Tag: poetry

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In the Center of a Dream

   
Sitting in the center of a dream

is an endless empty space
a hollow black hole I fill 
with the quadruple rainbow of jellybeans
or the sludge of broken drain pipe leaks.
And when I awaken the day tastes sweet
or salty tears silence the coo of morning dove. 

A candy vendor and a plumber,
I circle the morning mood
and inventory the cracks 
putty the holes with tongue wincing treats,
a nectar for my tea and a fuel for empty.
And when I navigate the world in a day round,
the flavors fade lost in the buzzing of honey bee.

Returning to the hive at night
the piping all but drifted off
to the soundless sea,
the hey-day mist lingers at crenulate margins
of memory leaf strands teased out in ache.
And when I shutter sight again to sleep it out
visions flicker inside the cave to thus prefigure me.      
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The Teacher

 



A soft touch and a hard hand, the teacher speaks in incantations, dronings of esoterica to mystify and satisfy his own urges to expel. Behind office hour doors he is hand full of slick hair clutched at the scalp mummified despair leaving its traces along the spiked tufts that resist gravity’s pull to his ears, one of which is pierced with a diamond stud. Only a knock, a student’s hand, a backward glance or a shy inquiry can shift his mood. His smile smeared on with putty lips, he ogles the words typed for him, pausing long over an improper punctuation or diction switch up. His eyes’ return are shuttered behind thick dark lashes that paint his pupils dark, the velvet of brown specked with black and stroked with soft charcoal malleable leniency and persuasion. The burning does not show. The coursing rage racing up the alleys of his cortisol-laden cerebral landscape, pathways to his libidinal longings for a leg, the hem of a skirt, a bite in the pen cap, tongue caressing the indentation, remains repressed against his spine, thrust shut in his pelvic dance of storming scribblings in marker red, furiously punctilious and benignly compliant. He is grade A swallowed fear in disgust, disguised as propitious transitioning. Everyone passes through and by the teacher while he remains, steady like the axis of a planet, a cross road or dawn’s return.

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The Ache of Decay: a Eulogy for a Friend

  

Though you have softly haunted me in the last 37 years,
your disappearance a mystery and logical consequence 
at the same time, last night you pulled me aground to you
reaching out with a bony grasp I could not escape to run
just as you did on your very last day when evil found you
a fair haired lovely of kind eyes and dulled senses drifting.


Why did no one know your name to pin a tag to your toe?
Where were your broken hearted mother and brothers?
The 70s dichotomy, full of marauding psychotics and love
free spirits and walking malignant tumorous contagion too.
I had seen you last on Venice Beach sidling ocean waves
from a distance as we smoked and sang a freedom song.


All was light then and love searching, seeking–a dreaming.
No one could hold you down but what roots had you then?
Did you have a father and did your mother try to keep you?
I barely knew you as a latecomer to my hey day pre-parting.
Part of my flowering teenage society in full bloom just then,
I had to leave for another coast and on a whim you did too.


I remember you cooked enchiladas in a pan for us one day
and I had never eaten anything called Mexican food before.
My mouth burned, tentative tongue swimming in odd spices.
You brought the sun and a recipe home from your California.
You, who wore brown suede moccasin boots fringed in love,
a traveling spirit of unleashed, unending desire to live freely.


Restless and fiercely unleashed you were locked in impulse
and the lull of hazy high of whatever was passed your way.
No trace of fear or caution, you were a stretch for my wary.
You sat down to pilot life and enjoyed the height of clouds
while I was the lip biting pumping hearted passenger blind.
Like the wind you caught to fly, you passed on through me.


But today you seep in my bones and pinch my thoughts dry.
It could have been me or my daughters or sisters strangled
the hands of murderous savagery abysmally wide tentacled.
Insatiable lust for life you had matched his in mass murders.
A rover like you searching, seeking and finding youth’s sins
road-songs of impenetrable lightness against a dark’s deep.  


No one completes you, a part of the composite space-time.
A forever child will never know the truth of scarred wisdom
the full compendium peace of surrender that is not defeat
like we thought it was burning out not burning through it all.
A chip of the cosmos, all we ever were and will be for now
I know you sign the silent words to me in my restless sleep.


Your human traces tattoo synaptic sheathed memory’s skin
recombinatory particulate ossified bone and detrital kindred
melding in minds where curiosity, fear and mortal angst sit.
Those who carry you bouyant as your spirit ever was and is
float a child’s bay abutting the seas of misfortune and strife
smiling liberation song’s perpetually moving feet of hunger.    


Remains do not matter, mere material remnants of a body,
a shell symbol of connection to a race of radical reactivity.
Bury you deep in soil of your mother that earth never held;
no soul or idea chained you to the moment of your making.
No touch of a hand or kiss on the nape of your neck stilled
spirit so wildly untethered attached only to windless decay.


Held in a life loss unspoken, unnamed too long unknown,
torch carrying family and friends, acquainted to a tragedy,
oh murderous mistress memory mine let her flee binding;
devotional clinging was never hers to believe such perqs.
Only mask rivulet stain of stony faces crusted in creases
wipe ache from ears of those who never heard her cries.
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Derek Walcott ‘ s “Love on Love”

LOVE AFTER LOVE

image

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life

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Love is not a Rose but a Choice

  

The marriages that last are the ones in which the two members regularly develop (but do not act upon) extramarital infatuations.

I read that today in Maria Popova’s review of The Folded Clock: A Diary by Heidi Julavits in Brain Pickings. What is it about love’s excess that it cannot be contained in one person, for one person, that we need to spread its spillage on to still others and other things in so many shapes and forms? What is this thing that we toss at humans, materials and ideas indiscriminately? I love my children, my new car and Shakespeare’s sonnets with strength and passion and tenderness. Yes, the car too (when I had a new one). Love is the excess, the overflow, always needing outlet. We live in the throes of love. Anti-love is its darker side though no less derivative of love. 

