Spoken word poet

Your mouth carries clues

crosswords, in pen-you project

ink-stained ideas.

Painting by Yeghishe Tadevosyan [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Spasm

Silence sucks me through this narrow tunnel and only

in my knitted spiral, soundness burrows behind flat walls,

I am pulled down or out, never to get all the way

through to where

it is all white

there. 

Painting By Jean-Guillaume Carlier (1638-1675) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Translate-or not

This other language I speak 

-none understand 

outside my elfin ears. 

As if I mumble incessantly, compulsively,

as if I am fumbling my thoughts with stone words.

As if I were

seeking to release crystal clear meaning

from in-side the hollow geode.

If it looks like a rock…

Those wild words were all dear to me, 

took muster to say in such a way as to blur the 

sharp edges, land softly, sometimes it settled

in, others not.

The consonants were the hardest parts, 

the little lilt only the muttering of a passing bird,

waving its wings overheads.

Emulating butterfly kisses, lips

blown away

with all my meaning-

missed-dismissed.

As though the goal was only to tell you

something-

to commune-

icate, instigate, dictate-show and tell

about, something I have lying around.

Yet, I make no sound

like feathers.

Since I can no longer speak

in pure poetry. 

Artwork By Hills, Laura Coombs, 1859-1952 (artist); L. Prang & Co. (publisher) (Flickr: Flower Fairy) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Maxim Poetical

Grandma said
                Always wear a bra
                -even to bed.
She said,
                Put liberal
                amounts of lotion on
                everywhere every day.

Grandpa advised
                looking up every-
                thing I did not know
how to use or say
Smile
Grandma warned,
               those are the better lines
               to make.

My heavy skin agrees
                with these
                ad(d)ages.



(This poem was inspired by Lorine Niedeckers' poem, '(A) Poet's Work')


Painting By Mohov Mihail (1819-1903) (Mohov Mihail) [Public domain, Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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.