Communication

Confusion and desire make the world go round
I swim in a pool of words and faces
Tell me,
Not what you are feeling or
What you are thinking,
But what are you listening to?
What is transmitting live inside your head?

Penelope

When Penelope goes to a party,

The men remember.

They do not expect to see her there

And are shaken out of their slumber.

They are now grown used to seeing

the women freed from feeling

Women who are only echoes.

They remember without truly remembering,

Odysseus does not recognize her for he never got back to Ithaca.

Ithaca is no more, now is only a vast mainland,

And Penelope the orphan,

The wanderer among men.

She carries her knitting and weaves and unweaves it obsessively.

She has no stories to tell.

She carries with her the spider womb and that’s what wakes them,

Odysseus remembers being tied to the mast.

Penelope would not forget even if she ate the lotus-flower,

And she is immune to the voice of the sirens.

She brings this with her as a heavy but soft truth on all of them.

The other women are stirred and grow defensive.

They don’t know what it is, for they don’t see the charm in her:

Penelope looks haunted by shadows and whispers,

She’s not quite there.

She speaks with no gift for interaction,

She can only interrupt.

Her words are lullabies, they soothe with their musical strangeness,

But none do sleep from them: they are awaken to their own words.

They don’t really think much of talking,

They speak like they fuck and like they hunt: to expel from themselves a weapon.

"How can we deny the self when all of language is exploring its existence?

How can we ask "why" without a separate self?

Penelope must ask herself in silence.

How can we learn to not fool others if we do not study

the ways that we fool our selves?"

Postmodernism, please don't kill the self,

She begs.

You kill all the opiums, all meaning.

Penelope does not understand violence because everything is touch to her:

The contact of two eyes the basic and most meaningful.

She searches with her eyes around the room,

Hoping but no longer expecting to be caressed.

From her exudes a hum that all do fear but can’t resist, the hum of memory,

The hum of time suspended,

And all approach but turn away at her twitchiness,

Her nervous thirsty body.

She may not remember how to love,

And really it is tragic.

Only in the trance of music

Penelope sets her compulsive knitting down.

In one great exhalation of movement, she swoons somehow:

Two bodies are close together and the light that exudes them seduces.

After all, he is a man

And she is a woman.

They will go to a quiet place and he, pleased at her soft features,

Will kiss her without much thought,

But she will in passionate anxiety emit through her body a tremor of urgences:

We must look in the mirror and succumb to a waterfall of forgiveness,

we must cleanse and treasure our selves to be true,

and be a different color of the rainbow in the different types of light,

which is not, in fact, as blank as being black.

“If we stop relying on theory,

If you don’t forget you and me

And that you and me is not a temporary thing...

(I am not dead if I have only gone away,

You men do not know how to wait)

and return to being, quietly and thoughtfully,

it will happen without us even trying to understand...

And that's when we'll go back to childhood,

to the fantastic exploration and admiration of the Other,

the true God who is not Ourselves, in heaven!”

That is her climax, 

In her heart of mind,

She is not interested in half-shared climaxes:

No climax beyond the warm cocoon of a body around her.

She’ll still love with the strangely dignified love of woman

That knowingly loves what is unworthy of her.

That way, she lives in the world of shame,

But is free from the world of guilt.

Heaven, the end,

is just a promise to the return of Paradise,

the beginning,

only supreme in that the sunset is more “meaningful” than dawn,

Or so they say.

Penelope sighs.

Guilt is a rush to earn that future paradise,

and shame is the bitter but secret knowledge 

that we could just have stayed with the dawn.

"We could have stayed in Ithaca..."

Anti Fairy Tale

He didn’t like her
And she didn’t like him
She was a flower
And he was a rock
She knew how to talk
But he didn’t know to listen
He knew how to lead
But she knew not to follow
She needed affection
He needed patience
She was sad and
He was angry
She teased him
He rattled her
She burned
He turned her ice
She wanted to smooth his rough edges
He wanted to eliminate her quirks
She would try to make the food more spicy
He was thinking always of his health
She had never met anyone more rigid
He no one more volatile and frayed
She would attack him with her rancorous words
He would attack her with his silent indifference
They clawed at each other trying to change each other
And they lived happily ever after.