This, of course, makes sense — we know that love is a mode of “interbeing” and a “dynamic interaction” in which the opportunity to choose each other over and over is what sustains the longevity of a couple’s bond.



Love is a choosing
not a rose so named
a choice of days
one which I choose 
and you choose
hopefully together
maybe the same day
to select you, me
as your moor and mate
coddle and cure
each day every day
when the mood strikes
smiting sense and pride
plucking at frayed seams
with disdainful eyes
yet believing still
in inversion’s conversion
a matter of mind
in the seeing eye
inside the skull
crossbones of ill
to parallel sides
arm in armed
concave to convex
a tilt of the head
changing the slant
of the inner sight
so that you see
me seeing you
we two knowing
hearing the sign
buzzing our nerves
caring as showing
inside out wearing
learning unlearned
a parent’s sharing
poking a shoulder
warning a glance
ruling an unruly mind
guilt and pain aside
teaching an oath
swearing a lesson
picking a courtesy
bowing a head
in shame we learn
in obedience we sit
before a flag and stares
the history of living
the meaning of love
the trick of getting by
love is learned 
and then unlearned
and truly it is
the equation of love
I love you and me
I understand me
understanding you
since love is this
this understanding
that to love so
is to love me 
loving me
loving you
who are all
of us.
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The Art of Becoming the Latest Me

“Your perspective on life comes from the cage you were held captive in.” 
― Shannon L. Alder

  
credit: upload.wikimedia.org

Pure sound, entirely un-mattered, 

voice and air I was, intoned grief
laughter inverted all-in deranged
9th dimensional twisted despair 
shattered lines in flecked powder
bruised cilial cringe at the edges
ears only producing me, my being.

The howl I had become was vast
as wide as a woman’s crumbling
cry thro’ ancestry pierced endless
millennial fear of falling in losing out.

Coming undone, not always so sexy
by another’s fullness, sentient sea, 
the wailingly frothy palpable spume 
when the other subsumes, absorbs
light and time, screams in unfolding.

When I disintegrated, a pupil mirror,
you witnessed naked sound as sign
death knelled body downed into dust
no thud when the shrieks hit ground.

You hold me now, recombined anew,
not in tubes of echo or image’s flash
the grimace of dying inside etched in,
but in re-sight devoid of formed words,
broken past filtered through particles
ionic and clear, trampled and repaired
in memory as manifest born, a human
with skin sensate to the pelted stones
now mere flesh weighted walking on
descended far from aural awakening.
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Wingless Wren

  

She is a wingless wren
a bitty beak a half lid
slow-eyed sunk in
dreaming of flight
and plans of cities wide
and deep for her pain
losing miles of time sweet
she is dove of sighs
coos left for the unloved
she is an electric beam
of magnetic woe laid
before her feet and song
one shared in no one
my little song bird mute
limps to nesty retreat
dark hollow of a tree
gleamy eyes trickle
light fogged from within
a birdless fright of whim
a skittering feather foot
scamper shot running
a wrong winged one
she is a grounded wren.

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It was just a dream…

  

Credit:  http://s3.amazonaws.com



Softly now a wind swept plain threads the dusty sky
in tapestry’d landscapes open wide in an endless eye,
for who comes a’spin trailing cyclonic tear stained anger?
A dream, it was, a dream and only a dream.
The bone rumblings nauseate my awakening.
Fist pummeled popping despair explodes in fracture;
my joy is hiding, darkened in a webby cervical corner.


I awoke to the morning’s whistling words; 
my feet were cold, fallen free of blanketed body heat. 
Spring came early, opened prematurely, and so left; now
the returning cold deceives, rankles a ramshackle house, 
its half way adults of changing complexion, doors open wide.
They pass and return like the shoreline soaked sand,
intermittent, persistent and constant synchronous rhyme.


The words of my awakening were mere warnings.
Almost over, I squeeze between staying and going
come and gone, keeping me presently here, now by the by
jammed in by the leaves that fill my window’s blind view.
The green bleeds through me and approves noddingly,
quivering its reply in jittered tenuously ticklish goading:
Come out to the world, connect and extract its comfort.


I am a lonely laughing over it runner.
My feet, bare, exposed, never but lightly touch the pavement,
their steps imperceptibly driven past the crowds’ avoidance,
padding by in silent wide eyed stare, solemn mouthed,
a hasty reproof in the reading for the uninitiated.
I told him I never once felt enough a part of this world,
not enough out of it either and I meant it then as now.


Running steamed skin trails scents of the night’s visions.
Those words–never…enough…–circulate behind my shades,
blinking the sweat from the lids into the skin crease burn,
not remembering if I said them, actually uttered the words.
We were just talking or texting, smoke in the sage room,
grainy air or fog or hail, obscuring our voices in gassy ice.
There I told him, I never once…never…felt…, it was a dream.


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There is a Leaving

  

credit:  https://timrwalls.files.wordpress.com


There is a leaving that must be done
everyone knows when that it is too
when the pastels of the sky deepen
at dusk and pink becomes orange-red
a time when the ending paints true
the beginning and hope is contained
in darkness.

There is a leaving that must be done
when fall leaves and winter begins
a dying that prefigures anew the new
the hatchlings of sea turtles and fins
of mermaids spied prancing the deep
in imagination veered round the din
of darkness.

There is a leaving that must be done
when the face utters no more sighs
and a voice thinly reaches a mind’s ear
for none but the countryside cottages 
of someday adorned remain in dreams
plans of then dissolving soon too to
the darkness.
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