Gravity speaks of distribution

While putting away the dishes

in my tiny kitchen,

I recalled over-hearing 

the man say to the girl

'Your eyes were bigger than your plate'

And now I was stacking the plates,

sorting large and small,

thinking how they were all made the same

Each one designed to hold only so much

And the inevitability

Of each one taking a turn

At the bottom,

bearing the weight 

Of all 

The others 

And never cracking.

With the dishes put away,

I look through the glasses

Thinking of the right size

for my eyes

Hearing the tiny echoes

Of gravity 

And thirsting for more. 

Painting by Joannes de Cordua (1630-1702), 'Still life with copper dishes' in Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Pres(s)her

All Things fracture where

fragile pressure placed

care-fully

just so

we know

Better

held in a place

of mending.

Painting by Harry Willson Watrous, 'The broken vase' c. 1900 in Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Flash point

When ideas
hit air
they turn from blue to red,
originating from the short wavelength
inside
to form long low rollers of crimson tide
depositing turbid drops
of inklings.

The idea
tries to crystalize
along the smooth open facet
trying to adhere to open wounds
only to become
solid and reformed.
Ages ago,
raw material was re-collected and
re-presented as pure, a commodity
of our invention.

A single blinding glimmer,
like a square grain of sand
may find itself
a fully rounded pearl
over time and under toes
we find this same potential
scattered across elemental
boundaries.

Carbon in cubes
could become a diamond,
coal, a mote of dust, or Us
bearing the weight
of six million atmospheres
while making light
of such intense pressure
to create beauty
from conception.


Painting by Karel Dujardin (1622-1678) , 'Allegory' c. 1663 in Public Domain. 

Mammalian

Gasping,
the weight of all worldy air
light enough to float
gathered together atop my chest,
paralyzing me in between states of consciousness.

Now,
I am not worried about dying. I am not suffocating
from this.
I can feel the sun sucking out all the moisture
I have accumulated solar radiation,
the evaporation sometimes itches,
crackling my skin.

I can hear the white waves crashing below me,
at my feet,
the atmosphere levitates between solid and vapor.

I can feel the displacement of the ground under my body
wedged between a million grains and cannot move
under this compression.

This thick skin has held too much inside.
Over time,
the walls between this and that breakdown-
ocean, air, lung and rib, my marrow margins.
Any body,
I dare
touch me, a moment before the explosion
feel how forms are all temporary.

*
It was just this thought
of a suicidal great whale. My morning, anxiousness.
Beached him or herself.
What is left of this shell?
The gastric juices digesting itself,
as if there was one final thing to
finish
breaking down.

Gravity does not let us change our mind
either,
I was about to explode
myself.

Image By Avenue (Own work), stranded Grey's beaked whale in New Zealand [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

A Lee alee

The moan returned, and it always came at precisely the wrong time. 

In these conditions, concentration pulls away and tapered focus spreads

its photons in flooding streams of white thought.

The wind knows this and is relentless, always. Careless 

to human needs for calm and order, real food and clean water, it blows- 

every which away.

The rising whine coming in all corners should have reminded us, nothing

is sealed completely. Same never remains cremated-

change or would be by the same name. Ashes. Should anyone notice. 

It is justified, to claim not to hear, to feel no steam rise, to believe 

this arrangement is permanent or static. Hope is clean energy.

Electricity is not a friend.

Dear me. It could never end. A break, a breath, and shriek, 

its thick harmonic resonance extending its reach in waves. 

The breeze dances its heart out down in the valley. 

It will twirl itself out haphazardly and we will see 

no steps in the routine. This storm was not predicted. 

Every light word goes out the window. 

The pain sank through.

Painting by Jerônimo José Telles Júnior [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.