Heima

All is accessory.
A vibrant energy enfolds me when I look upon what cannot be resituated,
And in this place, I cannot separate myself --
My body
My clothes my glasses my hand--
From it
Like smoke and exhalation intermingled.

There is a music of home and it
Is a music of the fullnes of isolation
Just like there is a taste of the home
That comes from the kitchen and the frying pan of the home.

The beauty of home is the beauty of the sacredness of stuff,
The sacredness of things
Both dust and what we put in shrines.

Home is a dizzying place of endless inner adventure
With no fear but a subtle, pleasant suffocation
Where every thing is also an idea.

Hymn

Pain is a loud party next door
And the ceaseless sound of the buzzer,
Sleeping not in your own bed
And finding a stranger in (br)others.

Beauty is crying when all you can think about
Is "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
And knowing thirteen is the number
(Has always been)
Of ways you could choose not to hold him
(The general him, even the Father Him)
Without ever escaping your prayer
Without ever escaping your need
Without ever truly believing
That you can survive without him.

Truth is the intimation
That even in his arms clasped tight,
You would still be lonesome.
You would still breathe night.

Devotion

Let me see you in all kinds of light.
Let me analyze your nervous and your boisterous laughs,
And see the way your lips drink from the bottle,
The way you stretch your legs while reading,
And how your face twitches when confused.
Talk to me of art and your ambitions,
With a serious face but warm warm gaze,
Displaying all the tenderness of your ideas.

Let me cuddle with you on a sofa to feel your nooks and curves.
I'll ask you to take your clothes off slowly,
Letting me observe your sequence and the self-consciousness that may or may not glitter in your eyes,
So I can absorb each inch of skin and stem of hair that grows.
Let me feel the skin in search of silk and paper,
Outline your fingernails and smoothe the ridges,
Worship the small roundness of your breasts,
Taste the texture of your flowing locks.
Let me even smell your hidden caves to know the quality of your salt,
And if you are willing,
Kiss me so I'll passively experience the theatrics of your seduction..:

This way I will feel more near to him,
And understand she that he loves, and why.

Vampirism

You can't figure me out entirely. You think I'm pretty in a bizzare, unsexy way and with the wrong clothes on. It's not that they don't go with my personality, but it's a bad style. You know I get good grades, and you guess I'm smart, but you think I have a fragmented, unorganized way of speaking and it shows in my messy writing. You hate it when I laugh nervously as I say serious things that I'm not sure about, or when I think I've said something scandalous that actually made no sense at all. It makes you nervous, you get a vibe almost of hysteria from my part, and you also conclude that I'm very self-conscious. You were surprised at my essay in English and how it was considerably better than my Spanish paper. There are things that don't add up, you've been surprised at me and my unpredictability is the reason you don't discard me completely, but you'd like to see some of my finer insights taken to their full potential. You feel I'm so unlike you, so unlike your rigid boots, stern stares, and straight-up posture. But you're sometimes amused. Even if you don't show it, and you tell me to sit properly, you find it refreshing that I put my legs up on the bench during class. You think I have a lot to learn, and not just in school.

You find me warm and smart. You've always seen me so much as a woman, soft (if not flabby), so prone to tears, ridiculous tears for tragedies you think are past or should be irrelevant to me. You do believe I get carried away, and like any woman, am a bit spoiled, and you think I belong to a more delicate and privileged social group than I realize. But then there's the boyish side in me that surprises you. My large sweaters and the need I've always shown to be part of the guys. You embrace that and find it endearing, but not at all attractive, for when it comes to sex I am at the bottom of the list for you, not only because of my clumsy movements and lack of sensual awareness, but because you have seen me in all kinds of light. You see my destiny and see a bright future. You see promise in me (you don't like the word potential), promise that you know will be kept, but you've seen me slip and fall, and become more human, and you hope not too much so, because you love people who are unearthly and strange, who dizzy you with their articulate doubts and observations which are your hidden doubts and observations and who are so unlike the people you grew up with who sat in the sun and smoked away their disquiet. My way of talking and weaving and twisting and unweaving make you feel like the passive listener but not at all less of a man. You respect my words but in the end I'm just a woman who blabbers on and on...

