Poetry – Page 31 – In the gaze of the other

January 26, 2015

Ode to Having a Day

Dread of the day,
nerves riotous with din
banging pots to pans
shot up in shrieking whelps
foul curs whipped in vicious plea,
I want to peel off the skin
relieve the abominable itchiness
a laceration of seconds too soon.
Of a morning departed the plan
I awoke ablaze in palpable bliss
womb-like in submersion
in a warm Caribbean sea
effortlessly afloat
holding your hand,
you who I love like my sight,
all was nothing wrong with us.
The morning ripped you from me
howl of desperation,
grasping the air
as if I could hold the leaving back.
Later the roach fell from the sky
next to my plate
while the high-whine complaint
grated of nothing so bad
in metronomic persistence,
accelerating the urge
cutting ears from my head
ceasing the catatonic shrill
the dog whistle blasts
that only I could hear.
And but for the crowding
penetrating roots of teeth
clamping my jaw shut
I would have uttered seethe.
But then, when the printer
my last hope and hoop
and step through
to meet deadline
broke down,
so did I
just as
the sky
fell rain.

January 24, 2015January 24, 2015

Wind-Swept Day’s Percipience

Credit: images.fineartamerica.com

Outside my window, thick stubborn leaves
of the hardy, overgrown orange tree’s
sturdy branches shudder and sway
in the sweeping wind of mid-winter cool
on a sunny Southern California day.
Turbulent travel of the upturned earth
make me wince in trepidation,
my eyes burning with a pasty silt
swimming in the tears welled to protect.
Sighs whine, escaping through
too poorly insulated window linings.

This house, soaked with life, is weathered
worn as are most of its inhabitants:
fifty, seventy and eighty somethings.
It creaks and moans in wind and swells
sighs in the rain, arthritic in its painful joints.
Like us, it is in need of repair, extra care
reflecting the love above the strife inside.
We patch it along of necessity;
it shelters us from the cold in gratitude.

Weather like this, near tempestuous
yet mild all the same, mirrors the mood
of a sleepy house after a full night’s slumber.
The question lingers the hours with wonder–
why am I adrift despite a bountiful sleep?
Vexing, the answer weighs in abeyance
mid-way between the poles: acute curiosity
at one end, and the other, impalpable aplomb.
The clime of an indecision, windy-cool-sun,
thrusts itchy thoughts at my scalp like
“When will that email be answered?” and
“When will I know if my request is approved?”

A day like today, gasping and groaning,
agitatedly in disarray, is hospitable
to scalpel-probing limitless presence–
of each period on the page or dust mote
in the sun’s slender dusty ray laser’d on the sill
hedging that testy tree so peevish and pinched
with heat-worn unseasonal, dirty-drawn,
dotted orange orbits a’ring its edges.
The world is edgy and requires a long look
in the hurricane’s eye, fluttering relief
where calming pellucid perceptions lie.
Peace, my restive gusty sense, peace.

January 22, 2015

Unabashed Self-Promotion

Thank you Elephant Journal for publishing my poem, one that appeared on this blog last month. It is about my mother who lives with me and smiles in the throes of dementia.

Please enjoy and comment at: http://www.elephantjournal.com/2015/01/dementias-deliverance-to-a-misty-mother-on-her-birthday/

January 16, 2015January 17, 2015

Windowed Away

Credit: i2.wp.com

Some people alight upon my life and walk apace awhile.
Others come and plant seeds that root belong-with-me,
even if merely for that moment, those days, those years.
I met just such a woman who came upon me suddenly,
though it was obvious I was asking her, “Come find me?”
And she did set foot upon the soil of my soddened lands.

We had nothing and everything in common: music, play,
hopes, dreams, fears, and all the unspoken known things.
She liked all the teams I couldn’t and ate what I wouldn’t,
like meat-burgers and fries for lunch on every other day.
From the south was she and I the north; she was waves,
I lines, but neither size nor shape moved us, not our taste.

We mattered to one another in most ways, assured ones.
She had the same window in her house, though we lived
in two different worlds facing polar ends of the same earth.
Our windows opened to onlookers peering in on mimicry
as if an ex ray technician looked down the bony guts of us.
We let the air open space flow alike in each our breaths.

