Child Poet's Walk
Dew drop, moon step
Across the crystalline grass we crept
To greet the sun upon its frosty-eyed dawn;
Was it me, or you,
Or some newly visible star
We expected to come upon?
Was it words or a lack thereof
That brought me near
To the bell of morning
As rays struck clear
And set everything ringing, golden
Grains taking root
In every furrow of the eye,
The grey sprouting rainbows
The rainbows blooming sky,
Blue arms raising
In oratorical praise
To blanket with form
This newborn universe—
Soothe Without Touch
Nothing but poetry
Can soothe this mood—
Not quench—
But enter so fully
There is only
What’s burning
Which cannot
Consume
Without providing
Light
The pain radio blares
So loudly I can’t hear
The music of the city
Around me, detect
But one faint note
Of harmony
The feeling of difficulty
So overwhelming
It’s swallowing
All the clarity
Of mystery
All the divine arrows
Guiding me
So I walk
The city,
Still awake
For what it’s saying,
At least
For the
Possibility
I need someone
To hear, I need her
To listen to me
With her noise,
Her pans clattering
From open windows
Her strangers
Climbing into cars
Her wind rivers
Flowing my way
I need her
To show me
Without pointing
To soothe
Without touch
To understand
Without knowing
I need her so
She must need me
Because it’s a feeling
Of seeking each other
It’s shared
Loneliness and
Misery we’re willing
To bear together
On corresponding horizons
I wander tonight
Inside you
Like a lover
With the wild hope
This spark of heart
Will ignite
A completed circuit
For us both
Besides I’d rather
Wander than go
The one place I know
The one that got me
Before
The one that’s a one-
Way door
Do you feel
Sacramento
The proximity of
The ledge we live upon
Tonight?
Every step I might
Fall anywhere
I’m a miner tonight
Digging your
Darkening veins
For a thirst cure,
For an unlisted donor
For a deafening
Whisper
And I’m only
Inches better
Than when we first
Started walking together
I don’t expect
Pity, even empathy
Exactly, though I know
You have a pain
That resonates
Even greater
Frequency
Than I can echo
In all my bones,
So maybe baby
If I remember
You can take it
So can I
Not by toughing
It out though
But breaking
All the way
SacramentOde
Climb rickety backstaircases
From alley entrances
Toward parties on several floors
Of remodeled Victorians, kitchens
Gradually becoming other rooms,
Faucet handles in one corner
Of the living quarters, over the bed
Follow exterior pipes painted
White to the bathroom
Passing people whose names
You’ll never remember and barely-faces
Gazing through the single-paneled door,
Heavy pane of antiquated plate glass,
Big bronze bathtub knob
The trip into alleys
Inevitably becoming one,
Pass the same bum
On different sides
Of a dumpster, kick
Broken glass
Kick broken glass
Listen to acoustic conversations, tin stereos
Reverberating from some thin-walled apartment room,
Try not to laugh, be anonymous
Driftwood newspaper, a ghost
Unrolling its endlessly long sheet
Find a street, any street
Arcing big brother trees and
Envy, appreciate each other’s
Breezy silence
Stumbling down stillness
Make not more music than the leaves
Walk till dawn finds you
Ass wet on cold bedewed grass
Tucked far enough back
Up the park lawn to become one
With the lowly trunk tree, only lonely friend—
Catch 4 AM newspaper men
Each wondering how the other does it,
Invent weirdness sayings
They won’t forget, give them your best
Just because you know
They’ll never pass again
If possible drag as much of yourself as you can
To the river, passing
The offices beginning to file
Into exoskeleton ant lines,
Make little of
The eye contact
They don’t want, lament
The droll resignation, the focus held
Like muted masks, sing praise
For the occasional one that won’t, that seldom
Unquenchable fire eye still glistening, even now
Just for us and 7 AM
Arrive at last
Sit right down on the bank
And no longer care, even wish for the dirt
To crawl all over you
Make you the same being
Watch yourself glisten emerald skin
Grow golden coins in the moss
Splice verdant rainbows into green gradients,
Crickets chirping the calmness
Egrets sliding through stillness
The fragility of lifetimes
In that delicate, graceful neck and sky
Line
No one owns and so
All yours
Smell of Spring
The smell of Spring always comes in subtle and soft, sliding along those fast-melting jewels Winter leaves behind in the grass, breezing in across the landscape like an initial whisper which suddenly opens up ears to the whole world; the smell of Spring always arrives in a single instant, and the next everything blooms and reveals its most tender flesh to the forgiving gaze of the sun, which is just starting to smile in spreading pink and orange rainbows amidst the green; the world is never more briskly alive than in Spring, and even the skin sprouts forth fresh tingles in the diamond air: flowers open themselves in the imagination and the mind becomes an expanding container for the rolling blues of the sky, which continue to grow in potential until a deepening purple gives way to cool space and then stars stretching their veins out in the darkness, a darkness which, unlike all other darknesses of the year, is never fully asleep; the smell of Spring is the first line of a sonnet soon to be penned in Summer, the smell of poetry wafting into the prose and becoming a single, indivisible perfume; a smell as bright and crisp as the first crack of sunlight in the dew of the first melt of snow amid the crystals, the renewed baptism of water into the earth after a dense, rigid winter, the first opening eye of the year when sunlight and the world are reunited–
Embers
1.