You hate yourself for still seeing a goddess when I appear before you. You try so hard to make me unattractive, but you are seduced by my softness, my flowing hair, my innocent (you would say naïve) smile, my quirky expressions. You see the ether, the lotus flower, the growing peace and maturity (is it maturity?), contrasting yourself, making your darkness, your cynism, your stale and rotten ideals sting. All of this your eyes give away. You feel angry about my existence in general; maybe not angry anymore, but certainly annoyed. You know that I am fake, my whole persona is somehow an elaborate mask created by this bland insecure girl who has no identity, no voice, no self-esteem. And it is all the worse that you were influenced by me in the past, that you trusted me, opened up to me, bowed down to me. For you that is unforgiveable, something to be buried and denied. You still see visions of me lost in the heart of darkness, hysterical, naked, dragging myself. That is why you can't believe that I still strike you as the lotus flower. You take pleasure in my blunders, which remind you of the things you have always rejected in me: my high-strung ideas that the teachers don't fail to bring down to size, my dumb, childish mistakes like putting metal in the microwave, and you don't know if deep inside those things do charm you (for you once truly were, in its complete sense, in love with me) or if they are turn-offs, because there is no depth to your soul anymore. You know that we are inescapably connected; you feel it when we laugh, in spite of ourselves, at the same joke, or when we still manage to read each other's minds.

You know we are two sides of the same coin. You may be smaller, and thinner, and know how to dance, you may have never doubted your roots, or your loveability, but you are chaotic in a similar, pure and tormented, girly and sexless, contradictory way. You would never write about me though, and you know I would hate writing about you too, recognizing this "thing" that unites us intsead of trying to forget it, ignore it, deny it. You are over it, you believe. You always thought I was the crazy one, the erratic one, the impulsive one. Monstrous even. Yes, monstrous. But you are allured by my taste, my style. A captivating monster. You think I am too much woman for mankind, but not because I am the feminine ideal taken to the extreme, but because I am literally TOO MUCH WOMAN, too many thoughts, too much breast and belly and legs, too much face and cheeks, too many senseless words. You shrink at the comparison to yourself, and know that I have shown you sides of yourself unexplored, possibilities of being that in another scenario, you would have been curious about, and would have undoubtedly befriended me, and you know in another life we would have been intimate friends, and you hate fate for punishing you by showing you, through quick flashes of coincidence and unsought for encounters, pieces of the person you have missed, of the person who will not figure in your life as a friend, but as a rival.

I am the poet of self-consciousness. When I am with you, I don't see you. I see a variation of me in your eyes, in your thoughts that permeate into my subconscious, and from that image I can make out yours, like a shadow. I could write about you, through the ways I feel I am seen when I am with you (from my family, to the woman on the subway) and fill volumes, volumes that would make up a cubist self-portrait, without ever really talking about myself. A self-portrait in which I would be the object, but not the subject.

El descenso

Tú fuiste, también,
Un falso profeta,
Te imaginabas movimientos
Donde sólo había ecos.

Tú estabas contemplando, también,
el infinito en el reflejo
Del reflejo en las pupilas
En la imagen del espejo.

Y no eres un genio
Ni un Cristo
Ni una flor de loto abierta
Ni un oráculo
Ni Eva
Ni el Amor
Ni la Esperanza
Ni un delfín
Ni el quinto elemento;
Ni siquiera un rencarnado,
Eres un narciso ahogado.

Tú risa no puede ser La Música,
Ni tu llanto la expiación del pueblo.
Tu canto no encantará a los árboles
Ni tu cuerpo lo abrazará el cerro.

Israel no es todos los pueblos,
No puedes ser el águila y
Al mismo tiempo la serpiente.

Lo extrapolaste todo.

Al rozar tu nombre,
te imaginaste otros
y te bautizaste infinidad de veces.
Al rozar la eternidad,
Comenzaste a flotar por encima del tiempo
como si ya hubieras muerto
o fueses inmortal.

Creíste poder despertar a los dormidos
Pero estabas en el sueño:
La embriaguez del solipsismo,
La embriaguez a secas.

