Sending poetry to the world
he spoke to himself
with a soft slur like sand in the mouth.
his eyes rolled around in his head
like waves lapping the shore.
he tries to remember, but her face becomes the rings
around the hot island moon predicting the rains.
he pictures her lost on the horizon.
he punches the palm tree till his hands start to bleed.
for years alone, he knows only the coconut rum.
it stains his lips brown as his skin tans to leather.
he passes out
in the hot island sun. he snores
while dreaming of nothing.
written in college~ sometimes things aren’t what they appear. Sometimes you find that people are more complicated than you could ever hope to realize.
her reflection
the glass cracks invisibly
and distorts a girl –
slinking down on dirty tiles,
panting out of breath
and buzzed.
her bones dig in the floor.
she watches the burning walls-
they whisper her secrets
with the heady intensity of
a grade-school gossiper.
she screams with all the
cells in her wasted frame
to go go go go go away.
she screams till she’s shaking and water
is squeezed from her eyes
and her fingernails have cut
holes in her hands.
future sunny days
will remember
now as the season of rain,
the never-ending crying of the sky,
the flooding of the streets,
the swallowing of beach, bank, body
now as the time of disbelief
the desperate want and need for things
we just can’t have
the feel of warm
the feel of orange melting into the
sultry velvet summer night
the feel of skin tingling tan
instead of white
now as the overwhelming overtaking green
lawns like jungles where kids would swing
if the rains would end
but the windows now are streaked
still dripping wet and slippery
so hoping to end the
waiting.
Driving rain on the skylight makes perfect music for reading. Have Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and Kerouac’s Book of Blues and I’m not sure that it is such a great idea to read them at the same time…..
Anyways, a confession.
Confessions
What I wanted—
This writhing naked soul.
You, the ancient samurai,
Split in half with your guts spilling
With a sense of duty.
What I thought I wanted was
This blank admission.
You, as a great artist,
Throwing paint in heated frenzy. Desperate
Through the mess to speak.
You, as a lover,
Throwing your arms around mine
And lifting me up, and up,
until.
What I need now—
A quiet meditation,
a hushed whisper and time to think.
In my bathtub
legs have to bend
under the bubbles
smelling of lavender and vanilla
and fading fast; faster
they float off on some
imaginary breeze
when my fingers skim the surface
and make ripples in the
fading chalky streams of soap.
My head rests on pale
yellow tiles and my one arm
lazily sinks
while the other tips a large
red wine glass full
of tannins and aged oak
and hints of spice and vanilla
to relax the
fading chalky streams of soap.
I finish the wine,
crumple my body,
sink my head
under
water
till it spills over the sides
onto a canary yellow bath rug.
That old abandoned shoe,
the one that hitchhikes
on the side of Rt. 100
says “save me”
on my way home from another
day of work.
I try to block the cries
but still it looks up through
shoe-lace eyes
and a busted rubber sole,
“Please,
help me.”
Ok, I’m still working on the ideas/metaphors behind this one (started many years ago, still not even close to being finished). As it it deals with space-time, I hope you indulge me a bit. I have no business diving into these areas, but I like to anyway. The idea of relativity, of our clocks as inconsequential, all our fears, worries, anxieties all wrapped up in our own version of time, which we know only as a constant… then learning that it’s not! If you are into cosmology and related “light” reading, look up Mario Livio. [my fav astrophysicist/author]
complexity of the time-space continuum
I am a three dimensional solid although
many dark nights I feel completely flat.
I experience time, and it is blood pounding through my heart.
In the universe, all is light billions of years in the traveling
through space billions of miles empty.
Here, all is the idea of now.
So many times I say I have not begun what I set out to do,
that I’m wasting my life
sitting in this dark moldy stairwell waiting.
Waiting on the perfectly safe door to open.
Waiting on a perfect gentleman to lead the way.
Waiting on that epoch fear that my hours will cease
before I’m ready.
Some say “be patient and wait, in the future you will see.”
Future?
Don’t they hear the hours
while we stand still growing old.
Don’t they see sand swallowed by the tide,
by the moon,
All of us neither created nor destroyed
yet slowed by gravity, affected.
Don’t they understand by the end of this breath,
our notion of the present is the past
and by the time we decide to move,
the space is filled.
No one, not even Einstein or Hawking,
has this relativity figured. Us poets
are not exceptional. We witness
our space plowing straight ahead
to only come out bent.
I said to the man,
“Gimme more”
and he said, “take take!”
I reach; my hands fervently
staining with the juice
of those red berries pressed
into wine,
and I am drunk,
my lips purple and even
that color I lick
off to get more.
I said again to the man,
“It is not enough;
you must do better”
And he quietly
takes me by the hand,
and leads me down
into the
hungry darkness.
In the shadows
Of a steaming bath with Turkish detailing
And palm trees framing its lovely face,
So gently,
Like my wet hair to my forehead and neck,
I was held in arms
Bigger than my own, bigger than my fears.
Arms
With strong muscles and hands
That seemed to seek out
My weaknesses and my dreams
On my wet appendages and
Underwear not meant for swimming.
And the jet stream pulsed around us with bubbles,
And the sky seemed to spell out in its stars,
You only live once,
Live it up.
Little poems are soul food~
you will feast as long as you
don’t let em get ya, don’t let em ever get ya.
You’ll live the colors that create life.
Don’t you let em lock ya up
with their nonsensical ramblings of ordinary thought.
Tell em: no meds;
you were born as stardust
and don’t need nothing more than that.
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