Her words brushed an unseen cord
Tied so familiar
Yet ringing so far
As if hands
Of overlapping passion
Were plucking the strings
Of my heart’s guitar
2.
As always
When you come on
A gypsy vision
Of times
Long gone
I would pen
So many Lorca poems
With the worded wish
To flesh out
Foreign landscapes
In trembling expeditions
Along your skin
Just to be
In the neighborhood
Of your café
My song arrows
Begin to quiver
Your way
Even here
In the remote dimness
Of my cluttered room
A few beams
Of poignant light
Occasionally stray
3.
Vagabond campfires
Smolder inside your eyes, leave
Remnants of embers
Smoking in my soul,
Stolen rubies glisten
Upon your lips
With the invitation
Of an unsolicited kiss
But strongest always
Is the music
Of stars in your motion,
Poetry your voice
A weeping willow
In the wind
Your song
I go on
And even though
I rarely think of it
Haven’t forgotten
4.
Come on out, girl
Come on out
We’ll watch the sun
Slip off its gown
Watch the colors
Disappear from the clouds
Come on out
Come on down girl
Come on down
From the stairs
The moon’s not
Quite there
But you can feel it
Rising in the air
Come on down
You know, the
Cypress trees
Are whispering
A symphony,
And the wind
Is liquid light
Splattering
Patterns upon
The night
Come on out
5.
I no longer want
how much I miss you,
I would rather have
my heart strands
all root themselves
straight down into my bodily planet
and not imbalance me
with these massive branches
reaching toward the infinity where
you are not, I would rather
the flowers smelled like someone else,
or better, nothing,
I would rather
the petals all fell
back into my mind,
the sprouts reroute themselves,
the dying leaves fertilize me
and the seeds
renew my soles
because this fruit
is wasted
on no one to taste it
but a bland page
and a man
who knows the flavor
all too well
6.
I would prefer
no girl to write poems for
than one who cannot hear,
one without appropriate ears,
I would choose
to soothe my soul
under smooth sheets of the sea
or bury myself in a bath of hot sand
and have la guitarra play solely for God
to harmonize with the overhead bird’s cry
which I know it yet does
but in a way that leaves me
empty and empty instead
of empty and full
7.
The café was crowded when she walked out.
He blushed bright yellow but
The tables were unfulfilled and
She was adress in emerald seas
The night he got drunk and wavered the ledge
A thousand fish squirmed his insides
As he turned in a net of memory
He saw no visions of their future
But the waiter already knew the answer
He pushed his back toward the corner
All of time’s arrows fixed upon this instant
And had nearly put back the towel
Every time he fixed the ring it broke again
And then she walked in
The waiter asked him if he wanted a drink
It was just another tree in a forest of nights but
As soon as he stepped into the café
And instead wound around the wrong end of evening
The needles tingled differently
Her eyes encompassed a panoramic glance
He had tried to make someone push him off
But this time silence screamed only what he never wanted
He could see the empty café and their table through the window.