Ya estás sobria,
Y despierta, creo.
Ya te sabes conejo blanco
Con reloj de arena
Que sin miedo no está cuerdo.
¡Eres vieja!
Lejana, como una estrella,
De otra dimensión.
El espejo es sólo vidrio,
Humano un nombre taxonómico.

Sólo te queda por descubrir
Si efectivamente
Todo lo que baja, tiene que subir.

Confessions of a Hair Splitter

Even when I close my eyes I see split hairs,
The frayed and dry bifurcating feminine strands.

At even the slightest instance of idleness
I find my hand threading through those oilless ends
Holding up the little Vs
To separate, to split
(To make make a split, like a contortionist ballerina)

The action is like pulling off a stubborn sticker,
Or separating the toilet papers.
I gingerly pinch each branch of strand
And try to pull as evenly as I can
(It's like a highway twisting round or like a skier curvijg down)

Sometimes it seems the right strand will be left
But in the end the left remains.
The little half a hair that has been severed is the weaker half,
Often pale and curling in my hand.
When I've been splitting for a while
My sweater's strewn with little shrivels of hair
(As of an old lady or the shavings of some wood.)

But the half left on the head
Is not much stronger than the one that fell:
Compared to the whole hairs, it's dental floss
Ready to break at the slightest pull.
Sometimes I enjoy breaking this surviving half.
(In cruelty against the big part of the wishbone)

There are are white spots
Rather near the end,
Which mark a split in another sense:
These are knots of some kind
That indicate the hair will break
If tugged at precisely at that place
(The pleasure of tearing down the dotted line!)

But I exhaust these hair mutations rather quickly,
Nervously
I find the almost invisible knots,
That break not so easily
The minuscule inverted Vs,
(Not like snake tongues but like splinters)
That my fingernails can barely grasp
And (like a surgeon or a seamstress threading a needle)
With comfortable frustration at my un-nimble fingers
And piercing concentration that obliterates the surroundings
I split not so easily.

Sometimes my sight is tricked
And the overlapping hairs give the illusion of being
Joined at the hip
But they're really two strong separate hairs
With healthy, rounded tips.
(The disappointment is of running up to a stranger
Mistaking him for a high school friend.)

I could not stop this fixation even if I wanted to.

Clean

Today I am entirely me,
The sky is red and pink behind the trees.
The sky is slowly bleeding out
Its ability to think.

Today I like the way things feel on my open pores and wind-blown hair.

I was clean for a while,
But then I was dirty.
I dirtied sheets in many
Strange tower beds.

I pondered over all his gestures
Every minute of every day.
My love was like a red red rose
(Made of cheap metaphors, of course).

Now I am clean again.
The sky reminds me I am clean,
Delivers moobeams through a quickly fading cloud.

For years I remembered too strongly.
My mind was the vibrating echo
Of an original whispered word.

Today I am only clean,
Slowly bleeding out my ability to think.

Mineral Love

I love a cold and lifeless thing
Not messy flesh
A seed of truth in its mineral core
Its porous face
I take it will take long for it to fade
Dissolve, evolve

I love the weakness of its diamond-jealous sparks that blended with its gravelly mass to spice it up.
I love how in my pocket as I pass the trees and flowers and the grass
It gives mee weight,
A cold grey anchor for the shore.

I need no kiss and no caress, no touch
Than it to hold
It pulses in my hand, it breathes
I swear it does
We were reconciled through metaphor,
My dear, my rock

