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LETHOLOGICA
By Ali Abraham
Ah! Lethologica!
i forgot the word
that means “i’ve forgotten the word.”
a word that describes the moment when precision
trumps continuity.
this is a word that means pause,
a clause of a word,
a trick of light,
a tick of illumination,
a tear of patience
in the busy fabric of prattle-
the persistent “what is it?”
I Naming You
Naming You
Excuses
Some Time Ago
Ten Years Old and Afraid
She Refers to Herself
We Do this Everyday
Thin Ice
Mama, Grammie, Me
Handshakes
Our Shanghai
On Eye Bags
Things by Themselves
I Will Kill Myself
Simple
Wake Up
Dude
II Evil Plan
Evil Plan (tm)!, A Guide
The Fashions
Post Eden Eves
ARTIST’S ALTITUDE
On Poets
The Melting Poem
Now Love is Free
Foot
On Teeth
On Pearls
Who Needs Dick Who Has Bic?
Costume Complex
The Selves and Me
The Words and Me
Tweaked
Cried the Wind
III Treasure
Treasure
Blue Venus Above the Moon
When Things Get More Complicated
Clavicle
Galactic Cannibalism
We Must
About a Boat
IV Head First
Head First
Godless Prayer
Missing in Anonymity
The Importance of Ritual
September Bones
Remembering Japan
The Thing We Love
I Naming You
Naming You
1 grave
i'll wait somewhere forever
for you.
they dug me six deep
and I was a hole
to fill.
2 corpse
snowdrop water sunk and then cracked these bones.
a daisy seed sprouted in my nose hole
weaving through the mouth cave with spindle sewn
lace finger roots. soil absorbed the rich soul
and much became planted in the cool roast
rainbow chocolate of earthstuck flesh clumps.
from dirt, blooms sprung about my gross black ghost,
penetrated and pinned by the cross stump.
prison is not coffin, but tomb marker,
here lies spirit stamp iron wrought etch.
i don't exist, but still suffer darker
purgatories: merely the starring wretch
of the loving epitaph. i exist
in stench, resist god fists of fixedness.
3 baby
the bouncing beats sound softly. woven hearts
interlope cross body territories.
stillness, not easy, as i am both part
and within movement, our sordid stories
of plum bobbing apples, incarnate Eve
or Newton's trembling fruit. its for you i wait,
weightless within the thrum, to be received:
naked date with the pearly silk slick gate.
i seem to inhabit, it all becomes
me, within you, housing me, snake pulse
and dark, thick, milk fog swirls bthm bdm,
en-wombed so, by universal forces.
fluid sack bursts, tornado squeeze contracts,
sucked forth by breath till' void, again, takes back.
4 mother
i waited for you for months,
it was like they say
about boiling water.
i was a big globe swilling
thousands of tsunamis.
what shall i name you,
little death?
Excuses.
it’s true. once in the springtime, long ago,
i murdered a frog, in cold blood, stone dead.
first, i pulled off his legs. my hands, aglow
with green guts and frenzy, itched to behead.
in my paw, i held the stiffening thing.
it no longer twitched. i retched, petrified
by shame. gloom came that same spring:
fewer tadpoles. i could never confide
the misdeed. and— years later, someone said
that famous killers, in childhood, killed.
my future was set. my hands were frog red,
tainted from babyhood, stained sick by thrill.
i have an excuse not to be purer:
i’m a fated serial murderer.
Some Time Ago
i noticed
a caterpillar
crawling along
a fracture in my dad’s
garden planter.
i ate it,
gulped,
i waited.
for many days i waited.
for many nights i lay in bed, tense,
waiting.
my vision was unfocused by concentration,
and my mind was buzzing with the organza blur
of imagined wings but i never lifted from the ground.
i guess that butterfly never burst from
it’s caterpillar skin and never flew to my head
where it never crawled down my nose
to flutter out of my mouth
(which
always
hung consciously
open)
and i still wonder
if i can make babies
why can’t i
make
butterflies?
Ten Years Old and Afraid
apple seeds once flew like stardust
in the heavy august.
and they too,
fell splat upon the mud!
just like me,
splat upon the mud!
--indenting a me-shaped-blob
onto the soft earth.
we're living on an earth that has "grown soft."
you're growing soft earth! what gives?
give it up, tell us!
usually "growing soft" is not a good thing.
it happens after you have kids, or play with kids.
papa says sometimes
i am sometimes not a good little thing. and like a secret,
i crave the bad softness,
the rot that cushions splat.
but I find none under the layers of mud.
the earth is a rock beneath the ground.
i want to suffocate in its mud,
but the mud layer is too thin for drowning
in, and so,
i turn over:
all but my naked grape eyes, camouflaged
by an encasement of wormy hashbrown mud.
belly skyward, i ponder
the plumage of the young apple tree.
its single apple, beetlejuice bright with an aura of dusk,
a burning ruby at the core of a kiss,
whisper escaping prayer.
i am so tiny
surrounded by cities of my drip castles.
i am so tiny
She Refers to Herself
as "your skinny little mother,"
"don’t talk back to your skinny little mother"
"you’re hurting your skinny little mother"
"your skinny little mother's back aches"
"will you give your skinny little mother a massage?"
but its never inflected like a question.
