glass to the gain
the man to his name
the grass to the glean,
Who ride the motorcycle and belief
in the sissy seat
He gonna improve his case.

I dream I’m fixing broken things.

by Darrah de jour

Sometimes, i think i could fall into love
with anyone dark & mysterious;
anyone domineering:
with a slow, heavy hand.

Sometimes, I think I need a slap in the face
of a more positive reality,
then I remember what I am running from
and how what I seek somehow finds me
in a better stretch
on some lotus-type flower of hope;
and that slow heavy hand
comes crashing down on me, like a wave
of prosperity.

Sometimes, i think, i just need to be laid
nice arrival of perceptive survival
instincts.

And other times, there are a few things for sure I know
and they are that;
I could fall into a fantasy – a remarkable obsession with anyone
Dark and mysterious with a sense of love’s urgency and the ever-pressing night
which no longer affronts me,
but lends itself peacefully to my inner-visions,
which today, are for something bright, some birth right recognized,
that I might be noticed for what’s on the inside

faith _

is slolemning through

the shitty periods

When all you want to do

is jump out of your

skin.

And not feel

the way you feel

By Any Means Necessary.

faith_

is Trusting

that on the Other side

there is some higher

knowledge

some better place -

Some recognizable person

whose eyes feel like Home

that will meet you

Where you Fall. –

and your lips ~

they become my

lips – as the fire

in our prison of

two shackles only

the unholy-brave.

For we almost miss-

ed our one chance

at forgiveness.

When falling from the

Tower – It becomes flying.

by Darrah de jour

I’ve acquired a taste for her
a slow thirst creeping
up from behind the hour
Soon I feel tongue to cheek
milking for liquid stored
Lips turn inward, consoling

I’ve acquired a taste for her                                                                                                                              tomato avocado tea apple sauce
company jazz silence rain buttons
layering menstruation writing
vagina breasts simple soft
complex selective cats and dogs
wrestle lip and tongue
I’ve acquired a taste for her

Somewhere between summer
and freshman year college kids
crowd pubs and bars
Escapees from the draft
riding over the Canadian border
where rivers flow deeper
longer silently stronger
Pilgrims Indians
cats on tongue
I’ve acquired a need for her

c. de jour, 2007

I was dead when you found me.

I was a heart beating on a pile of bones.

waiting for death to return from holiday,

to finally take me away.

to render me.

to surrender me useful.  to

give me a life I wanted.  amid the stones

licking the wet ocean, giving

reason for the lapping, giving time for the moon

to regenerate.  I took your hands like the sick take their medicine.

and every time you reached for me, a part of my soul whistled.

and every time you left me, I stayed there, with music playing so that upon

your return, you’d have something to listen to.  beside

the sound of my beating heart, clanging against sternum, against thorax,

against reason.  rationale.

because you were a taken man, and I was death incarnate.  licking the stones

with my dull aching pain.  and you became

the only reason death never returned. to

claim me as Her own.  I sit, waiting, lips pursed into whistling stance, holding my breath

for the clock to hit ready.  and your footsteps to hit the pavement outside my door.  for

you to claim me like a jacket at coat check, throw me over your shoulder, find me a new home, grow me flesh from bone.  cry me a life anew.  give me a tin soldier to surround my heart, and save the key inside your own heart, at least your mouth, so that each time you kiss me, I’ll be reminded that I belong with you.  and how you gave me life when on the doorstep of death had I found.  my compass lost to the graveyards of other men’s good intentions and messy dispositions.  actions like wild horses, whose saddles never knew surrender.  but I did and you did and so I wait, like a soldier.  for an allowance for discharge for life outside of the wreckage of a personal war.  for victory not victimhood.  for you to save me.  god, I hope you can save me.

c. de jour, 2011

By Darrah de jour

I’ve spent my whole life
Looking for my father’s eyes.
The eyes of a man hidden; shrouded by the dark of ages
Times when a boy in a boy’s home where the nurses fed the kids
And the kids cleaned their own scraped knees.

He remembers Happy Days and who directed Casablanca.
He remembers Bravo Channel’s lineup and who sold their t-bird & which year.
He knows his mother’s piercing eyes and the damage they caused. Radiation. Beams of a ballerina’s slim light.

He has memorized the capitals of all 50 states and some in foreign lands too.