But I have never visited her house, so have not looked in,
only glimpsed shots, yet she has walked under my window.
She has eyed me pacing the kitchen floor and mumbling;
she knows how I fold my clothes in too hurried an un-care
so that corners are not crisp and the shirts are not square.
She has spied the crackled walls of sun bleached golden.

Too, eyes witnessed my children laugh and fall to the floor,
her sight-following the line of their dance or pitched glares.
And I memorized photos of her children, callows and cars.
Though I have never stood, and may never glance there
not in front nor from any angle un-before her open window
where others tread her sandy yard on tippy toe’d high view.

She keeps the keys and I the lock but only in third space
where bespoken desire kept in cranial play, hands sleight,
strong caressing visions malleable as clay in divine heat
baking dust forming bodies from sleeping nudes raw lie.
Or not she but the neighbors circumscribe ruled borders
that walk the metes and bounds writ in maps and books.

In a dream, I am a-wing to her window open wide waiting
and through it I can see soft cornered shirts un-squared
and foot traces of trails paced fretting the kitchen tile floor.
Where acne’d stares beam dull, disillusioned indifference
among feline’d fallows, howling chuckled comforted glee,
and rosemary floating breezes clung to seamless walls.

January 8, 2015January 8, 2015

Take her

Credit: s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com

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One day I stepped into myself and found love.
I knew it was there all along because I could feel it, give it.
But it was all for others.
And I also found greed and jealousy and hate, disrespect.
And I found those hideously powerful.
They belonged to me.
I felt them too.
But mostly I felt disillusionment and loss.
I felt myself missing.
I feel it.
There is no poetry in reality.

January 4, 2015

Cloud from Both Sides

The cloud loved me to pieces, wanted to be my high-hung hero, but only rescuing the parts in a singular vision of unilateral need, not all. One-way vision of a cloud is downward. Clouds hover, and this drizzle detective spied the splashy bits of me from afar and decided long before we met, which soft morsels would be engulfed first, probably mamms and glutes, the prominent parts, before soaking the skin to its marrowed bone, for those bits were obtuse objects of ejaculative enjoyment that only a cloud could outwardly conceive.

Credit: http://staciayeapanis.com/artwork/2063260_Making_Love_to_Spike.html

Clouds are opaque, particulate substances of deceptively barely perceptible content, but they are felt and can cause harrowing angst, ultimately fear. Storm clouds, for instance. Cumulonimbus beckons the discontented rain, sky signs of rocky weather while cirrus paints the sky calm for smooth sailing.

We were once warm but then the cooling produced more clouds in the stratosphere. When we first met, cloud on high, mare’s tails and cirrocumulous and cirrostratus of wispy wanton strokes across my face and hands, light touches, silent sighs, slowed my pace, pausing in misted percipience. I was closer to the ground then, inhaling dust of the agitated lowland dirt and needed the precipitation, a washing off of the old ways.

And as you made your way down, altocumulus, heavier on my tail, vaporous droplets down my neck, cloying clutch, more threatening with your sudden struts of blasted fretting and thunderous moaning, your thick strands of desperate tendril attachment, you clung to me like sticky humidity, suffocating flypaper, inescapably omnipresent, both inevitable and ever-forming: cumulus, stratus, cumulonimbus, cumuli stratus, all of you sucking my skin moist ciliating my breath that inhaled you in hopeful oxygenated renewal and expelled you in disappointed delusional destruction, moment by moment–dizzying with your denseness obscuring sight, obtuse prescience, dull ratiocination, and dubious succor, which were just schemes as transparent as you up close, mere apings of the bonehead borrowings from others, banefully boring and clumsy. It took lightning to flash on sight. Then the downpour.

After-burst renewing, insightfully born in a cloudless sky clears the way for time and breath kept close on the wing. Peace brother cloud. The winds blow you across other visages, fare for another day’s delights and despair. Me, I’m walking to the sun. Fire over inundation.

January 3, 2015January 3, 2015

Lie Me to Sleep

And after this, no more silken lies tell.
Hairy legs swept free from their web,
clearing the corners where secrets dwell
in its predator to prey, rotting suspense.

After this one last fool, the venom pools
in another victim of putrefaction’s paws.
Arachnid jaws of acidic kisses of cruel
juiced to the grave, engorged paunch.