The plights of old age

I remember my grandmother in the big house, watching television all day long, shouting when she spoke because her hearing was bad, getting helped into the shower by the maid. There were shelves and shelves of neglected books on philosophy and literatura from her happy days as a profesor, now caked in dust. I don’t want to end up like this, I thought. My craft, after all, is not to dance ballet, I can do it for as long as the pen does not tremble too much in my wrinkled hand. I will do yoga all my life to be fit and flexible when I’m old, not like my grandmother who would take a cab to the café down the block. I will be successful, proud of all my published books and numerous recognitions, proud of having changed lives in the classroom, hand in hand with the love of my life and our beauiful offspring. But then again, when I was little, I imagined myself at the age of twenty already having published a novel, with an adorable boyfriend, having seen much more of the world than I have, studying at some university abroad. Life has a way of making distances in time toward your goals expand, expand, and expand through some circumstance or another. However, I have always thought of the time in a lifespan as ever different, always new, because never before were you thirty, or forty, or fifty-two, and I have always disagreed with my peers who want to die a spectacular death in their late twenties to never know the plights of old age. I want to know life, to know it to the fullest degree possible, I always thought. But there are some fears. Watching my mother age, and having aged myself a little, I wonder if life really is always new. With my mother it seems to be the same depression, the same traumas, the same resentment. The same unfulfilled dreams, only different television shows on primetime. It seems that life passes you by, whizzing past all those goals that kept getting farther and farther away from your reality, and on the other hand drones on, leaving you stuck in the same spot you’ve always been. Reflecting on these matters gives me a feeling of restlessness, of insatisfaction. The plights of old age is probably just a different version of the plights of youth and the plights of middle age. Except that on top of everything, you are wrinkled and practically deformed, you have no energy, you are invaded with disease, and nobody expects anything new from you. If it really is that bad, I guess I will submit to oblivion and smoke opium for the duration of my elder years for, after all, what is the emminence of death good for if not to enjoy all the pleasures that kill you softly?

Eulogy of the Muse

She would bleed out of me uncontrollably. She would shake the hand to stumble towards a pen or any type of keyboard and discern. She was a mistress that lived in wooden pipes and rolling papers, in starry skies and bus rides, in poetry classes and nature walks. She made kaleidoscope a verb. She took away sleep or else crept her way in, where even now she lives as a ghost, dictating flashes of magic. I thought that tree of life inside my head contained an elixir of boundless existence... it was sweet, a thick whaft of words. But she is dead now, limp and lifeless. The autopsy proves she drowned. The water of the ocean rotted her wood, dissolved her powers. An Icharus. With her I felt the sparks of the sun on my face, I grabbed the twigs that burned in the campfire and she sat on the burning branches as if she were made of air. I held her hand as we plunged towards the depths of dreams in that watery tempest. An ocean death, a death in the place of origin. Now her corpse is dry as stone, porous. All deserts were once oceans. All oceans have vague memories of incandescent volcano explosions, times of heat and destructive creation. What was there in the poetry, in the jumbled prose? A vomitive cry, an itch, a restless eye. But most of all a heart consumed by fire. That fire reached the brain and linked both organs. Now the heart beats like a clock, and the brain is only ego, uninspired. I must justify my absence, honor her life by reconigzing her death. I must speak of the emptiness, the silence of cave walls. Except that there is nothing really to say. Silence and emptiness speak for themselves. Contepmlation becomes passive, passion becomes contemplative. And there is nothing new under the sun.

Manos

Manos. Manos que no se cansan de hablar, que no se cansan de tararear. Tararear... manos tumban tarareos por cualquier tipo de superficie. Como si fueran teclas, tocan ritmos tántricos. Las manos conocen liso, conocen agua y jabón. Cuando las lavas se esfuman, además de que se espuman: se convierten en fantasmas. Mis manos tocan mi cara y con uñas la arañan un poco, la rascan en puntos sensibles, bajan por mi cuello y tocan cada piedrita de mi collar, se llenan de todo. Manos de vainilla recogen el cereal que se regó por toda la cocina y lo intenan limpiar del polvo porque sí lo consumirán. Se ponen pegostiosas y polvosas. Cuando hay un hilo suelto, ellas lo desenredan y lo deshacen hasta que sean múltiples hilitos. Manos lo colocan en la orilla de la ventana del metro. Manos amasan y sienten el espacio entre los dedos como un vacío sediento que da tragos profundos y se frota en el abismo de la masa. Mis manos conocen los volúmenes de mi cuerpo, y buscan conocer los volúmenes de tu cuerpo. Sienten las páginas del libro como si buscaran aletearse mariposas y volar con ellas. Las manos sudan, se ensucian, sostienen el peso de todo cuando están en el camión que nos sacude el equilibrio, las manos también limpian el café molido que no cayó directo en la cafetera. Manos de mañana, manos de noche. Mis manos son lo que te ofrezco para que me guíes, tus manos son mis ojos y mis manos son tu corazón.