My father doesn’t know my age or my boyfriend’s name or how much I weigh. My father doesn’t know my dreams or ambitions or middle name.

I’ve spent my whole life looking for him. A modern-day Sherlock Holmes. Pawing at strangers. Condensation above my brow, an electric kettle set to ON>

Sifting through the junkyard dogs for a thoroughbred. I’ve been taken by the leash into bedrooms like dungeons and dungeons like Heaven. I’ve purchased every mascara and heel, every wartorn steal, every pet that shakes my hand, every line by a willing man. I’ve numbered my CDs and exercised till 3am, I’ve ripped the sharp edges from addicts and lined my eyes with consequences. I’ve taken men from their gender roles and women from their comfort zones. I’ve stripped car paint from bumpers and driven down Hollywood Blvd. with a muffler seizing time, dragging strips of canvas, concrete and asphalt, making sparks in an otherwise unworldly city.

I’ve taken drugs that make me talk and medicines that quip sleep. I’ve sipped ether from bathroom drains and prayed longingly to gods I can’t see. I’ve found home in every bed I’ve slept in, and wagged myself out of abusive’s hands/ like that muffler in that famed, legend-house City. I’ve earned my stripes, my determined lines, that guide me to where I am now. With a few stretch marks, but mostly a kick-ass sexy-ass fine-ass stripper’s body.

Still some days, when it’s rainy out. When the music is the Blues and my bathwater tastes salty. I’ll creep out of my bedclothes and daydream about the Beach. About slicing through the water with legs like Virginia Woolfe. Scissorstick shapes in the waves, coins in troves dragging my pockets to the gnomes. About plunging myself, a barnacle, a starfish to the watery green deep. Snuffing the breath that lives inside of me. My Voice, which tells me when to wake and when to sing. A baby barreling through the darkened tunnel, careening breathlessly through, to the only sliver of cruel light it can see. But trusting what will be there when he makes his way out of the vagina and into the jungle’s reap.
I find my father’s eyes in everything I see. And nothing at all. Like a ghost of a dream, a certain wartorn reckoning. These are the cards and I play my hand accordingly. Only, don’t tell me what to do or how to do it. Cuz the only man ever did that was He. And like Nina Simone, today, I’m ‘Feelin’ Good’ so freedom is mine and while this bird Be Flyin’ high don’t try to paw for the obedience deep in me. A father one day will discover who I am. Learn more about the woman who sashays with Pride down 5th Ave(nue). And it won’t be no john with a dollar bill in his teeth. And it won’t be no bebe tryin’ tryin’ tryin’ to own me. The femme is fatal to only She. And like I said before, today the bees buzzin’ know how I feel and I know how I feel, and I’m feeling good!

Something I’m working on…

by Darrah de jour

At sixteen and a half, he moved.  To a nine by nine cell.  To prison.  With running water and a steel toilet.  Where I lived similarly with my parents.

Who never spoke of, nor heard about, nor made mention to the cause.

Know conflict, know complaint, absence of resolution.  Disdain, distrust, the bluntness of an egg’s point pushed up against my cheek, no where near my mouth, escaping degradation.

Know needing for things, wanting for, unsated, know dispelling of illusion, hearts like cranes where I pump quarters and upward of none can I harness.  Know perfumed requests and grainy bold ones.

Know mistreatment until any treatment is improved demeanor.  Know irreverence of reservation for my output.

Know this wanting life.

Know this absent life.

Know this changed life.

Turned from the mirror, for recollection of…

Cross with the hand that reaches from behind the reflection.  Silver and apart.

Gripping need, until need is sacrifice of the last son, the youngest born.

Until need is incidental and it hurts so bad it hurts good just to want it.

Quicksand – like the heart, is trying to save us.

by Darrah de jour

She was jealous of my relationship with Jesus –
why wouldn’t she be –
He seemed a great man –
and quite a forgiving friend.

A father figure really
When what I had
wasn’t enough

“It’s ok – don’t you see?” I’d say
with a believer’s awe-inspired enthusiasm.
Floating nearly two inches above ground.
“Why?” She was incredulous. Eyebrows fierce
with territorialism + a frustrated perplex-
ity those around you get, when they don’t
get you.
“Because I have an eternal father! A
kind + giving + forgiving father – Gentle
Jesus!” The words rang from my lips
like angels whispers – only to form
screeching harmonics – into her
misshapen psyche. Paranoid with
intolerance; hoarding the one last/final thing
She’d claimed + regretfully shared with me.
Her kid sister, appearing a doppelganger of
sorts, now that her hair had grown out of
that awful length that warranted only pony-
tails + her faith was identical.
Palatable Christianity. Palatable only to
those who declared themselves a counterpart,
not a counterpoint.