We Do This Every Day
she carries tension below the sharp wings
of her shoulder blades
as though all expectation festered there.
my thumb circles the impossible knots,
loosening and releasing her pain,
spreading it across her back, little by little.
she remains stiff throughout
as though I was examining the angles of her posture
instead of attempting to smooth their rust.
Thin Ice
as she watches the olympic figure skating,
her body remembers the axles it used to make--
the ambition of leaping, of toe picks set to Swan Lake.
she used to speak of the importance of arms and fingers:
like a bird's wings, she said,
like willow branches, like tiger lily pistils.
but now she watches in silence,
occasionally muttering
to herself when she predicts
a fall.
Mama, Grammie, Me
adoration selfish enough sometimes breeds
something instead of Love. something strange and poisoned.
mama said, grammie’s fat,
her boobs are so big they’re going
to break her back, two potato sacks.
jeez ma,
Its just an unattractive rack-
She’s old!
mama called grammie: that bitch,
big bertha, chocolate-fiend,
obese-addicted-disgusting!
“doesn’t she know she’s taping it
directly to her ass?”and i say…mom,
hush, tape it to your ass and shake it, skinny bones.
(she sticks out her tongue at me and groans)
“kill me if i ever exceed 7 stones!”
but they only use stones
to measure the weight
of dried good shipments-
i wonder if
she knows this.
i wonder if grammie knows what she did,
all those years ago,just a kid: 16, absconding to
New York like a gun dog without a scent, imagining
a scent, she seduced that promising Dartmouth man,
her brother’s friend.
i can hear her laughter, her operatic voice,
voluptuous and commanding like the rest of her.
the command: to be seen, to be touched,
to be worshiped.
my grandmother, that wild creature raised
like fire in waspy stepford, Swarthmore.
my grandmother, a young woman with a future
and a sharp tongue that flapped, a spirit that quaked
with too much.
her father adored her, old family silent flicks
roll endlessly with Mary. Mary tumbles, Mary
dances, she skis, she laughs, she empties
ice tea on her brother’s head, Mary,
Mary, grammie.
and then it happened. and then she was 18
with a baby and a penniless dartmouth man
with a future and med school bills
that she was cuffed to like a school girl
chained to the bed she made. a joke that became
a perverse fetish.
the baby was as good as a scarlet letter
and its midnight cries didn’t wake her
as she slept because they sounded like
the caterwauls of her dream.
Mary, Mary,
indulge, tape it to your ass and forget it’s there.
in the coffin, your bones will rest on it
like dried goods. and only then will the weight
of it be measured in stones which my mother will throw.
and when she joins you down below
i wont pick up a single pebble.
i’ll bring you both roses, and you’ll
share their dried petals
as the wind blows
Handshakes
she prefaced formal introductions with
a ritual of whispered admonishment:
the weak handshake is a sign of a wishy
washy woman. so we spastically jolted
each new opponent introductee with mocking
cockeyed glee. we’ve done it for years.
we rattle their smiling white teeth
til’ they’re crooked in their gaped jaws.
we attack those chapped or clammy hands
with charming
winsome grins.
with grilling prong
clamp shakes.
some hands melt in the hold,
some feebly joggle back.
nowadays
sometimes we forget why we reflexively detest
the weak shakers…those wilted porcine grips,
precisely syllable-d names, bulbous play-dough faces.
each one, armed with business cards
and botox wedding smiles, executive jobs
or vacation houses. and you taught us, irreversibly,
to shake their hands just like we check christmas presents.
to judge the firmness
of a fingered embrace
as though
strength of hand
were strength of Soul.
Our Shanghai
the place where we grow up no longer exists.
here is Xintiandi:
here are the bullet holes in the bridge at Xintiandi,
here is the second tallest building in the world
where once an absurd fun house mansion stood.
legend told the mansion was built for the sick daughter of a rich man,
her recurrent dream, the blueprint for its mad dimensions.
here is the Pearl T.V. tower:
here are the purple and blue iridescent hexagonal domes of the tower,
magenta pink nipple dome at its top. shabby and dwarfed now,
but five years ago, the most famous attraction.
here is The Bund,
still it wraps itself like a mama snake round
few remaining scrap bungalows, the Yuyuan trading market,
wraps itself around the new buildings, even, as they crop up like untreated shingles
upon the tired skin of this sinking city,
tallest of all sinking cities.
aluminum shack peasant shanties went down
and sepia toned monsters went up and up and up,
disappearing into the dishwater gray smog,
springing up and up until they were the tallest in the world,
but empty.
we were once guests to this hungry, humming Gotham,
voyeurs to its history:
a culture that swallowed itself.
in a place that never existed
my first kiss tasted of breakfast dumpling and MSG.
lasted 10 seconds.
then i woke up
a thousand years old.
Shanghai was gone,
vanished entirely in the gray smog that crept off the ocean, into its streets,
the sunken city, sinking, sinking
into its forgotten wrinkles.
