Sit & spin

Sometimes the body feels too fleshy,
repulsive and the layering excessive
and feels like swelling-

Other times, my own sharp cheekbones
jab these bulbous thoughts
with sharp words, as in No More,

and I try to swallow them
before they creep out any further
or scrape my pink warm flesh deeper.

Nothing is mine anyway. These hairs grow,
out of my control, these moles do something,
the fingers I stole from my mother.

The time is not mine, not even this one.
The body refuses to cooperate with a grander vision,
without blurring the edges and intruding on space.

My left justifies my right and intentions are made up,
despite knowing that I knew this before the fingers did,
the neuron that jumped at the thought which took credit.

Resistance holds our places in equipoise,
it's nothing to do with style,
just keeping things in place, in check,

afloat in my theoretical state of chaotic
reassembly with additional small parts
never mentioned.

Feel this sitzfleish,
like chain mail
awaiting my reply.



Painting By Daniel Hernández Morillo (Salcabamba, 1856 - Lima, 1932) – painter (Peruvian) Born in Salcabamba, Huancavelica. Dead in Lima. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Break of heat

The air was thick as clotted cream, felt curdled and
pregnant with wet heat. While white and stacked grey clouds
weighted down until pushed themselves into fog,
it was mist.
As hot as it gets, they said, this is it, the tops it can get.
An inferno.
The hottest it has been yet.

A lone human in the dark morning,
no cool breeze finds me, sultry summer lingers
at the front door, breathing heavy, loitering across
the eggplant sky, hanging on with bruises.

Eighty-six
degrees at three a.m.
nothing moved but magma waves
hiss and ess. Yes,
this is the sound eighty-sixed.

Finally, at six, three more hours
the sky cracked, the wind awoke, stirred
and whisked the steam into lemon meringue.
Now the brown edges protrude.
The silence dissolved like refined sugar,
and moments filled with birds and their wings.





Painting by Ercole de' Roberti [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Traffic

Strangely, and somehow ever still
we all agreed, we all believed
despite the odds for and against
a higher power
the harder the fall
be it for truth or justice, karma, saintliness, etc.

I guess something else made itself known
privately, intimately, miraculously, coincidentally
called Acts of God, meaning no explanation,
meaning no known cause or capacity or possibility
of escape from these well-kept secrets
about proof and feeling, outcomes and solutions,
and there was us
stuck in the unknown. Needing nurture.
Navigating through Despair,
getting lost in Hope.
We keep trying to solve for seasons or reasons
for the unpredictable Nature
mirroring our mirage-

And just perchance,
the devotion toward loving God(s),
holy spirits and the angelic, is an obsession,
with Death-the passion-ate rose, heart, compass,
pulled by this magnetic feeling.

Better to stop and smell the air about you,
make some sacrificial vows, He Loves Me (Not)
He loves me Now, in lieu of later.
We (will) Be Good, and ask ourselves
What Would (a) god do?
or a man
in our case?
We (will) wait.




Painting by Hermann Ottomar Herzog [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Disillusionment

I am here.

And now, I begin, again,

With space and commas, breath and white

And see clearly how obsessed

With spacetime and specifics

With Here and Now-

I have been…

Have virtually

Erased all presence

Of mind

Or need for then,

Than,

I have made sense with time,

Grown with space

A sense of place

Within the hour,

Finds me.

I knew words,

I said it all

And after all this

Was settled

It dissolved…





Painting By William R. Leigh (born Falling Waters, WV 1866 - died New York City 1955) – Artist (American) Born in Falling Waters, West Virginia. Dead in New York, New York. Details of artist on Google Art Project [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Always enough

On their walk home after school,
the middle school kids foraged among green ankles
in a patch of sour grass,
Don't swallow-Just chew, says the boy with braces
who spotted the little cache and reported it.

A lone girl sits criss cross applesauce
on the sidewalk in the shade of a pepper tree,
she wipes her brow, a paperback book splayed
in her lap.
She has never heard of a broken spine.
She doesn't look up-her ride must be late.

At the bus stop
a  stubbled man asks a teen
for the Time,
then asks the youth why he is out early,

I go to the Academy.
I have to go to work, he
explains.
How I remember those days,
retorts gruff with derisive smirk
Not the same, I'm sure,
the man reassures-
Academy.
Is this bus always late?

A crow hops next to the bench
looking sideways
every so often, adjusting his position
on cracking a tough nut,
or breaking a date.

Either way they look
too little
too late.



Painting by Boris Kustodiev (1911) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Made in the shade

There are no words for this nowhere night...
The branches that lean on lusty air,
the mind that sways without care,
to This and back to That-without photosynthesis
or reason for process just in this dim moonlit
moment for rest and breath.

Steadfast in the breeze, and leaves too shiver
in a display of stirring resilience and transcendence
mocking me, I see. So-we still strive fruitlessly further
for naught and knots
where such difficulty and circularity
is always relevant at the root under foot...

Well, that is deep-
We being anew-acorn to oak; choking up
our symbiotic exchange of needs
and invisible nows, for want of more
foliage for later, lushness across a lifespan.

For Now, nothing is more than enough
to keep me here seeking a lone moment
to feel my place and lose it
all in the same breath.


Painting by Caspar David Friedrich (1819-1820) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Do, Rey, Me, My, I

I admit-

I hate poems that start with "I",

which means I also hate this poem.

I mean, there is no "i" in "poem".

There is though, in "poesis" and "meta-

morphosis", just one

I mean, the making of one into many

more I's and i's.

It is not as if I care

about bravely baring the skin or showing some soul,

a sweet tooth for eye candy, and me, me, me...

Besides your self 

what is important to the eye is not the you

others see, really. Not fooling anyone in that mask.

I know you smile when others look at you,

but fail to see your eyes,

really,

I see you mocking me, and I do too,

since it was never about you

only I and I hated it. 

 Photo of Norma Talmadge (c. 1919) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.