Poem #8: Immortal
A stake in my chest
When I thought I was made of steel,
I cling to the last thing that made me happy
So that I may fall with a smile on my face.
Even if I am bloody,
Sore, weak, with my wounds weeping,
My heart will stop beating,
But my soul will never stop breathing.
Poem #6: I Wanted Nothing
Formaldehyde in shabby cluster, a tap on the cigarette
as a conductor would call attention from his stand.
Air so still, our glasses linear on the diner table, in a
duel to death, and I am so afraid of my veins speaking
to yours in this mutual silence, I contrive my tendons
from being interlocked, not just in their own hinges,
but with yours.
(She, a stare from eye to eye, captivating my
captive pulse, pendulum pupils swaying down to her
knees, angled sharp.) Headlined above the curtain pole,
a candid light leaning its flicker on the distance between,
shoelace to colored shoelace, and still life passerby,
in motive: never wasting a goddamn.
Sober sun sunken beneath a dance club flare, a
florid scab across the street, me enjoying the printer
ink shore devouring the lit pools, rippled with clamor.
Knuckles popping like bubble gum snaps, and cracking
your neck as if preparing for a gallows in a diner.
There were tendrils of fog, unscathed in the street,
a concrete miasma stifled, lacking current, the curious
fumes less deliberate than the smoke you bellow
away from me.
And in conversation, I am similar to the anatomy of fog
enveloping all your sparse remarks, your thin
postcard comments. I wouldn’t call either of us hesitant.
Somehow, I’ve begun to adore the manhole cover shade about your eyes,
like sagging dollar store bags, and how you carry all you see in those jaded sockets.
Even how our dreamless, empty lifestyles are massaged by dry coffeehouse
“dates,” I’ve learned to love how easily I am filled by such
metallic, civilized warmth.
(We had no necessity for words, in moments such as these,
no apocalyptic mindset, no inhuman sense of perfection–
just the joyful movement made by she and I, the parking
of the car anywhere.) I wanted nothing but the distance
in between where we each sat, and not you. Not you.
Poem#8 Be Thankful
We plan, yet we fail …
We toil, yet we are lacking …
We love, yet we are hurt …
We care, yet we are taken for granted …
Life is unfair, yet beautiful.
Good and bad they said both comes in threes …
The difference lies in how we take both …
With open heart and an open mind …
Or with a complaining and misgiving soul …
Be thankful everyday for the things we have …
Because others don’t have the things we are thankful about.
In Me
I imagine long nights of love making
You entering and exiting, welcomed or by surprise.
Experimenting.
Exchanging smirks and kisses.
You try. I try.
How did we end up here?
Not long ago
You were just a cordial ‘Hi & bye’
Now we’re each others highs & lows
Sweaty embraces. Bodies shaking.
You in me.
An Ugly Face
You glare at me with your eyes
And then turn back away from me
Because you only saw
An ugly face
Starring back at you
With a open heart
Full of a lingering love
Inside a genuine art
Do I Dare to Eat a Peach?
He wrote, talked about man
the existential loneliness of
man I suppose, or was he
hungry for a peach out of
season he could not afford?
The prices asked for imported
fruit and vegetables! He grew old
he grew old, he grew old, he knew
where cheaper trousers were often
sold to the oldsters pawing through the
Goodwill offerings of discarded books,
colorful straw boaters, scarves, bric-a-brac,
what-nots salvaged from another man’s
lyrics. What is this diatribe about you’ve read he wasn’t very nice,
an anti-Semite too, he grew old, in disfavor, unhappily
married to a manic depressive, who was put away. She grew
old and barely ever complained she dared not eat a peach.
# 8 poetry marathon : we need.
We need more images
a chance to dream; imagination.
we need time to think.
***
we need to process
too much running around
we need to keep breathing.
Flower
what a thing it must be, to be grown for beauty; to attract // to serve
the purpose of catching an eye, turning a head, inviting a smile // existing and
subsisting with the sole intention of brightening and blooming, even when rudely plucked from the whole // looking at you, I feel all of my plans quite abandoned; sure that I shall live my life forevermore with roots extended and drink my fill – face to the sun // and dissolve.