Eye Bags
easiest way to see
your mother's face
is to concentrate on them.
i kissed yours,
but they stayed sunken.
after all, Love is not like sleep
or water
Things by Themselves
Black Holes FAQ (answers to frequently asked questions)
WHAT IS A BLACK HOLE?
Loosely speaking, a black hole is a region of space that has so much mass concentrated in it that there is no way for a nearby object to escape its gravitational pull. In consequence, time is bent. Since our best theory of gravity at the moment is Einstein's general theory of relativity, we have to delve into some results of this theory to understand black holes in detail, but let's start off slow by thinking about gravity under fairly simple circumstances.
who wants to find these
broken things?going nowhere-
coming from where they’re still
going.
pieces of floating skeleton,
vertebrae, eyelashes,
discarded poems orbiting between
mars and jupiter, an unfastened
belt of thing smithereens.
did we ever serve purpose
in a life time? our clavicles,
fossilized tiger fangs,
adam’s missing rib.
pieces of things
that nobody knows anymore.
like the part of me
that loved you more than itself.
astronomers
keep searching for
the broken things
finding only time
twisted by
so much
that not even
light can
escape.
let alone
themselves.
I will kill myself
so that i can write you
a poem from hell
just to brag that i can do it:
the dead
wander through ink, painting
a halved black moon
with the soft rhythms
of ferocious pulsing.
my words whisper
with your blood
and you are forced to listen
as i rise.
in the stillness,
i want every molecule of you
to touch me
and then die.
Simple
there was a day when loving you
was simple,
and here, another day, nearly yesterday,
i lay in a snowdrift at midnight
close to naked,
willing myself towards death
just to give you an opportunity
to pick up my frozen limbs
and carry them to a source
of warmth—
i eventually crawled naked
towards what i knew
to be warm.
another man found me
and
under hot sheets,
i kissed his clavicle
and listened to his heart
as he slept.
you were only present
in the cold silence
between beats.
Wake Up
i open my eye,
still blurry with last night’s tequila.
upon waking, i don’t believe in miracles
and I don’t think they’re in me anymore—
though five hours ago,
i lay naked on my rooftop, singing.
full
moon
empty
glass
i thought I could touch a star with my tongue-
believed it would melt like a snowflake
and light me up bright like Zee.
even now, head buzzing with flurries
of booze induced haze,
snooze induced crust…
if i did believe,
i’d say jesus tap danced across that water.
who would walk with that sort of power?
i bet the meditation of saints,
if translated to sound,
would skip like a hip jazz beat.
the sour nectar still on my breath,
i bet i’ll do the same thing tonight
just to get back to that primal place,
blood singing with naked possibility.
Dude
the best wind is a plaything;
sacred blood gold leaves wheeling through stalled time.
i was seven epochs late
in experimenting with innovation,
a DUI short of ego.
frozen in my own nakedness,
transfixed by the primordial.
it seems as though everythings ended:
untried by a garage sale of moments, massacred by the
“here is life!”
some days i think i must’ve been conceived by lizards in a laboratory,
and other days, i think i must be just a regular dude.
name found. I AM A= I Love
II Evil Plan
Evil Plan (tm)!, A Guide
your objective is simple: widespread misery.
your motive is complex: love (yes, it works)
Stage One
to begin
you must first devour a chosen one. any will do.
there’ve been a few this century.
this will cause disturbance in the force.
aghast with loss, the people will ask, where does she come from? and why does she look so good wearing the skin of another human?
the element of surprise is your friend.
Stage Two
next, you must poison the moon.
and you will run your operation from an obsidian citadel— a mysterious place of unrivaled dark glory, a laboratory for toxin mixing, for venom concoctions. and by the light of the sickening moon, star gazers and lovers fall into catatonic trance. countless hordes of mutant race will run rampant with your bidding, picking off the sitting ducks, those impractical Romantics.
and everything will be fantastically ugly without their dreaming.
Stage Three
finally, you must enforce a 1984 police state. your name shall become synonymous with blood, and no man will ever again dare refuse to be your prom date. everyone will bow before your mystical abilities, and the world will have no choice but to make you their new goddess.
every dance will be yours.
you will never take another biology test.
The Fashions
she didn’t like it
when i wore a buddha on my chest,
the zen of advertisement on my breast…
enlightenment and all the rest—
OHM! but i digress.
she didn’t like it
when i wore hindu goddesses
around my neck, i accessorized
with religion for the discotheque—
a little sexy shiva to make up
for my boring dress!
she didn’t like it
when i played jesus christ super star
in my car. i sang along when judas
yelled WHO IN THE HELL
DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
she didn’t like it
when i made a jewish joke: how many
make early fortunes charging for a single toke?
that’s why college kids are always broke!
she didn’t like it
when i got a tattoo on my ass.
arabic symmetrical script up my back,
an attractive, tactless, guaranteed surprise
in the sack.
these are rational
mass supplied passions.
you can ignore mothers,
but you can’t ignore fashions.
Post Eden Eves
abba, abba, blah, blah, blah. funny
bone, how astute you are within these lines
of mine: starting with eden, my money's
on that horrible snake filled mine
field the bible calls a golden garden.
pardon me, adam, i’m a bit naked.
and that thing between your legs has hardened,
why, god damn! i’ve been oh so forsaken,
advantage has been taken of a rib
to make me! and i want to name a few
things, like, THAT’S a monkey. now don’t be glib
with me, fucknut, god, i can’t be shooed!
i’m not a stray dog, im a naked thing
praying at the crossed christ you created!
