The Poetry Marathon

My father’s heart fell victim to heredity four years ago.

The surgeon placed a stent in his aortic valve to brace

the walls and keep the blood flowing.

I imagine the stent shaped like a bridge to strings,

like the one that bolsters the cello

in the corner of my room collecting dust.

But even before that, he couldn’t pass the physical

to join the Korean War–his heart murmured

something the doctors did not like.

My father’s father died of a heart attack, or

maybe complications of diabetes that betrayed his heart.

He was a musician and a piano tuner,

who sometimes imposed a cello lesson on me,

firmly pressing my fingers to the finger board

nearly 45 years ago on that corner resting cello.

All of his 8 sons played musical instruments.

The 21 year old I work with at the sweet shop,

whose name may be Rob or Mike or John,

is someone I would say has a heart of gold,

but for his laziness, though still an amiable sort.

He has a pair of friends, twin brothers, who

come to pick him up from work and take him home.

One told me that Rob-Mike-John had five heart attacks

when he was only a sophomore in high school.

His doctor said he was lucky to be alive.

My mother’s heart is strong, always has been.

Her mind and body are ravaged by demented

disease, forgetting to allow her to live, but her

heart beats resoundingly under her ribs, her doctor says.

And though the cuffs don’t hurt her any more,

too little flesh on her arms, her blood pressure rocks.

Sans word, thought or flesh, she is pure pulsing heart now.

Your name means mountain ebony,

a certain Bauhinia,

common to coastal California,

but I call you moody.

You own my front yard,

dominate passages and pathways,

burgeoning weight of verdure or

leafy reaches for spider’s webby catch to

neighboring anchors–rose bush branch or

parked car side mirrors.

How you please my wispy-boned mother braked still,

the dog leashed to the wheel chair,

under a relenting shade,

cooling an afternoon zephyr.

In spring or autumn, sometimes winter too,

you boom-blossom burbling orchids,

delicate pink and purple hazy bells

that sometimes ring in summer too.

That’s when your leaves burst butterfly hearts

of hunter green fringed in lemon-lime edges, a

hovering, healthy, verdant vibrancy.

But on any given week without reason,

your leaves brown at the edges,

then all the way through,

baring skeletal bramble

like bones of the cancerous,

exposed,

radiated,

burnt

for the winter–or summer complaint,

marring the yard, baring the hidden wreckage behind you.

That’s when the pods hang dry in rusts and reds, seeds

to bake or burst, sturdy uterine drip packets,

like dry, pea pod icicle tears crying,

yet unyielding to the grip.

And the next week,

they’re gone,

replaced by the brilliant buds like

poking penis plants peek through tightly tubed petals,

orchid splendor,

the softer side on a misty Monday.

Until Tuesday.

When the mood strikes.

Which outfit to wear for today?

Alone on the Heath, a purple flower

where there once was dry reedy sand,

you, friend, rode the train to dusty plains

with me–and slept through shifting tides

along California beaches, we two, strangers

to this land, and no less to each other.

I watched your sleeping breast rise and settle,

like the rhythm of our first freedom days, lazed

into adulthood, we seekers of flame, depths

of our soulful hearts, walking poetry, youth

alluring to each other–comrades–and evil too.

I saw you leave that day, through cloudy eyes,

music, sand and weed drifting us alongside

our own nature, me, cautious and calculating,

ready to loosen within my comfortable shoes

and you, a riddle’s answer to what is freer than

free? Air. Who has stolen your breath, my flower?

Your forever frozen face stills time in its place.

“Martian moons are Phobos and Deimos,

the latter translated as Panic,” I told you then.

It was mid-way through our junior year–our glory days.

I would leave you that very next week for California.

The last time we drove around the lake in your jeep,

open air, breeze whipping the hair against our ears, you

replied: “I don’t believe in moons, stars or planets.”

I still don’t know what you mean.

I live under your gaze

in a box

by the bus bench

in the bushes.

Though our eyes

never meet,

not a glance my way,

I feel your shame.

Don’t.

Judge my story.

You’ll find it in my eyes.

In Praise of Praise

Not a participation trophy fan, still, I believe in praise–fair props.
Praise the days, praise the nights, praise the accident that is us,
Our planet, our time, our space, our separate solitary worlds,
Together and apart, unable to perceive reality let alone truth
Less a word than a gurgling gut full of sense and the sensible.

Through the singeing stain of soiled panties soaked in piss, as I sobbed,
Sitting beside the third grade boy crush and plum of my notice,
Shame stays, but the blush of recognition, heart surge pumping pride
in mastering a job well done, earned in doubt and fear, curtained hope,
The A, raise, high five, and fist bump, all winking nod to gratitude’s birthright.

To cup a hand to an upturned ear
To hear what all there is to hear
Echo down the hall and up the stair
And keep my mind from turning fear.

To hear what all there is to hear
And keep my mind from turning fear
There must be brave good cheer
To fight the crowd’s scowly sneer.

To keep my mind from turning fear
And fight the crowd’s scowly sneers
I shall hold those I love to me near
And never let them harm my dears.

I’ll fight the crowd’s awful sneers
And never let them harm my dears
Lest their lies most insincere
Sway the tide to lesser cares.

I’ll never let them harm my dears
Nor sway the tide to lesser cares
Like hate and names no one dares.                                            Framing targets in trigger hairs

Sway no tide to lesser cares
Frame no targets in trigger hairs
Come clean in consciences bared
For hate’s glare dies in love shared.

We’re leaving the Great Park.

It’s a scorcher out there.

Her team just lost six to one.

She’s quiet on the tortuous zag from the fields.

I don’t think she feels responsible.

At 17, she’s philosophical, albeit a touch cynical and weary.

She carries her angst in her pocket.

“What is nihilism?” She asks the road ahead after a while.

“Lately, I’ve been thinking about how minuscule

we are, especially in light of the cosmos and

the improbable non-existence of other life, somewhere.”

I haven’t hydrated enough.

My head hurts slightly.

“Well, it’s sort of like nothing matters,

an extreme sort of skepticism,” I immediately regret saying.

Her eyes widen and the depths of velvet brown

endlessly recede, raw terror swallowed–stored in a gap.

“But it’s not just the life’s a bitch then you die philosophy.

There’s something freeing about understanding our

insignificance in the larger scheme of things and our utter

significance at the local level, where we live.

It doesn’t have to be about uselessness.

The randomness and chaos of our births and deaths–

some take comfort in the just-is-ness of it.”

She still stares out at the road ahead of us, but I hear

her thinking it over, this great question of being and nothing,

all tied in knots to her senior year of high school,

turning 18, the possibility, potential, and unknown…

she who has always tightroped the anxiety fine line.

At 65 mph, those last 5 minutes take us no closer to home.

Fleet-footed atop the blades of grass, they look like a floating ice capade of soccer ballet clicking heels like Dorothy while swooping legs shoot–Nike’d.

Her hair bunched floppy whipping
White shirts mouth surprise
She barely misses missing.

Your hand so cold, clenches mine,
Unrelenting grip, inescapable since your return.
You can’t realize, sensory memory vanished under the knife,
How far I won’t go, how little you have to fear I might disappear.
The machine tells us so, the beast that remembers your absence
Recording waves sucked from space, you, me ionically, bionically, your clutch keep.