Internment
I was being sent to Japan. The last and final journey before an end of sorts. But an end. It doesn’t matter what comes to close at that moment of distinction. I rail against it; think only in terms of failure. How I don’t want to ever fail. But you live as a child, then as an adult, considered lucky if you make it back to childhood. The harsh sand paper sheen of adult diapers. The rashes that can never be fully cured by ointments as oily and uncomfortable as they sound. The red, torn up skin whose plies are whitened layers of skin peeling up and away (dry): the skin of potatoes cut with a blade curls away from the starch flesh.
It was a race to the plane. The terminal far from where I was, and shuttle buses escorting hordes of people from one location to the escalators and life-sized belts to do the walking. The line was thick, and long, and I stood at the end knowing I would never make it in time to cross the country, then the Pacific. I appealed to the line, their senses and sensitivities. I can’t miss this plane. It was his final wish. Could I even do one thing he requested of me.
Salty Soil
Salty Soil
When you say it, you have to sing it. So what you’re saying
won’t sound as serious. Dire & final. Life were to break out in
animation, curves filled with esses, color strong, deep
with sediment…not an overnight occurrence, as if you rubbed your eyes to find
flowers sprouting from cracked floor. You live in a meadow painted
to fit your touch—a breath in pulls the prairie june grass closer to
the gait of your thinning legs. Don’t blame me
if this isn’t exactly what you’d imagined.
Small areas of ground, soil cursed by the roots
of massive trees can’t harbor the life of any living plant. Shrub or
bush variety. You know it’s me who keeps trying to plant what
won’t take. A summer season, three
seasons later, the brown fell into the once green skinny offshoots quicker
then the passed time accounts for in sentiment. The ruined dirt moves so much quicker.
Realism in the Renaissance
Realism in the Renaissance
The sun set is
exactly accurate in beauty when the
sky’s red lights fluorescent.
You’ve electrified
the horizon line. Put the three
in dimensional. It is certainly pollution
that definitively
makes these colors. I could not chose
Earth’s continuance under the conditions of the Mesozoic era.
Live amid the dinosaur beasts.
Lift the yard of plastic tube—widening for mere inches
on one end—above your head, swing
it like a master reeling in
his slave. We are both American. Hear the slight humming whistle? Sings
as it is swung about. They produce
these corrugated tubes so you will know you can make sound—has to be
close enough to register
when you question, It’s as if these kisses are just for me.
Why would I want to
live with animals who
would have no
regard for my testimony or appeals:
Please. Don’t rip my meager
flesh into pieces because you are scared of my body even with
the ratio in your favor. Heavily. If you had the same organs
as me, you could engulf my entire body without hesitation.
Fly (Aways)
Fly (Aways)
I leaked more fluids when I was younger.
Fluids flowed easily, with the ease of cohesion. How water just sticks
together. This is the season baby birds fall out of trees. We find them
almost under our feet. We count: one, two, three, four. The sticks
of nests not bound to support the weight of this lay
of eggs. You couldn’t say with assuredness that mama bird didn’t
do her job. Predators abound in the city sky hanging
low alongside humidity. (We say) Everyone has to eat.
Everyone deserves to have food until they feel their stomachs full. If they died, lay here
uneaten, but broken, dead but whole, no one was fed…
the spring: embryos—colorless & stuck in the cracks of concrete—
not yet prepared for the hatch, the chlorophyll filled leaves lining the branches
that hold their homes in trees’ brown masked arms. The paths (we walk)
are not seamless, the sweat
sweats out of my pores with awkwardness into
the cotton of my jeans.
Cooking on Hollywood Boulevard
I hope the nausea comes before I drop this car-
ton of eggs. Yolk soaked lacquered wood screeching
under my midnight blue rubber boots. Let’s name them
after the great baroque musicians, Vivaldi, Monteverdi, before
they can no longer be named.
Broke and unnamable.
Who wishes illness,
unmistakable pain that
kicks from the inside out like a man buried live in
a coffin. Ribs’ resonant timbre through the pine nailed tho-
roughly makes you a man: arms,
hands, prints,
run the width of the back, spine’s
valley, over your side’s acme—discover fingers fall
into the cage like wet concrete. This bed is where
my infamy reigns. Sometimes death is still & silent.