ARTIST'S ALTITUDE
maybe
i’m only good for lewd servitude
served up with a bratty attitude
and booze. yeah the rent is due.
i spent it and i spent you too. you
were only good for a screw and
a little food,
that god-awful local brew
please!
don’t mistake false gratitude
for Love
or brooding exactitude
for Art.
are you stricken, fool,
by these puckered poet lips?
you really like these decorated hips—
the mad spastic stints?
fake longitudes
and latitudes
of dimension?
haven’t you noticed
maybe i’m traveling nowhere
at only
the depth
of the word
i?
i only like you when
i’m high.
and god, you’re just a
speck
at this spectacularly gilded
spectacle of altitude.
although….there’s just a chance
that with some absence, perhaps
i love you.
Poet
to be one
take up a pen, crack it open,
finger paint ink to paper.
crumple the paper.
swallow it. two hours later
take a shit in a flower planter
and pray that some bird
or irreverent wind is
benevolent with a flower seed.
If the season passes and
your offering is beset
with weeds, slit your wrists
and leave behind a note
written solely in words stolen
from a beautiful dead one.
or smoke a cigarette
and kick the dud planter
and its bad dirt.
The Melting Poem
like so many poems
the heat of our bodies was too much heat,
our colors were too many colors,
our rhythm had too much syncope,
and our rhyme was heavy handed.
wind battered the window
and the pane emitted soft moans
but the snow never came.
our light melted the snow
before it could fall.
like a poem,
we murdered what we were
the instant
we discovered it.
Now Love is Free
learn to flirt with inanimate objects,
charm the lacquer off an arm chair,
kiss the piss out of a mirror
(fail to explain lipstick mash
marks when asked.)
flip your hair at the wind in the door,
eye fuck a stop light til' it screams green,
bend low and give your stuffed bear a show,
lick the French fry oil from your lips,
swivel your hips while receiving communion,
hold confession booth sessions in the shower,
toss your cat a dismissive glower,
Cady Stanton marched for this girl power!
do away with flower bouquets!
Love isn’t just cheap
or even freely given,
it is a slew of garage sale scrap sins,
miscellaneous mishaps forgotten
to rot beneath our hot,
hot sun.
Foot
wow,
that thing is so big,
if i were to lop it off,
we could feed
a tribe of pygmies
for a week.
wow,
those toes!
meat push pops!
foot! thrust between
two bus seats
like a wedgie.
toes! twisting
snakeheads!
foot, blistered
by slopes,
the red underbelly
exposed
like the palm
of Buddha’s hand.
toes,
curling and cramped
like refugees.
foot, toes, foot, toes
eyes flash
from foot to
toes.
in retrospect,
i can’t remember…
what does
the rest of you
look like?
Teeth
found in sour oysters
you're meant to suck on
Pearls
found in sour oysters
you're meant to suck on
Who Needs Dick who has Bic?
i am a woman obsessed with the rod.
possessed by countless questions
about man’s pervasive relationship
with his meaty log.
the salty dog is always god,
a highly covetable instrument.
to know a thing,
one must first know its name-
the Firm Worm! the Kerouwacker!
the Meat Maelstrom! boobs are just girls.
The Girls, Apples, Dirty Pillows.
i persistently grapple with the idea
of having a “Skin Flute.” yes. my womb
can bear “fruit”and i can wear a pantsuit
i can even give my man “the boot”
happiness is an available pursuit…
but don’t you wonder too?
what would you do with it?
would you be proud of its size-
or if it was little, despise it?
i haven’t decided.
…do hands and feet really compare?
do the smallest boys ceaselessly despair?
i once read
that some girls pack.
pack what?
heat?
socks in their crotches?
my mind wandered:
do they pack ideas and delusions
or dildos or small potpourri pillows?
are they proud of their static bulge?
the way a four year old boy is?
once i was a ten year old girl
and once i grasped a baseball bat
to my pelvis, swiveling my hips
like a prepubescent blonde Elvis.
it was fun!
the attention garnered by the gun
is not to be outdone.
in tarot,
the masculine suit is “The Sword”
and the spiritual suit, “The Wand”
combined, this makes a dick
the fighting divine. mine to manipulate,
but never to wield. the Womyn say
this must be appealed!
and let it be understood that
i’ll never (forcibly) kneel,
but i am relieved to be free
from the one eyed eel’s
unpredictable pressures.
(though if i weren’t,
who even listens to a Feminist’s lectures?)
Costume Complex
Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story.