Pies

¡Ay! ¡Tanto de la vida es muerte! El suelo está lleno de muerte, de desechos. Cucarachas caminan a nuestro alrededor, por ahí corre la mugre, el agua del drenaje, los vidrios rotos, todo lo vemos. Los zapatos que nos pones muchas veces son tan blandos y tan ligeros que sentimos todo. Sudamos fácilmente y olemos mal. Pero a veces nos toca caminar por pasto o por arena… el pasto que Whitman llamó un pañuelo de Dios. La arena de las dunas, la eterna arena que nos exfolia y nos hunde como agua seca. Cuando eras chiquita nos lamías el sudor. Te gustaba la sal, sólo te torcías en tu cama y nos lamías como si fuéramos tu helado del postre de la comida. Se sentía bien, se ha sentido bien cuando tus novios han decidido colocarnos en su boca y besarnos, aunque tú te mueras de la pena porque sabes que olemos, tendemos a oler muy, bastante mal. Sobre todo cuando nos pones alpargatas. En la prepa Claudia te decía Patas chuecas, o sólo Patas, ¿te acuerdas? Siempre nos ha gustado extendernos hacia afuera, hacer un triángulo como si estuviéramos practicando ballet. ¡Y luego cuánto trabajo nos costaba pararte! Cuando te sentabas en el suelo te azotabas y te parábamos con muchos dobleces de pierna e impulsos extraños con tu trasero al aire. Nos acordamos del último día en la clínica, cómo nos volvimos locos y empezamos a temblar en esa partecita difícil de ubicar, muy en el centro de nosotros, sobre todo del izquierdo, y las enfermeras te decían que tus pies se te estaban adelantando a tu partida, que andaban emocionados. Sí andábamos emocionados pero también nerviosos, ansiosos, llevábamos mucho tiempo andando en círculos y con los mismos zapatos mansos, cómodos, sobre el mismo suelo de linóleo. Volver a caminar distancias largas… ¡qué travesía! Nos gusta caminar, nos gusta llevarte aunque nos cueste trabajo ajustarnos a los zapatos que nos pones, son casi siempre demasiado grandes. Luego nos da comezón y no entendemos por qué, cuando nos rascas a veces se mezcla con cosquillas y nos damos cuenta que somos muy sensibles. Nos gusta que nos eches crema y que nos mimes, y aunque nos gusta estar descalzos (no amamos los calcetines) no aguantamos la mugre, estar negros. Muchas veces llegaste a casa después de un largo día y nos postraste sobre el lavamanos para lavapiearnos. Nos pasa algo con las rayas del piso, con los pilares de los barandales, con las sombras y las luces. El pie derecho tiene que pisar donde justo atraviese estas cosas, pero a veces cambia y el chiste es justo pisar donde NO hay raya, o que el pie izquierdo sea el que pise la raya. A veces se siente raro pisar el punto del piso mojado o que tiene una basura atravesando la línea del pie porque el otro lado no siente nada, y luego nos confundimos con qué pie debe pisar qué… siempre hay un sentimiento de incompletud con eso de pisar las rayas o las sombras… es todo un juego con el espacio que dominamos y a veces nos saltamos un escalón para que caiga donde debe cada uno de nosotros. No lo podemos explicar… sólo nosotros nos entendemos.

Someday is a long time

... And the feeling's not quite there
Like that of body bobbing in the sea
The sensation leaves one bare
A stocking hanging out the basket of laundry
(No rhymes that fit, only vain attempts at symmetry
The storyteller fails in some rythmic sense),
Is what happens when...

You imagine a story that can't be told.
You let your shoes infest with mold.
You buy and you yourself are sold.
You dissect a species incredibly old.

Through nothing you can someday sometimes attain
A silent treasure as a gain
But someday is a long time.

A naked angel on the front window prophesying rain
Is your only comfort on an empty day
At least the cores of trees will cry with you through their fingered leaves.
Nothing can cure this emptiness
Like that of body bobbing in the sea.

