The following poems are excerpts from the self-published poetry chapbook, Why I Dyed My Hair Red, which I released in 2004 as my honors project during my senior year in the English program at Wright State University in Dayton, OH.
Red Dye
I watch her fire engine streaks
fade between
gingerbread brown growth
a false identity
baking under
artificial sunlight
younger fibers push
their way through pores
dead cells collaborate
conspiracies to vanquish
the branded locks
birthed on Devil’s night
the lipstick-red strands
smudge into brown and blonde
filtering her mask with watery
streams eroding electric desire
reflections
oversetting an orange dusk
Self-Reincarnation
(In response to William Wordsworth’s
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting)
We shed our translucent jelly shell
the malleable armour wrought to us
through rebirth
passing into fragile bodies
awakening into one realm
forgetting another
Asleep to the golden gates
the chorus of souls behind them
lives we spent in the heavenly void
timeless among friends and waiting
Eternally patient
to forget the Lamb
the light
the stillness
Asleep to one realm
awake to another
children of the wingless
the imperfect ones
who justify chaos
birthing from order
The pure open their eyes
to the blue-veined flesh
only to hear fluttering of wings
from the wind blowing dust
He Moves Me
blessing his dance like religion
he moves me with hypnotic waves
hands like white lightning
tracing luminous lines
beneath draping willow branches
lingering syrupy swirls
cross-stitched invisible motions
perched on woodland’s high point
this boy-child stares into the city skyline
haunted by violence and fate
his eyes are molasses
rich with memory and wild abandon
The Right Words
from behind glassy eyes I grabbed a hold of you
so tight my fingernails pierced your fleshy waist
you picked me up and kissed my clammy lips
dried blood in your mouth
one last moment of passion
before you drowned your car in gasoline
strapped me inside
rolled up the windows
locked the doors
smiled your canine grin
and with hands upon the steering wheel
you turned the key in the ignition and
I closed my eyes
and wept
I’m so sick of goodbyes
Leave Me in a Glass Case
within this mirrored pyramid cleveland shrine
i sprawl on theatre cushions
surrounded by walls of voodoo
child black-lit paint & cases
holding handwritten sheet music
jimi’s canary yellow translucent
stage shirt stands ruffled above
mack the knife, gold-plated guitars &
sun records pinned like tacked stamps
i stumble out-of-body & sober
in a faint familiar trip
heightened by Jimi’s mystic
healerman herbsman
islandman visage on a flat film screen
bally’s rolling stones pinball
tattooed with mick’s lips,
opens mouth to machine
full of red sin & salvation
cult figure anti-filth
electric ladyland seashells
glass beads & feathers
three screens 100 feet high
throw bowie to my feet
louder than glitter
and rhinestones
white suede scarves
black & white wallpaper snapshots
burnt drumhead rock relics
awake in a psychedelic netherworld
melting through aphrodisia silver & wood
leave me to clasp an unplugged mic
near drums on metal platforms
closed off by velvet theatre ropes
& do not touch signs
let me loose let me
obsess & admire
boundless reinvention
remember & worship
sartorial style like a
brit-mod japanese kabuki
rainbow-knit kimono
& glass spider collage
store my ashes in a silver box
with a nameplate and birthdate
leave me as an artifact
of our generation
hung in a glass case
near broken radios circa 1940
and 1960’s copies of rolling stone
my blood passion pumps
black magic odes
in this rock altar graveyard
red-lit by idols of years past—
a self-indulgent memorial
The Art of Storytelling by Leslie I. Benson 
good stuff!
i really like Leave Me in a Glass Case.
keep up the good work.
peace.
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