well, flight or shatter

it starts, a bric -
a - brac, a tumbling, - i don't know this
road - or maybe i traveled blind before
and stupored,
or in the soft mulch-covered woods
on moonless nights.

well, these things crumble, you know.
not made of stone,
our feet crack easier;
but what things we contain,
wisps and wists, i want
more than to love
like a ghost, a dead girl, drifter
in my aged, worn shoes

when you flood,
sky shine on summer grass,
like glowing wildflowers trailing the sun's fingers,
and i am moved how the wind must,
in nectared breaths and petals

the heart in flight

Love love love, lovely, c'e la vi',
(non e francese: "c'est la vie").

Madam, I am scrawling, yes,
with charcoal.
These wires become all aglow.
Caged in Bangkok lanterns;
I am as naked and dark as sparrows.
 

some birds eat other birds, or story for the lost artist

A cliff falcon swept her broad wings, and
thefted a newborn chicken-child singing 
pio, pio, pio to a little boy.

Well, throw a rounded stone swiftly,
enough to strike
the hunter. She will
drop the yellow feathered thing.
It will plunge thirty feet, 
lay dead on the grass, dirtied
and damp on the ground,
for the little boy to dash over
in his small feet,
and be afraid to touch it.

You must
pick it up, the little dead body,
and carry it in the cracked cradle
of your labored hands,
and lay it,
in a grounding-stone grave.

You must take the old bronze bowl,
the one where grandmother's young fingers
picked her blessed rice from,
when the young farm chickens chirped for her,
and place
the hollowed metal,
on the silent body of the creature.

Take a tarnished spice spoon, heavy
with the rains and cold,
and strike, the empty eating sphere.
It will ring, a knelling clarity,
& sound, into the dozing mountains,
and the cool, grey haze that cloaks them.

You must hit it again,
& again, and then, again, drumming
faster, your fingers,
become chanting monks
of a dead dharmic religion,
a steady, chiming, prayer-voice
soaring up to the blind burying gods,
and the bird will stir.

no. love, you are porcelain
fragments; pushpins spilt.

these things puncture underfoot. blue.
threads in softness; lines going
across me, you were so tender,
little sinking bites.

ceramic shards,
how my feet bloom
wet, along your mouth
red peonies and claret,
oxidized kisses on a pane.

i would scatter you:
silver tacks and iron pins;
how you dizzy on my splintered floors, how
fearfully sweet my heart races and aches
the way i pierce you into my flesh.

Fraying

There is a way the shirt unravels,
a little stray thread,
that you tuck,
into the fine, sturdy body of the hem,
with a promise,
to snip at a later time.

And forgotten,
between the entwined legs in the mid-mornings,
and soft cradling hands
that cup
cheeks and chins and bright eyes,
left tumbling like dizzy lovers
in the post-coital wash, the machine
catches it.

What a tender tug.
At first, a spinning,
a back and forth unstitching,
then, oh.
The strap has fallen,
the shirt has split,
and all the pieces fall, wet and tearing.

make lemon meringue.

or the breath suppressed, fall
against the silver rounded tins;
caressed in papers, discarded,

breathe.
dizzying citrine; clementines.
nothing quite

like pomelo, crushed
tears in mouth,
all tart
and wounding.

______________________________


When life gives you lemons, you make lemon meringue.

Or you could roll the lemon on a thick wooden cutting board and slice it; pour a shot of sunny, reposado tequila, and break the salt and bitter lime tradition. Or, you could let the lemons sit in the plastic bag in the fridge until you knew what to do with them. They’d smell only of sweet, fresh lemons as they fermented, sweaty with chill and condensation on their bumpy zest. Lemons forgotten, you could go the grocer’s. You could let your stiff back fall lightly against the shelves of silver rounded tins, all caressed with papers, as you inhaled, your legs unsteady in the heady citrine breaths of clementines and tangelos.

Then you buy the fruit, peel the loose skin, tenderly, and eat the sweet flesh.

When life gives you a lover, after things break with your last one, you should make love.

i walked
in black abyss,
dark & blind,

found stars,
radiant salt,
& white.

They say grace now; promise fire in the future,
and warmth and brightness always.

interlude

what is the taste of love?
-beers drowned in amaretto, liquid almonds with a little poison, steeped from the stone hearts of summer, love does not taste like you.
-orgasms, love does not taste like you.
-james joyce, oh poldy, poldy bloom, your molly who is going to leave you, yes, yes, oh yes, and i yes, yes your stream of conscious sweetness while you sleep, love, love does not taste like you, nor your old nostalgia pages.

am i blue? billie asks me. blue billie, i'm not like you. i don't cry, and no man's left me. the world is old and filled with lies, and i can lie too. it was a woman who killed lucifer.

-

there was a fire in chinatown, and it left a blackened stone-brick skeleton, all concrete and charred, and i fell in love with its burnt hollowness. is it bizarre to feel this, to love decrepit, aging buildings? the attraction's all in the expression, the honest ugliness.
they can't lie, so they stand in the rain, waiting to be demolished.

there's an art to lying; it is the craft of story-weaving and selling desire. you take a set of images, linked only by the person who commits them, and tie them together to make a narrative that people want to buy, like a bundle of frail papers with secrets, or withering blossoms.

i don't want to be eloquent. i don't want art. i don't want jacquard floors. i don't want to know that we are only chemicals and fiction.
i don't want to make love letters to ugly, miserable, disgusting (beautiful!) despair, who digs into me with her hooked ring, and her androgynous twin, desire, who possesses the space where my metaphysical heart should be, and breathes through my pores, and lives alone in his/her mirrored chambers.

perhaps i am poetry. i don't think poetry can live in a body like mine, or maybe that's why it does. or perhaps the world is too heavy sometimes, with it's grey nights, and overflowing fog, smog in the city. or perhaps i don't love people, only ideas, because people can't appreciate the world. or maybe i was born strange in the head, and now i love walls and dirt, and blackness, and mourning, and see truths too clearly to want to play cat's cradle and repeat cycles with liars; they are all liars.

or maybe i don't know the heart of what's real when it looks back at me.

i.
The songstress opens her mouth. She is petite, a china doll.
Her mouth, song is Shanghai, 1920.
 
I close a semi-gloved left hand to my heart.
Shanghai, Shanghai; Mandarin, I do not speak, but know the soul of.

She opens her eyes while lilting.  Makes dark-lashed woman lids at me, not at the lonely drunks near me, nor at anyone else in the loud jazz house.
My windows are open; I know her heartbeat. She closes her painted eyes, sways to her own young voice and the piano.
She raises her eyes elsewhere in the room, at other men at various tables. The back of their heads gaze back. Her fingers clutch and twist a strip of fraying microphone cable tightly. She sways her hips when she remembers to.
Her vowels and tonals are off at times, but nobody else knows the ebbing and flowing of Chinese in the room, only the exoticism of her voice.

If I were single, I would rise from where I am eating up her vulnerability. I'd leave my scotch on the oaken steps. I would saunter over, tell her, "I love your singing. Let me buy you a drink." She is twenty-four, and I am twenty-one; this is no matter. A girl is a girl.