Continuities

Please consider this
an invitation for you
to take a small step
with me
here

into a warm pool
of self-reflection
with its coincidences
and resemblances
to the things we
can touch
that may also touch us back

for the same reason
or terrify
by
sheer proximity of skin.

It feels blurry when fully
immersed
here
because this liquid is so much
thicker than blood,

immortal and color-less
in order
to not conceal its particulates
as deposited into your banks
of experience.

It all comes together
like light,
gravity, family and an image,
for a moment.

This shape
water takes
the pathways
as they mimic the way of wind
taking the open path
along, long, way around
an obstacle that doubled
itself as a ladder.

Without braces and right angles,
there are no straight lines or perfect circles
to be found or measured
here.

We may picture
perfection but cannot describe
or swallow it without losing
our senses
of things.

In between
breaks of concentration
the glass spiders
but it is held together
in its frame

since there was no place
to remain
the same
as the way we found.

Let us both observe
how much further,
the way you have held yourself back,
the way you left yourself
so easily open to suggestions
such as novelties as in
the word and first-mover
who made us-

stand up
while the mirror-image stayed
observant and seated
in place.

See,
that was not you
there
sinking in,
drinking in, thinking in
collected bodies capable
of lucid dreaming
without ever remembering
if we should have
broken the surface.




Photo credited by Jon Sullivan, 'Ashes on the Reflecting Pool' dated February 2013. 

The storm has come to pass

We didn't have any pictures, she told me.
My mother said the only thing we had from him
was the toy chest he made that we kept inside my closet,
the one I used to climb in.

I'd hide in the darkness, inside the closet, inside the chest-
and I tried to believe, maybe it was all about him.

My mother has many pictures from when I was little
of my step-father's rock-and-roll band. He played guitar.
And in those old photos, there in the middle of the bass drum,
where the pillow for practice goes,
you see there is a little curled up body,

unmistakably my own.
Even long after I've long outgrown these small spaces,
I can remember feeling this heartbeat
like my own-

And I recognized, it was not about him either.
There were pictures.
She lied-plain and simply-I found-
I liked to hide
myself too.

And I can still distinctly recall feeling the floods
of darkness and thunder washing over me,
but there were no pictures of this I could find.

My mother would remind me,
not of myself.

Blonde and radiant, back then
she was more like the sun,
and likewise, one learns
too much exposure can lead to cancer.

It is the smell of rain that takes me back, the storm
that delivers these dank reminiscences,
dropping memory all over me
wet and vivid, here and now.

And under this heavily cloaked night, the sky hangs
starless and preoccupied with pushing clouds around,
building up pressure and waving flags,
whereby I cannot help but find that I share
a stark resemblance
to thin air.




Photo By Adolf Zika (Adolf Zika´s archive) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.