I use your death in my favor. (new poem).
I use your death in my favor. To supply an excuse. There
is a system you can rig, combobulate, to hold your own
hands still. The surface inconsequential. Across the knots of hands’ bones.
I wait days to call you (everyone else) back. I tell you
nothing of any consequence. Nothing with definition. I say I don’t know
how to blend the phonemes, sound out the words. Passings
are jarring. The scratches red across the knuckles: dashes mixed with lines.
Gapes next to gashes.
I should take care when driving over wet, narrow bridges with more
than a knee. The rails light red by way of reflection, rain drops
reflective prisms. The greyed cement glows with pastels, mixed
brake & head lights.
The New Pioneers: a new poem
The New Pioneers
a)
The others live in an electric-less cabin along the coast. The seaweed
glued to the shins of her legs (tide’s force pushing toward land)
that she can grab at & pull off, throw violently to the water around her buoying body
in, up, over the rise & fall of the water.
She keeps her hands wrapped perfectly around the neck of the younger,
more virile child whose skin has no age spots—imperfect circles dipped
into shades darker than just years (I’m talking decades), after being born—
for the faithlessness in florescent-orange-covered sytrofoam
to save her life; the water out of her mouth, out of her trachea, her esophagus,
bronchus into bronchiole. Out of her system, the whole surviving to-do.
b)
Moon lights the grain of the wearing wood, shadows
sweep across faces’ features reaching in the not yet
but mostly darkness, unafraid, of the feel. The outline of the nose elongates
then quickly shortens. Feet brush the floor in song, in pattern: darkness’
clumsy definition the hands a half-successful vacuum
cupped over the cartilage blended into lobe…
the swish of the waves, of the ocean:
the song. If she were their child this would always be her lullaby. They’d make her
close her eyes & see the emerald green.
This is the day that Jesus came back to us. The day that he decided to return to show us not what he was capable of, but what what we as a people are capable of. A person relearns how to find their strength. They cannot keep it for the whole run. A person relearns to find hope and faith. An event comes and exhausts all.
Sometimes silence is just better. When the words come blubbering out, the cohesiveness of water isn’t strong enough to keep the knocked over glass intact–glass and water and all. The stillness that comes (tears stream out) before the hand reaches to contain the spill. After the slight of the hand caused the mess. The whole wet mess.
My dreams
My dreams have been horrifying lately. They have always been so, especially over the past years, but in recent past, in present future, they have been overwhelmingly jarring. When I wake in the middle of them, open my eyes and look about the darkness of my room, press any button on my cell phone to brighten the light so that darkness cannot consume and assume me completely, I am still in the midst of the dream. I close my eyes, return to sleep, and where left off is where I resume. How to escape then? Not to sleep for days on end? I attempted such trickery a couple of consecutive nights this past week. Instead, it left me even more haggard and distraught. Tears brought to my cheeks with a magnetism that can only occur when sleep has evaded the mind. I returned to sleep; to ships sinking, the dead arising–you turning your back to me as blood gushed from me and my body went limp with lifelessness.
I pulled on your shirt sleeves. I begged you to help me and my mother; to find a car, a hospital so that the blood would stop flowing out of its veins, out of my body away from my heart and my brain. You looked into my eyes. The declarative moment when the view of the eyes meet each other, and neither can deny that the moment took place. Or that you couldn’t see, plainly, clearly, that I was dying. But you turned. You walked into a house, taking another into your surroundings, and sent me on my way bloody and alone.
I have had these dreams about the others. All the others, but never you. And now, you’ve joined the ranks. The boys who visit me in my dreams and make them nightmares. Who leave me when all I want, all I need is their hand. All I expect, but never ask for outright is the tiniest sliver of their heart. I used to think your heart was so big, the sliver I requested would always be available, never retracted or missed if the rest moved or shifted. Following the cycles of the moon for as long as the moon will exist, which is much longer than you, or me will see the crescent grow into a circle, knowing that it’s really an orb.
I wake and the haze makes the air around me seem to quiver with the heat that rises off a radiator into a freezing room. It doesn’t leave me. It leaves me speechless, and sad. It makes me miss you even more. The you that I will always love.
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