Two Poems

Laundering

Last washed,
six, six, sex cycles,
it sticks.
Change in,
cancels out,
one thing returns
an artful white,
dead skin.
I take in
what you get
on your dirty
little day schemes.

Not so night
in the all lit
24 hour.
Certain sounds,
murmuring
machine babies,
cancel out
that last thing,
as dirty dreams pass,
you submit to
encompassing
white.

Certain ending …
why try?
Another cycle,
captive and white
behind your reflection,
cancels out dreams
of actual babies,
other machines pass
buying minutes to get
a version of dead.
Dirty in,
murmurs out.

Left standing still
in crawling skin,
among dirty babies,
so what'd
you hope to get?
A little not so night
that sticks in,
cancels out,
the one actual thing
you people
seem to like
has passed.

Split

I didn't know I was killing me,
until I was dead, strange

how pain goes only so far,
before life's tightrope bends,

a numbing drum penetrates
the head and calls for end

to all distinction. When
exactly do the veins stop

pulsing against the knotted
sheet, and when does the purplish

ring around the neck set in?
Does it look like I imagined

a wine stain under the skin?
What is the taste of wasted air

puffing out of bloody lips,
bitten in earned anguish?

The experience has eluded
me again, inside the darkness

of my death, I only know how
I was made to live.