~Mason Cooley
the costume complex
is a complicated mania:
each morning i stage protest against
my body and drape mortal angles
in the splendors of materialism.
sometimes i dress to match the weather
and sometimes to mask it. sometimes
i awake with a snarl on my face
and choose to ditch it.
the world of apparel is conducive
to dressing down to your despair,
but I like to mix it up by slipping on
a pair of orange velvet underwear.
poofy wonderland sleeves,
fetish buckles, school boy brogues.
deconstructed dress with exposed seams
smiley face socks. ruffled frocks.
luxurious shredded leathers.
i’m not a woman of letters,
but a woman decked in feathers!
i swear, you never know who you’ll meet
in the streets (least wise, me)
if i am disheveled, if i’ve layered
too many genres, a trauma of too much,
melodrama distracts from façade.
each morning, chill invites me naked
to a pile of clothes. the mirror shows a skin
that i barely know: and with identity prone
to tear, it’s crucial to make one to wear.
sometimes people stare
but i find myself scarier bare.
The Selves and Me
i share my bed with self loathing,
self pity, self aggrandizement,
every self conceivable.
i’m a slut.
and at night,
i curl up with my knees pressed against
the wall.
i squirm—i never have
enough room.
i do not sleep.
instead,
myselves weave
the story of my day:
perfect and fantastic foibles
affected by sighs and drastic
pauses. self improvement rolls his eyes.
self involvement
giggles.
The Words and Me
Nautical Vagabondage
is a sexy phrase for my poem and
after all, diamonds are only
the third hardest substance,
and window panes are eternally dripping
(as though they had souls instead of solely
providing glimpses.) after all, oil paintings
take 200 years to dry (imagine mona lisa’s
modesty, merely a figment of time.)
and rules of attraction interest me—
just subtract any sort of tactful interaction
in conversation. CATARACT!
look, i found an ode! o terse versification
of sporadic elation! i’m the patient of impotent
divine onomatopaeic vibrations!
but suddenly, but sadly,
it’s rendered insipid
because
my friend Sam doesn’t like the word, Vagabondage.
though uncontrollably
i must revel in it
like a fat man confronted with platters of porcine cuts
glistening.
Tweaked
the third most sinful word is surely the fuck
word, though we've all heard worse, of course, CUNT!
now, shall we embark on the reluc-
tant hunt for the crudest verbal affront?
clearly, the bluntest grunt couldn't be cock.
oh, we love that word too much to be caught
chastising its use, and that word won't shock
the average schmuck. and ass and bitch are not
all bad! sometimes they're animals. I think
nigger is awful, chink too, but neither
is aesthetically brash, and thus, not in sync
with our search's intent. each word either
screams or snickers. the vast attention span
for foulness is a theatric trait of man-
so our search continues! which avenue
remains unexplored? slut, WHORE? those subdued
and just slightly wreaking words are too weak-
even combined, tweaked. is it best not to speak?
Cried the Wind
Heart of my heart, were it more,
More would be laid at your feet.
-JJ, Ulysses
bloodcurdling still may
splice the bleating of blood
heart, hung like a hide
to dry on bone crumble.
there you were
within the murmur of a blinking eye,
alive,
insidiously breathing,
still.
a shimmer of spit on your lip
crusted slowly on the corner
of your mouth.
you were afraid.
the wine drunk purpled and
marooned and made black
your red, red tongue—stuck,
now, to the ribcage of gum.
words died there.
some, stillborn, stuck like carcasses
without organs to enflame them:
thick mummified skins of muteness,
bodies of thought, thoughtlessly lost.
the torporous stupor,
performed like a swoon, like a maiden
loved in June, laden with hissy air kisses
under a cloudy noon. her lover sung her
a honey ballad of oil, the droning joke
of summer. you’re dead, artist.
we played no dirge.
they found you wrapped in food stained blankets,
spotted by dried coffee droplets: the ragged
sleepy nest, a catacomb, loamy with impotent
love songs, the hanging breath of tentative
pulsations and the mercurial spittle of wafting
whiskey.
invisible bard
may be an invincible god,
but in such cases,
he is dispensable,
dismissible.
do you miss me?
cried the wind
Plan Complete.
III Treasure
Treasure
this old offering dish was found long ago in the coral cove of Nusa Dua,
sand sunken, protruding from coral. skin diver, Bill Abraham,
nicknamed abe-alone at home, Big Sur, dove tank-less,
and, holding breath, spotted an unnatural arc of clay orange.
the long line of his body, thrusting arrow, through the breathing
of indigo, rainbow of fish, jewel scales, undulating seaweed.
clinging to coral, he dug. stroking roughly the clay curves,
his fingers dove into loose sand. breath held still,
he pulled a dentist excavating wisdom tooth kind of pull.
the stem, root, the sand, ribbed gum, but his process
was bloodless.
the dish came in pieces, middle cracked jaggedly,
lip at one end of the crack, triangle gap, smiling.
breath ran out like an hourglass. pieces in each hand,
like a slow motion dart, he swerved toward the surface
broke it and gasped a hook punctured fish sort of gasp.
weeks later, he set about fixing the two pieces into one.
using superglue, he laminated the irregular fault,
where it once split, forever a zig zag milkish glow.
ln later years, his little daughter would offer what she could
to the broken thing that he found and fixed:
snarls of tumbleweed, dusty lavender desert flowers,
whispers of obsidian, clumsy origami,
feathers, flower haiku—
imagining always, the long ago offerings
burned like treasure, she offered herself.