School was cold + the kids mocked my bible warm
ed me, tucked into my shirt sleeve, hidden from
not the g.p., but the pallid raindrops, falling
in teardropped semi-circles from a distant but
attainable Heaven, I longed to reach and knew, in
the barren banks of my soul, I could.
If… I could continue on this way. This faith.

This faith…

Earth was a middleground, + like the 1,000 piece
jigsaw puzzle that seized me at Sav-on, I would
one day be that white man in the picture, hugging a
very blonde Jesus, encircled by triangles of light
much like the bubbles
in Batman that enclosed
the words “Bam!”

Whalebone (II)

It all began, really, with the cartoons.
The children’s cartoons, that deconstruct the
answerless questions, present the unpresentable,
the breathtakingly convoluted, beginning
middle end, and all animated!

We watched them on a 10” small screen pink TV
with a rippled frame around John’s head.
We giggled at first. Nervous and
free with the rebellion of watching Christian
propaganda in a non-secular household.
Beneath a pliable roof, that bent with
thunder storms, hail, and other minor disasters of god
my father seemed to propel with his anger.

Then, our chuckles turned to mocking.
How – Why would adults watch these? – as they
admitted during the breaks in the cartoons,
when the infomercial for the VHS Cassettes
showed its exoskeleton’s tenderloin.
When the price flashed before our eyes like an open
sign, although the value of money had not
yet actualized, our impressionable faith +
the formation of our morality was coming into
its own.

We continued watching. Well through
the point where Jesus gave up
carpentering for a missionary position,
when Mary disappeared from the Gospel,
to reappear after Judas’ betrayal, the other
Mary’s poignant feet washing scene – fit with burnt sienna
rhapsody blues, and other warm hues –
under the cross in un-equaled agony,
(matched only, maybe, by the son Himself).

We watched well into the third day when…
my mother knocked on the door to ask if
we wanted the crusts on our tuna sand-
wiches + were we still alive in there, it
sounded too quiet, what were we up to?
We answered yes for both.

The final scene (which was my
favorite, Next to the walking on water scene + the
leper + blind man who could see – or was that
the same guy?) enlivened utterly genius drawing +
effects by whichever production company
formed them. With canary yellow light
pioneering from the sky – casting Jesus
down from the right of God’s throne.

So, it was official – by the credits + re-
appearance of the sincerely weepy host + slightly
distracted brunette with the poofy
microphone – if Jesus wasn’t a
carnivore, I would’ve pursued matrimony.
The rest was a matter of time.

The question of explaining newfound faith
was unimportant + frankly trite to me.
All else caught up, like a veil, a train,
the mussels unraveling in Godiva’s hair
and spreading out on the floor beneath the hooves
of her thoroughbred.

I was a Christian!

A Born-Again Christian!

And wherever I went, there my Bible was.
When asked how this happened?
With fright + obscurity, as if an earthquake
had rattled + cracked my eyes, or the sun
never rose; I merely replied, “I found
Jesus.” The waxing of whether it was
possible to lose him, was the predicament of an unfortunate
person of impaired faith. Not mine.

“Unfathomable as it may seem folks,
these flowery tops were hand-fed + raised by
thrift-stores, + I am a high school bible
beater!”

Or “Jesus Freak” as my family
referred to me. I accepted the
epithet enduringly – any reference
to me and Jesus, as a cohesive unit,
as my homeboy, worked to bring a smile
where there was one.

“Have a good weekend,” I purred to my
fellow students, rest assured
that their dirty looks were a consummation
of the faithless lives they lived, and not
their contempt for mine.

My religion baffled those around me
like a sweater in June.
Why? How? had this red-headed
fire eater become a certified, rectified,
admitted, evangelical, Four Square
cowboy boot wearing
Christian?

And that honest to goodness
question would linger and change
When, in senior year,
i forged up to the
uncharted
podium, thongless
and made a graduation speech
about Existential Philosophy
and backpacking across Europe
against the wishes of your Mother
and Father.