Tell me, sweet, the eyes of the doomed
plead for love of the kill, lie me to sleep.

Spider Love

December 30, 2014

Picture Me Picturing You

Man is the only picture-making animal in the world. He alone of all the inhabitants of the earth has the capacity and passion for pictures . . . Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers, and this ability is the secret of their power and achievementsy: they see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.
Frederick Douglass

Edward Jean Steichen’s Gloria Swanson

In manipulating the presentation of information in a photographic negative, the Pictorialists injected their own sensibility into our perception of the image—thereby imbuing it with pictorial meaning.

We are all poets for what is a poet but an image maker?
We are all imagists.
We imagine we see in others what is, what will be and what we have always wanted.

The fiance envisions the perfect wife in spikes and aproned pearls,
nymphomaniacal lover and cookie-baking Cleaver mother.
No matter that she is not the one;
he sees those features in her nevertheless, more or less.

She can cook.
She likes children.
She looks great in heels.
He makes her fit the dream of his waking.

Who is a husband but a movie projector to the screen of the chosen one?
He depicts desire–figure framed photo of his ideal in ribbon and steel.
Meanwhile, she is his pocket and his purse, the hand up his sleeve making his jaw move.
Her world spins his above their heads.

What is a lover but someone who ‘shops the photo of her future mate,
rich in charms, clever to the touch,
sexy in her arms, ambitious enough for a sensitive side–
though she has never met him?

What is the unfaithful but a husband who paints his mistress the un-wife?
What is a poet but the mistress of make-me-love, hers for the taking?

Castell Photography on Vincent Serbin

I generally experiment with ways to artistically illustrate human thought. By human thought I mean- to present an image that expresses the way we perceive the world. The way our visual system assimilates information ( i.e. two eyes see two images and those two images are processed by a brain) and creates an interpretation of a moment. So in my work , when I juxtapose two images ,it reflects the way our visual system works but, in a sense I’m eliminating a function of our visual system by presenting two images instead of one. This I believe offers a fascinating way of reinterpreting the world.

December 24, 2014December 24, 2014

Have a Heart Throb Xmas

To my girls:

Have a heart-throb Xmas
and a yearning yuletide too
Have a happy harry holiday
Be all you dream him to be
but so much more pursue

For tied up in ribbon’d bows
is no more nor less than show
The secrets hid in green eyes
that sparkle in innocent lost
is pain’s growling heart tossed.

Grow my geese, find the love,
the one that helps you shine
a glint sunnier than his smile
But first, here’s to Harry. Who?
Why Harry Styles, that’s who.
(duh)

Cheers and Merry, merry, merry to all!

December 21, 2014December 21, 2014

A Misty Mother’s Winter Birth Song

On a Winter Solstice morning I carry wood to the fire
and stoke the arcing flame’s urge to obliterate night.
Borean breath burns those bones of trees slant ways
fueling gulps of scorching air borne to the sun’s rays.

Mother-child squats and stares her eyes pierced red
wondering where the winds have taken off the dead.
Her child-mother speaks no more of willow branches.
A baby gone old too, a sooty, sallow skinned witness.

Sheltering arms of her wisdom’s rock a bye morrows
I miss, her torch words of smoked images we chose.
Mother mine of childlike mind your birth was foretold.
Alit on Winter’s day, a searing blame to mothers cold.

With spoken mind’s hibernation, a wintry song is nigh.
Buried deep in fiery sleep is sensor twitching sunrise.
Yet a love surrounds her misty eyed daylight slumber
as Elven sprites spark shards shot of ember’d lumber.

She is my meadow lullaby cracking the icy pines now,
a cataract covered window pane framing a faint brow.
The pitter patterned words of incantations made flesh
are a witch’s brood of progeny, a sweep of stony ash.

The shortest light of the longest night brightens a sky
she never sees anymore in wheel chaired walk a bye.
Maternal flickers of the northern lights in babies’ arms
is left the love encircling a stormy eye’s chaos calmed.

	Damian Black on Our Roman Fathers
	Luke Edwards on Autophony: The sound of living…
	Shrut on Love is a Left Handed Lie
	Krista Mullen on Just Be
	Inthegazeoftheother on Remembering Boredom