Languid

I feel lulled, an invisible barrier blocks my mind. I feel the literature boiling up inside, the prolongued mmmmm's, the moon escaping my eyes through the thoughtless clouds, the bubble wrap in the dining table, and all the other settings in which I feel a certain detatchment, when I see those little sparks flame up that are only in my head, when i remember the beauty of the ocean waves, the excitement of my dog while I am lying on the bed, her tail wagging in curious furious little circles. But no stories fall from this sad mouth, no force possesses these languid fingers but the pulse to key whatever board I can and make at least a mushy composition. I feel the emotions of effortless effort bundled up inside, I cannot sleep because a dog upstais is wailing, abandoned somehow. I love my lamp and my lushy curtains, the broken down books on the table, the childish quilt with trains on it. I love my sister's bike when it takes me to the yoga shala where I lie on my mat and try to get some sleep back because I want to bend this way and that but I'm also still trying to retrieve the world of my last dream. They say that April's a rough month. All this I live, and heave, and sweat, and many puddles do I skip over, and many dreams do I let rot and die, and many bursts of sobbing sighs, of anxiety fits and little pills and books I read that get to me. It is time passing through me, like water my fingers, leaving no trace in words behind, how does it do that? How does it come and leave wordless? How does it hit and leave no sort of bump or bruise? I'm stale, like a rock left by the side of the road, trembling on the edge, outside the wheel of fortune. I am a languid rock that rocks in place and wants to scribble whatever scribblings in the sand it may.

Musick

This is not music.
Playing with slippery fingers that fall at any memory.
This is not music.
Watching you play as I sleep through the day.
This is not music.
Breathing hard, suffocated under your deformed sprawl.
This is not music.
This is not yearning, hearing the songs at the back of my mind.
This is not music.
This is not love, wishing for cracked silence after every sigh.
This is not music.
This is a mantra, always level with your soul, affecting cadence but
This is not music.
Not poetry to rearrange some sad ideas in verse and definitely
This is not music.
Not only dreams the ones that pull you down to bed and make you hug it
This is not music
Never wanting to wake up because it just keeps getting deeper
This is not music.
There are no muses, they only come to those delirious
They make not music.
While we are only in places of noise and babble
We make not love. We cannot. Only sickness.
This is not love.
This is not music.

Steady fall

Maybe on a ship telling a story
Or killing a mockingbird, or
Suffering a trial.
The testaments betrayed,
The heart of darkness swayed,
Flowers for some white mouse.
The awakening is always pure,
A clensing of the finer senses.
A little tinge in the third eye.
He always knew it would happen to him,
Just didn't know the time.
Who ever knows the time as we space?
It was thick but not foggy,
The presence of his Conscious Light
Worth spreading, worth juggling about.
But as time spaced him out
Fear and darkness seeped
Through the creases the fin
Of a shark could be seen.
He picked up a dead rose on the sidewalk.
He discovered new bones in his body every day
Like pockets for angel wings
That shone in absence.
He walked under ladders and
Slipped in the mud
And began to be sure that some freak accident
Was just around the corner
The cars seemed to leer with their
Spotlight eyes at him
And so he went inside and forgot
All about the Light
And he remembered the flaws and the
Downward spirals of night's mare.

Don't try to reach the top, we aren't
Swimming in no body of water.
Whatever goes down will not rise to float again.
Whatever goes up must go down.

And that's the gravity of the situation.

Silands

These are places where people live.
There are spaces where people can't breathe.
Swift scenes on screens of crowds give us the idea
That we've seen more of the world
Than it has of us
With some sort of spectral silence,
Like the moon about to bounce on our round horizon lines.

But what's in a silence?
Your face, somewhat blurred
Full of questions for asked answers
To letters you never replied to.
Your silence fills my head with echoes
Imagined, unforgotten.
Lapses, like all the angles you'll never see of me:
In the mirror, changing my hair, laughing heartily,
Discovering the world.
It is a fantasy.

There are islands and mainland always just ahead,
For we are navigating our way like magicians from this place.
Who knows where or what we are or were
And who knows the symbolism of rabbits.
Silence.