Blue Venus above the Moon
for my dad
Part 1
we haven’t spoken in months—
but as i go though the periwinkle plush baby book i found
in the deformed boxes once abandoned to storage,
a lone photo flutters out.
i finger the book's cover,
it’s yellowed pearl dotted hearts.
upside down,
the photo looks like atomic apocalypse,
a rash of orange cradled by blood maroon
and city firefly lights
the heart of which is an electric blue dusk.
on the back, the restrained scrawl of your handwriting reads:
“venus on my baby's first sunset”
Part 1
i’ve carried the picture around
with me for months—
its begun the slow tear
objects often feel when looked upon
too frequently, when held too tenderly,
when carried about casually.
its twin remains
stuck behind cellophane
next to a picture of us:
you cradle me, scarlet and newly borne,
in a faded pink blanket that sweats white balls of fuzz.
looking up, your sorrel eyes spangle
framed by the lashes that you taught me to
butterfly kiss with.
When Things Get More Complicated
1 The Skull
things shouldn’t hinge on so very little. but
he is beautiful. and he whittles concepts into contraptions.
he says he likes to make things…more complicated.
he shows me his wink machine.
it is made with grainy blonde wood-
and upon first glance,
it is a torture device,
or a helmet,
or a skull made of negatives.
he places it upon his head
looking for all the world
like a dentist’s science project.
he cranks and cranks the knobs
as two metal pieces slowly open his right eye,
and two others close his left.
at last, he winks.
2 The Conversation
a woman interrupts us,
to ask, “when is your vernissage?”
(a vernissage is an art opening,
she explains.) she says that in french,
vernissage means “to varnish.”
he hates that. I hate her smarts.
he shakes his dreads.
he flutters his fingers. he splutters,
he looks very French as he does this.
“Art is not Superficial
like varnish!”
3 The Silence
i mutely disagree.
what and who isn’t painted, repainted, and covered
in thousands of layers of glittering, blinding,
cracking vernissage?
beautiful things made clearer
by cover:
like with costumes.
and mania.
and Love affairs.
and some artists make art solely from layers of it.
is there an idea buried
somewhere beneath or in between?
where is the Art if it is not
in the layers and layering techniques?
our each instance, a preview,
a private opening,
to be pried open,
analyzed and then redelivered
…over and over again?
i look up
and he is still winking at me.
one thing I do know is that, in latin,
Ver means “to look,” and Sage means, “to heal.”
Clavicle
clavicle, a curve to
trace the shadows of
as the conch of my ear
nestles into the rhythmic disquiet
of a heartbeat.
a thing that creates caves and
crests to fill with lips.
where the shoulder of the human
shell curls
inwards,
a rib
gods never touched.
the ivory roots of cerebellum
below brains and above
central ventricles
and in Spanish, nails, clavos:
twisted metal pieces carefully placed by hands
into doors, a hinge for what opens and shuts.
and grand remonstrance:
the piano. a claviature bed of keys
played alone and at once,
in parity
blood beats bone stronger
listen
Galactic Cannibalism
I heard what was said of the universe, heard it and heard it of several thousand years; it is middling well as far as it goes -- but is that all?
–Walt Whitman
sometimes, one
galaxy swallows another,
star by star,
creating collisions from dust.
pieces of sky rusted
to explosive pixie thimbles
and rose gold
magically combust.
like hair ringlets
of electric-tar,
twines of stars
curl into one another.
these explosions shed
violent particles which
we cannot see
because their hues
shred finer than
rainbow.
invisible tendrils of excited
electrons swathe acres of grass
and human graves-
but none of this
can be seen.
the eye is too small.
too small for noticing
the elegant curve
that glances between two
beings in a moment—
such as
the aura of warmth that a hand has
as it does not touch another—
but nearly, one finger caresses
the air above.
too small for noticing
baby hairs as they spine-
remembering secrets
lips divulged, sweating
crimson to coral.
and yet, everyday,
human galaxies pull into
one another, entangling
stars with an energy
that is too colossal
to be seen.
We Must
my shoulders
freckle in the sun
my cheeks turn
the color of peach,
my lips,
the color of plum
i like it here,
i like you
the music vibrates in my chest
as it seeps
in
smoke from your mouth,
cinnamon and cola root
a scent
that is centuries of must
we must
we must
we must
About a Boat
the silhouette of a ship
cowers across
the sea’s unfurling spines.
the sun spikes the sea
and a dandelion’s mane
spindles with burs
of iridescent tongues.
the faces of the sailors
reflect the lick of waves
in the sweaty dew of their cheeks.
the sky unfolds
as the sea plumes beneath.
the ravenous deity
swallows.
snowflakes fall like thunderbolts
in the distance.
what a hollow roar it all made!
treasure found.
