Frida Khalo told Carrie Weems
that while she painted
from her bed Diego scaled the scaffolding
and reached the heights of the world.
So much more her life emerged
a woman of her times,
I would have wished to be her lover
slumbered in her bed.
My real life never quite
reached my poems
but what didn’t kill me
shaped me into stainless steel,
forming a deadly blade
broken on the battlefield
of what was lost
and could not
be found.
“But that was then and this is now.”
I saw my death stretched out
against the night sky,
ablaze and full of glory.
I wandered in the caverns
of forget and embraced solitude.
I drank the milk of paradise
in the backseat of an old car
content to be forever lost in
the landscape floating before me