ROUND ABOUT
By Jessica DePue

Turn it over and over easy
Does it turn you at all
In the process of processing
Progressive aggression
Distressed regression
Syncopated disharmony
The unharmonic grind of it all
Of your all encompassing slack
Of resolution, what of it?
This resistant dissolution
Creates more than it destructs
Love sick sediment, some stampeding meteor
Some one aches to fetch
Same one wails infinity
Infinitely through mirrored lungs
She bleeds your fuel
She gnaws remote detection
Claws her own misgiven sense
Of arsenic you dispense in traces
In smoke trails
Ungutted entrails
Tongue in cheek efforts
Your hard earned approvals
Her hardend heart ends...
Turning around and around
As I spin on a whistle
No longer you
No longer the you who howled
All those times

THEN and NOW
By Jessica DePue

Two mornings shy of Thanksgiving
Grey pillars, sly expansion
No thinning sky to uproot
By one clean sweeping sun
Most veils slide behind
Northern Mole Hills, mountains
I've challenged to extirpate
Unmentioned Marigolds- glamour golds
Amourous bolds, blazing hues through now
Some field back then
Some old family land
More earthen, less flourescent
Less city, more country than medical
Cowboys kicking up scrubs these days
Surround my chunk of city street
Weaving and dodging small town speculation
Went buried, unturned beneath my feet
Loosely spun compost heap
Unnatural misgivings gone thorny, dried
Against peripheral hindsight
The present persists its thirtieth turn
On a clean bill of health
My crystal crimson pools
My Swarming Potential-
These hallways it haunts

COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS
By Jessica DePue

Creamy spinach dip
Too salty tortilla chips
My lips burn
I'm sleep working
Waking up to walk home
To bed unmade, its seductive design
Yesterday I drove too far for therapy
Disguised as a sympathetic stranger
Trained to understand whats ripping me
Trained, as well, to be there by appointment
So I've appointed her my thrown of graceless hope
Hapless grace as I hopelessly graze
Concrete pastures, cow on my key chain
Lights up and goes Mooooo
Flashing my new poetry book
Bukowski was a Leo, who knew to care
My Lion in a public storage somewhere
In San Gabriel Valley, loading up unmemorables
We paid too much to lock from collective memory
Last time we went packing we brought our pet feline
Don't ask why
An answer I'm currently forgetting
In process, we keep making rent
Making due re-inventing our personal Nobel Prizes
I award each day with a shower, re-buff
Shine my good luck harm of being alive

EARLY STARK WAKING
by Jess DePue

So much for that
Today I find you parting clouds
Found my departure less loud a part
From our eyes' instinct to laser
Down morning's red sound alarming
Newly dismissed from my lips' surroundness
Rarely does a stir churn your limp side
Around pre-dawn I anticipate
Last hours to keep sleep's promise
To keep me held completely, our
Submission balances two worlds
Together externally welded
When our skin's warming graces
Take formal embrace of the other
Re-trace ourselves undercover molds
Before sun plants its plaid pattern
Across my vaporized mirror
Next door you grow nearer to dreams
Inhale mist and soothe our cool sheets
As my reflection exceeds its own likeness
Tooth to tooth to impart new clean
Wondering through aimless rounds
Foaming at the mouth
Gumming at beginnings

PUSH SPOOL LOVE
by Jessica DePue

Grazing grown rhythm...Modern Atlantis sighs
Too early sizing up rain taps
This hide away found us odd
Hours kept even night awake
Fighting to hold our lost liquor
A gain. An other refrain from
Lonely you amused me
Carving comforts for Christmas...
This second occupance sold
A heart wrongly rubbed around
Cul-de-sacs, surround my glass frame
Driving into our ocean green land
From there we stammer high
Vibrating inside our rude conscience
Inclusive and charming and lean
Ensnared in past crash arrivals
You resided perplexed and aloof
You finessed and fine goof
Abrubtly subdued my brazen tude
Buttoned-up throat choked up three drinks
Were we just joking or straining away
Next to your over due lip service
Kiss me two ways sideways today
That unlikely local we swayed in
Caved in and clung to eachother
One other thing about that-
Mac and cheese found us fat in bed
Wings spread like flying fried pigs
Perfectly tied in deep nopes and nots
Otherwise completely got by our best
Never imagine rest without you...
That me could be a no bluer black, so
Lovingly threading we two seams
Sew through
And through
And through

SMALL TREASURE (REVISIT)
By Jessica DePue

I know its a crap shoot
Bills over due, unresolved issues
Collect mites and dust
Our party continues over there
Somewhere beyond sunset people wake up
Home is an expelled word
A shoebox housing something
Perhaps relief is a bombing
Some estrogen walk-in primed with pleasure
Making the impossible my personal measure
To unearth latent rights of passage, your's
The smiling nerve of change is unnerving
Assuredly licking every fiber from being
Gawd how torn down corrosives do stink
Worsen stench of singed lungs or livers
Our meaty hearts sick ticking
Against odds unrejuvenating
Then slips in the trick
With indulgent wastelands of pity
Gritty, this most appauling of jokes
Gotta' laugh and sock it to you-
Near gonner your martyr's strong choke
Invokes what choice but to love?
Or hate if it managed past loving
Our truce to build straight through
Desires embue wish with
Your fire furnace embrace
Shivering until placed inside
Simplicity of motion again becomes us
Colliding freely we rest
To hell with the rest
Damn man, you sparkle!
Day past resplendent day
Nightly resolves surrounding new slates
Even as seasons weather to ice
Regret weakens ever slightly
Her hefty clutch releasing
Impossibly thin strands of gold
We hold spun woven rinds
As sun blinds its bright smoke
Our pocket flows
We flood

UNEXPECTED DELIVERY from MY ADOPTED MOTHER(fucker)
by Jessica DePue

I recieve four cardboard boxes
Snail mailed from my childhood address
One letter from a person I called "Mom"

A few words in black and white
She typed unsentimental closure
Sent a book by Asshole Schlessinger

Titled "Bad Childhood Good Life"
This after years of absolutely nothing
Not nothing as in happless attempts at something

Nothing as in nodda
Until today's special deliverance
Typed words about returning my possessions

She signs her name no "Love", no "Sincerely"
I contemplate tears over laughter then
An anacdote appears- some copied glib bow

About "Letting It Go" christian style
By the grace of God this woman is entitled
To lasso her high horse and cut me out

Then excuse herself with a cutesy quip
Southern Christians have simplistic consciences
When it comes to reasoning the Lord's way

I absorb this estrangement
Cast from the Southern tip of space
I look up at my man- laugh, squelch hysteria

And suggested we hit the bar to find Gary
Casting his eccentric spells at Mirabell's
I forget my aforementioned rejection slip

We're at Gary's high rise upon La Cientega
Balancing wine bottles nose to nose
If you inhale the spell disintegrates

I'm flooded with a clear glass bottle
Of vodka encasing a pear for amusement
Nobody knows my pain is leaking

Yet I feel something twisted gnawing
My heart is like that intoxicated pear
A fruitful chamber to some toothy worm

I want to smash the glass, bite the pear
I want to poison myself with fermented fruit
Feel its juices interogate my liver

I want to slam my body against the tub
I want to fall asleep ass up
Half way into bed

I'm taking punches from Texas
I'm slammed, contorted against the can
Whailing "I'm dying- I'm not- but I am,"

I've done it to myself
The cold tiles press chill into my cheek
I'm frozen
I'm dying and trying so hard
To let it go