IV Headfirst
Headfirst
silver cane in hand, he tells me
of a two years old motorcycle accident
that shattered two knees and two vertebrae.
caused his head to bleed.
we talk about the cold, how it makes arthritis smoke,
how it cracks between the kneecaps with its dry breath.
our bond of injury
made stronger by the implicit presence
of a friend who dove head first into vigor’s vim.
now he is bound by an instant
of rapture
to four wheels.
to computer screens.
hospital beds.
through email,
this man says he’s made headway toward autonomy since.
i suppose once you go headway towards anything
certain things break. necks for instance.
but the élan of the diver is never lost. Headfirst
is a way of doing things.
stories pile high.
one morning i woke up alive, breathing the air
that makes snow for the mountains i crave.
i felt the weight of my feathered comforter,
i felt the throbbing of my bitter ligaments.
i felt the distinctive thick twang
left by vics and wine:
and there, pulsing in the dark light,
Sense
thwarted dumb invincibility.
our diver wiggles his fingers
to taste the thrill that is left to him now. he fights
with some bewildering power to lift a pinky.
the pain is loud and wandering.
i feel and feel and feel and flex and brace and crutch
and smile and laugh violently. and cringe.
the boy speaking to me does the same,
unsheathing a dragon emblazoned sword from his cane,
waving it in the face of the misted sky, he curses the pitiless spangled heavens,
humbled only by the whims of his voracious, sometimes unthinking, life.
Godless Prayer
i believe in artful prayer, but i’ve never prayed to god,
one might pray with the backwash of liquor
for the blackness to come quicker, but not to god.
i believe in miracle, but angels are an obstacle
of fruition. listen, do you want a shimmering thing
to grant you a perfect version of your vision,
or do you want to earn it?
i believe in intuition, but not in perfect vision-
20/20 is the kind of myth optometrists persist
in spreading— and nobody can be bothered to object.
i’ll say it again, i believe in Art, but i never broke
my own heart for it unless you count
the prayers i made as my heart broke.
unless you count the day i picked my broken
self up, took a step, made the break worse,
glamorized the pain. perhaps it was on purpose—
intended to call forth visions of a shiny black hearse
and piles of flowers because a few hours later,
pen in hand, i prayed a prayer of damnation
in poem form speaking of my damage as though
it was the way i was born. forlorn, the damaged poet
mourns… damnit, slant rhyme.
slant rhyme, your timing’s off.
now, i believe in love
but never enjoyed it much
until my heart broke.
Missing in Anonymity
For survivors
i looked for you in every valley,
and each became filled with mountain
at all ends. i looked in the water,
swam the Pacific and the Rio Grande, but only found islands,
isolated, pan-caked between moon and ocean, flat land that had never considered cities
let alone human beings or even the deep wrenching sift of sorrow.
imagine me at night without the thrumming of your big dreams. i dwelt in a sorrow
that burrowed neatly in those forever rolling valleys
where i once searched for you. in my hollow body, i built labyrinths of city,
wishing one of the rooms of one of the buildings contained you. i stacked mountains
to conduct the search from highest elevation. high up, i became a speck of island
in outer space, and, they say on Mars there was never any water
and perhaps i could not survive without water—
but could without love, dining alone, parched upon the taste of sorrow.
i relearned the contours of Poplar trees, their whispering— forced myself to taste island
fruits, but still could not remember the precise and exquisite valleys
of your lips, the twisted vines in your shoulders or the mountainous
anxiety with which you avoided the hectic life of the city.
but i am a city-person. i live for the loneliness of cities
and i loved for you like one in a desert, chasing the mirage of water:
your feminine shins, earlobes, the ravenous foreboding of your mountains.
this must be how i lost you. i stared straight at you and your sorrow
vanished. this is where i starve for you now, parched in the desert valleys,
mouth stuffed with dust. my eyes become large as deserted islands,
my ears fill with wavesounds, nothing else. i am a string of islands,
they are called eyes, mole, mouth, aorta, elbows, knee joint: cities
of me, severed by volcanic quakes and eruption. the surrounding seavalleys
were secret, covered by ocean or filled with tears, flooded with salt water.
like alice, i could swim, i could search shipwrecks and reefs for a key, but sorrow
kept changing into ether, into fire, into rock. it was like mountains.
built of mixed substances. it could not be unlocked. like mountains,
i could only mine it, dig and dig into the sands that ringed each island
until striking gold or water or rock or sorrow.
i still miss you and i’ve long stopped missing my beloved city.
it was too busy there, too vertical, too vertigo, and i don’t need water
anymore as it now floods the emptiness of the valleys.
The Importance of Ritual
in the morning you will wake up half dead
and remain so for hours.
you will do regular things.
make coffee and tell jokes about the erratic weather.
your hand will shake wildly as you pour the coffee grounds
into the filter. you spill it. you clean it. you forget you made it.
you will dunk graham crackers into the coffee once you remember it’s made.
they will fall into the coffee and liquefy but remain graham cracker shaped.
it will be disgusting. you will drink only half of the cup.
class will end.
you run out.
you will take a walk to the quirky coffee place downtown—
the one that sells cinnamon chocolate.
you will buy more coffee and a piece of chocolate, sipping and
chewing slowly. the afternoon light will drag,
clinging to the day like the fringe of levi cut offs, a cool, distinctive shredding.
and you occasionally lose
track of what you’re doing.
but you will remember abruptly
(oh, i am drinking coffee. and walking).
you will go to the library and pretend to read. that won’t last very long.
and eventually the time for dinner will come.
but eventually is never enough
so you will eat at 5:30. (early bird special
for those who won’t make it much longer.)
and the only thing you remember about that day
is its refrain,
He is dead.
