The Poetry Marathon

In a century the plants will cover our memories. The fences we partitioned, the walls we we set to divide the land, all buried beneath the intertwining mass of green and black ivy.

Our bodies long dead, voices lost, all that held meaning dissapeared. Dissolved to dust and wind. And our songs have all stopped, their notes imprinted in our genetic code, dust and wind.

Trees expanding boundless into the sky, with boughs that stoop so low they almost touch the earth. Wild grasses consuming all obstructions in their path, reaching upwards through the shadows of larger plant life.

In the middle of the field, with its paint peeling in the sunlight, stripped to the white wood base beneath corroding lacquer and paint, a piano disintegrates continuously, and on its base there are one hundred keys, chipped, cracked, worn to the plastic center.

The body still stands, holding strings too rusted to sing. In one hundred more years, there will be nothing to find here evident of the music that was once composed.

Rushing crowds of people, an urgency to arrive somewhere.

The moment a conglomeration of happenstance sensory-perspectives, each element dazzling the mind, appetites attributing to the particular experience of this place, right now, right here,

surrounded by electronic images contorting on skyscrapers, people cheering, laughing, dancing, speaking about their world to one another,

I catch a random phrase, ” So whats it like,” and ” Are you gonna go?” Ordinary montage of words, while the music pours into the streets, “Is there a god?” and “Are you her?”

the traffic collapsing as it topples forward, revving, honking. Under our feet the crime of civilization is smeared into the pavement, dark stains and cigarette butts, plastic refuse pressed into place or blowing across the street.

Above us, in the center of my view, blue sky reaches beyond all, surrounded by the ntermittent spires of glass plated buildings, like the points of an industrial crown of corporacy,

I am at the center. There are people here with me. Things happen here. This place is important, all the seemingly meaningless congestion are really the rites of holy sacrament,

we consume our flesh by offering it to one another, the plastic, the exhaust, the chemical condensation forming on the windows, mixing with the salt from our sweating temples.

We invoke dormant gods to sanctify our grimey station. We exist as electric revelry, our atmosphere, our fragrance, right now, in this place.

Swarms of anonymous people, congesting the sidewalks, frothing over curbs onto battered asphalt canals, interweaving through stalled traffic.

A highway full of angry people, anonymous behind their banners, united behind their message. Seen. Heard. They are the movement you see cascading across our country. Anonymous but you know them.

They’re your sisters, mothers, daughters. They’re your nieces, aunts, and cousins.

They are half our population, but they’re not as free as the rest of us.

Cool pressure surrounding,

Folds of stilled gravity, swirling,

resisting, flowing in the rivers path,

the tiger-striped magician vanishing

beneath bubble-storm breaths.

Applause dulled, vibrations eminate

in the deep dark, below the world

dissappears, above me the jeweled dance

of light crackles across a glass ceiling.

Encased in the embryonic silence,

the gates of heaven shimmer,

some touch to inuterine memory strummed,

birth and death beheld simultaneously,

lungs reminding me to live.

to pull towards the surface,

towards the light.

And now, my frail skelton of a spirit, 
withering in the endless waves of entertaining stimulus,
overfed to the point of nutrient deficiency, 
all sick with the modern cuisine of popularizing ignorance.

How much has changed? Came and went?
Are the feelings of each human heart truly so similar?

What wondering is there then? 
What tragic pondering would make sense of all this? 
What delicate orchestrator oversees such a sad dance?

Breaking the tiny parade for small flames 
that fizzle out in the mass void.
What of our pain! Pain!
Just tiny sparks dying in the endless night.

On the black hill where the prarie grasses 
and small trees converge into one impenetrable shadow, 
from which all that is of the earth unfolds forth, 

down through the valleys and secret hollows, 
that breathing titan of darkness, 
whose outline is just barely seen 

formed against the fallen sky, 
where purple teeth shine out 
from the deep caverns above.

There, upon this midnight place of stilled dreaming, 
where starlight's radiance imprisons my slipping retreat, 
that waning fire of my paternal seat.

The majestic virility of universalkingdoms
held breathless against the timeless sea
She sleeps in an aging dawn of becoming. 

Outlasting the swift brightness of Jupiters might.
In his most silent chamber, 
in the most private corridor of his mind, 

he feels the foundation weaken, 
the breaker wall fallen cold, crumbling.
As she swells, expands, engulfs the mountain 

no longer proud. 
helpless to a deeper cycle 
buried in the rising waves.

A swelling reservoir of insignificant bustling, 
the roaring byproduct of crowded masses, 
shapeless faces, eyes that count lights, 
eyes and mouths speaking, so many talking, 
breathing, wasting themselves all over the surface.

Death by automobile, 
gasping like malfunctioning robotic fish, 
mouth agape in the thin hot air. 
Bloody divers unleashed from his abdomen.

Death by diet, by pills, 
by isolation in a crowd of unconnected persons. 
Masks and decadence. 
Images paraded above life dying within. 
Unaware of the slipping veil, 
too consumed to feel the soul's departing 
bit by horrible bit.

Swathes and swathes of people. 
Names and places, 
but the crowd is nameless, 
all people taking up space, 
what disconnect has led us here? 
What disenchantment eats at my own heart?

The rush to sell and buy. 

Thriving measured by consumerism. 
The chase and competition all around. 
To live and die for turning that great wheel. 
All standing on the backs of some, 
to lick the boots of others. 
No ones back is weightless. 
No ones tongue is clean.

We deserve our cancers. 
We deserve our failing hearts. 
We deserve the strangualating cholesterol, 
chemical sterility. But our children dont.

The children deserve something better.

The transformation bridge,
rippled shadow set low
to grounding curves of a gravel road. 

Sleek, earth-smoothed face,
a muddy arrow point,
striped lips that fold around the mouth. 

Glistening sunlight refracted 
upon each scale, 
talking plated armor,

feather sockets, 
scraped away to pliable shingles
of ground hardened skin.

Diamond studded rope of light,
Sun-setting night prowler,
river-whipping earth mover,
blood warm hunter of the early evening.

Steps creep closer to an awaiting death,
Pale-faced ghost laugh,
Entering an unknown tunnel beneath the land
Head is dreaming on the far bank of the river

City traffic sleeps in the cradle of the moon
Entering awake, the land of midnight’s intention
Suspended serpents dream an alerting fear.
Women and children out of reach.

Heart jostled by a silent magician,
The crowning sun emerges from behind grey towers
The yellow king prays with red tears
A white rose waves on a black field

Your body's story slips 
from behind the words you want me to see.

The folds of skin pulled tight, 
angled in the hand held mirror camera lens, 
transparent as the plastic screen saver you project.

Your body's story is a nest of hornets 
burrowed in the hollow tree behind the pond.

Your art betrays you, 
like school children who cant keep a secret, 
each crimped curl, each curve of mascara, 
every striped line that accentuates the center of your figure,
All are wailing birds of night, 
crying for companionship in the dark.

Your body's story is a scavenger 
that rides the high cross winds, 
carrion eater soaring like an eagle.

I look for your hidden blemishes, 
shaming jewels whose crown can never be undone, 
the real treasures that reveal you, 
the imperfect nose ridge, 
the wilting petals of your cleavage, 
gravity's touch not so obvious 
when you pose with your arms above your head.

Your body's story is the trampled ground in early spring, 
snow thawed earth, crevices, and sediment 
sliding  into creeks and ponds.

The story of your body is the truth of your beauty, 
yet someone taught you not to lead with it. 
To hide it until you can trust them not to hurt you with it. 
As if anyone could hurt you more than you.