Waiting
The muffled click
of a clock
as unacknowledged
Faces
wearing unassuming
Forms
vanish past
Eyes are searching
for Eyes
like that first
Mirage
slowly become
a true Island
An auditorium
of voices
unintelligible
as singular waves
of sea,
the mind leaps
through the body
at first guess
of her hint
The steam of
boiled and bitter
Freshground
Awareness
of already being
too awake,
the glass countertop
too smooth
to be
really Real
There will be
several rehearsals today...
Always well-placed
the neon haloes
overshine
Actual angles
of a presence
that would wing
all else away
Light
is showcase
For what we are in
What we seem,
What we have
in want
The purpose
will not
be discussed
but remain
everpresent
until it becomes…
A woman
of soft fabric
whispers through the room,
too subtle
to cause
pause
Reflections live
nearly invisible lives
in the thin world
between the window
and outside
A hand too close
to be any
but my own
firmly clasps
the water glass
as if time might freeze…
Sudden
voices scatter Sparks
into this reverie
of what is
yet
to happen
as
like a premonition
Her face
appears
in the illuminated
door frame
(and all these
considerations
forever cease
to exist)
The Brooding Woman in the Nice House
We come stumbling by
In sandfilled sandals
And smelly shirts,
Salt stuck to our skin
And scrubbed into each brushy hair
Blown out like wild roots by the wind—
And smiles, such smiles born
As only inside the ocean herself,
Inherited from a day in the waves
And breaking out
A crest of white keys
From the mouth,
Tinkling atop breezes
Of laughter
As I look into a window
To see a woman brooding
Over a large wooden table.
The table is bathed in sunlight
From cycloramic windows
Curled around the room
Like a clear curtain forever
Uncovering the sea
A glittering scene
Of myriad diamonds
Spun by glass chandeliers
Into carousels of light
Swimming pools
Of sky and water
Against a landscape of marble
Draped with interlaced vines—
Fresh aromas of nearby forests
Ingrained in the hardwood floor
And ornate cupboards polished
With the perfumed oils of distant shores—
But she was not happy,
Lost in some thought
Of what was not
And in her downcast glance
Did not notice
All the beauty
She had constructed
In order to be
As a matter of fact
Could not even see
The sea
And it was sad
Not only because the beauty
Was wasted on her
But because
She was such a waste
Of beauty
And here we would have loved it
And taken advantage of it
But I guess
We had such love
For everything
Anyway
And not much time for sadness
So hopped into our dingy van
With curtains of rags
And feet of clay,
Leaned heavily tipped
Toward that heaven of blue
And drove straight away
-Santa Cruz
The Downhill Slide
It’s never flight that destroys a shooting star. It’s friction. A friction that makes it collide, makes it burn, makes it beautiful. A shooting star is only an asteroid without friction, only an invisible piece of rock in space. Friction makes it something we wait for, something we wish upon, something that is breaking apart as it creates.
Because of friction, shooting stars are fast, and you have to be looking in the right place even to see them. But that’s their magic. You look and you see one and you think, Maybe that was just for me. Maybe no one else in the universe was looking in that spot at that moment, maybe I’m the only witness in all creation. Maybe, besides the star itself, I’m the only one who caught the brilliance.
And friction is always a downhill slide because the moment of its beginning is also the simultaneous start of its end. From that first instant of contact all parts are beginning to fall away and spread into the atmosphere where they will ultimately scatter their anonymous drops into the oceans of the world. The downhill slide is just the hardest part of the process to admit, since we’d like to think at least one thing, besides change, would hold together forever.
My Muse
My muse
is a light calling
with bright silence
a wind forever about to blow
a chance
waiting to be taken
a dream of awakening
we are mostly asleep to
a truth voice
we usually ignore
as long
as we can
something like the most beautiful woman
whose grace is utterly without artifice
of seduction
naked without shame
brave without pretense
all-wise with unknowing
she wears a starry inner smile
all through
her wardrobe of tears
that glisten with
the way she listens
she wants to dance
and wrestle
and win
as she watches you
and waves
to begin
Thursday, January 04, 2018
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