He is dead.
He is dead.
September Bones
for my mother, for her mother, for me
she sings
slow, slow, willow-dear,
fill the spaces between your roots with elder-down, down,
down, drink the air above the cupped earth,
suck your phloem teeth and sup the hollow hiss,
sipping the whispers of summer’s fermented grape.
the wrath of winter follows:
willow, your roots go deep into the earth
but who remembers the shivering of your september bones
as they lost their leaves?
she remembered yesterday as though incantation bound the calendar pages
and amnesia were the sweetness of smoke as it rose from the turning of days—
the kind of creature who knelt in blonde grass
and stroked the pale shadows of the tree branches
wishing for springtime
and kindness.
her cold breath rose
as the hours grew darker.
all the while, the september bones rustled in the catacomb where youth once tossed them
like playthings.
the crinkling of wind broke the dry veins,
and spokes made splinters into the earth.
oh! the bones splintered so as they tossed.
they could carry her no further.
sometimes, the dark earth
is a brutal lover,
sometimes,
a cold mother.
the year is gone.
our grace then,
like summer dust storms;
the long and deep kiss of it,
faded by longing as the earth forgets
her leaves.
Remembering Japan
1 San Francisco
it is cherry blossom season in San Francisco,
a wimpy one, still it is cherry blossom season.
the trees populate the city shyly,
a couple stationed in front of a crumbling
Italian church, the border of a park, sidewalk planters,
reticent heralds of a foreign loveliness.
they thrash in the deluges of April. street sog
absorbs the sickened bursts, and petals float
in the gray mire, drown in the gutters, impressed
into rain boot heels and smeared on welcome mats.
it calls to mind the greater season,
goddess of springtimes: sprawling groves
of the Japanese country side, blooming in playgrounds,
schoolyards even, glorious Shinto gardens zen burst spring.
i remember the pagoda roof cowl curves,
crowns stacked like nesting dolls, protruding from
a breathing blush swirl of blossoms and their limbs.
and at once, I feel a chill of vision:
splintered and coagulated mulch of broken earth,
limbs and toxic sog and bubbling mud where our earth
could no longer hold our trembling and her trembling
and broke
and it is cherry blossom season
bodies and blossoms and pink and blush and flesh.
2 Great Wave
nearly midnight, the gas fueled fire
glimmers, its soporific sputter drowned
by electric TV glow and HBO announces
Touchstone’s Pearl Harbor.
contentedly reading Robert Hass’ “Time and Materials”
as Pearl Harbor’s drama unfolds, i bask in the heat
of the little fireplace flames.
After the Winds unfurls its words, but absently.
i become sucked into the Hollywood world
of a gorgeous love triangle set in a California Hawaii,
crying vicious bursts of tears, huffing shallow
wisps of breath, heatedly muttering things like
bring that plane down motherfucker!
i’m thinking i want to fight! and i think it with
the full outrage of my heart, gasping because
i can smell death-smell from the screen
as the ships sink and the harbor swells with bodies.
wreckage.
i sip my whiskey lemonade and smolder.
the liquid is puss colored amber on the rocks.
it chatters as i sip, thinking Japan
Japan where i lived as a kid
how beautiful and how brutal
Pearl Harbor—
my Tateyama,
streets swollen with bodies.
wreckage.
movie sob chokes in the throat.
becomes a swell, Great Wave of paralysis.
The Thing We Love
Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.
Philipians 2:12-16
1 The Dying
and to kill everything beautiful
is the precursor
for this world that refuses to hold its pieces.
we’ve come to spin on an axle that is 4 degrees off kilter.
This is an earth that throws itself into quakes,
a trembling earth that has reached capacity.
too much sorrow, too many bodies, too many, too many, too many painfully
quaking bodies refusing
the soft touch of each other.
2 The Mourning
age, unknown. origin unknown or known too well, or both,
the massive animal, grief, lies prone,
arms spread like christ.
and in his arms, we lust for postmortem as the dumb and
dead saints lust for lust
those forever disintegrating martyrs, nothing but boxed and cherished bones,
smoldering in their catacombs.
life is a sacrifice that anyone could make, but most choose to keep,
seeking forever and it’s gift of grief— animal thing,
the animal grief.
3 The Living
in mourning, we only see only
the blurred thrumming,
only we, the grieving living,
sacrificed sacrifice
choosing instead, to hold each other with eyes closed.
we bear together, the living,
and once dust,
we settle together,
the mingled sod for roots,
a layer of color
for the rivers to unearth,
a secret trembling of miracles
free fall
difference between jumping and falling
1 Jumping
if the edge had a view of itself
instead of from itself,
would it flee its own jutting,
cuttingness by
jumping?
i did.
i jumped into the chasm of it:
black as a gulping mouth,
spiral throat swallowed me
with darkness rushing.
once unbound from
the bondage of the ground,
my ears filled with the roar of air.
dried tear ducks
prickled with sleepy seed granules
where dreams had never fully waxed
and crusted.
2 Falling
we were pushed from the edge,
and together, fell
from its crest into crush.
in free fall,
we held hands
and realized we were always
on the edge of something:
each other.