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Poetry by Juliette Sandoval

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors

She wages war on the human animal
the dirt blessing industrial heaven
the weather of utopia is mechanical
and spreads my wings and pins me down

I breathe in the factory fire
as if it were a flower
She is rubbing me out with smoke
trapping me in the greenhouse

The oil spills take an edge
urban fantasies alight my imagination
the city water is clear with poison
something tells me we’ll bend soon
She wages war on the human animal

The chemtrails are real clouds
illuminated by a darkened mind
Her passion for the city is a fantastic beast
a monster which sighs into the Wheel
the gears which run my desire
in Time with the 9-5 workday

I am living in a perpetual flow state without meaning
You’re a bit of an electric shock therapy to the senses
The helicopter search lights search for me
I search for myself, I am
so fragmented

Where is the line between
Heaven and Earth

The medicine is poison, the medicine is poison
My love is a pharmakon, inhaling deeply

Words flow out of me as if I were a fountain
The War was started on the psychic plane
Mother is bleeding on our behalf, a remarkable martyr
The orchids take on a medicinal glow in the moonlight
the light is a trick as it is the witching hour
Her lethal weapon is a part of her romantic disposition
I feel her blood flooding my veins
and the leaves are spilling over me like open wounds

I tend to them
one by one

in a chemical bath of prayers wrapped in plastic
and the hard water tastes like last year’s arsenic

Now I wait in the Fire Training Tower
it is raining on the Anonymous Avenue
with a name that makes me think of you

here, dim steel sheds are lit from within
a gift to the imitation Salomes
who say nothing with such burning intensity

I captures personalities
like fragments of light
on the refractor
they drip in painted color

I don’t know how to reconcile
this unnatural disaster
I admit I find beauty in the decay
the weeds plant seeds in my body

as I wander the city streets

Looking for paradise lost

because I believe if I were
to arrest Love the earth would break
with desire causing life to grow
through the pain, until we were all
possessed by the gardening instinct once again

Juliette Sandoval

Twitter: @j36712604

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