The Compact


Some of us are given to,
upon our person to secret
instrumentation to adjust
the patina of our facial tones,
lest the glare of man made light
lend a shine undesired and worse,
uncovered windowed pores allow
revelations undesirable into our souls.

In other words, a compact and its constituents:
puff, powder and mirror.

Observed a compact in use
between Act I and Act II,
the deft use of the mirror,
angled, moved back and forth
to provide perspective,
close-up and/or total.

The Gods of Metaphor,
Deities of Derision
force my unwilling reveal
thru the holy confessional screen:
I too have a compact.

My compact, a deal, a treaty accord
between the white rigors of life daily,
and spasms of black lies
to make appearances tolerable.
My compact is what I cover up
with powder and puffery.

Aged sixty two years, life nonsensical,
perversely inversely, the dependence upon
these cracked hands grows,
dying cells dividing like newborns,
worrisome weariness make the lies
come faster and more frequent,
which is why my compact has a mirror.

No matter what perspective enamored,
In the mirror, my reality check,
No powder upon my eyes,
the brutality and the joy,
of life is undisguised.

Nonetheless, I have more,
Morethanless, the balance
is favorable, the outlook positive.
My compact with you is to
remind us all, through
music, dance, words and love,
This is the only compact
with the power of human law.

I am twenty years old
I have never been in love
I have had my fair attractions
As for true love I have not
I imagine her though
Beautiful too me
I'm not quite sure her name though
Nor have I ever seen her before yet she welcomes me in my dreams
I think if I were to be in love
I'd like to be at the start
The start of something new
Something so pure
As pure as the bright blue sky
With the sun shining bright
Yeah I think that's love
Waking up next to her and seeing something like the sun
Don't get me wrong there are cloudy days
There will be raging storms
I guess in the end I'd like to be at the start
The start of a sunny day
I guess I'd like to be in love

Don't tell me that something that feels so right isn't whats right for me
Don't tell me that I'm waiting again for a someday...maybe
Don't try to make me believe that we don't belong
Don't try to make me feel like its all completely wrong
Who the fuck are you to try to fill me with doubt
Who the fuck are you to tell me to turn a deaf ear as my heart shouts
You just might be right and all thats left here is yet to be cried tears
You just might be wrong and we will live happily for the rest of ours years

Two weeks.
Two weeks and she's gone.
My best friend,
My sister,
Is going to be gone.

She's leaving to Texas.
And she's happy about it.
I hate it.

I keep thinking about it too.
Like all the time.
It's just so surreal to me.
She has always been here.
She was never in a different state,
Never too far from me.

Ale this really hard for me.
My heart is being just thinking about you moving.
This is the worst thing.
It's like separating Chich and Chong.
Like separating a drug addict from meth.
Like separating yin from yang.
Do you realize how bad that is?

I know you have to leave,
But I just wish you could stay.
I know this is a really shitty poem,
But it just said what I needed to say.

I'm happy that moving makes you happy,
I'm just sad that I'm never going to see you.
I'm really counting on those two years here.

I lost cuntrol when I was nine years old.
Mother took my hand off my crotch yet left my brother to the confinement of his cock;
Girls good, boys bad, and oh no sweetheart your beauty is your only power.
And I’d blush; not in the way she’d hoped through the sweep of a brush but rather when my teacher left her hand lingering on my back as she bent over to tick the formula of the female form and cross out what the chimes of the church commanded.
I looked at the curve of the x she used to mark the spot and sighed.

Teach me. Teach me your ways so I can breathe in the sweet blossom of your hair as I rest in the bossom of your heart, its smells like lavender. Lavender.
Lavender sweet dreams honey and I will see you there tonight.

It was then I began my perpetual low earth orbit from dream to dream and departed from what mother said that day when I asked the question that makes mothers quake as they smooth out the creases in their dresses and tuck their unravelled hair behind bitten ears.
Making love. We made love only to make you, darling.
Mother smiled sweetly and turned her back on me as her mind traced back to that morning when she made mad passionate love with the milkman when daddy wasn’t looking. I am still waiting for my little sister.

If practice makes me perfect then meet man, mother.
I used his rocket to launch myself into space where I spelt her name out in the stars and jumped over the moon to Venus. I felt the warmth from her skin like the sun that keeps me alive. Alive. Alive.
Warm me, darling, just with the nestle in my vessel in my veins in my sugar coated spaceship.
We found sticks and made smores and we floated together, with my hand tracing your V in that three-dimensional galaxy between your legs we fell in love. No void existed between our celestial bodies as gravity pulled me into your arms.

He came as I came back from space thinking of nothing but the soft shape of her hips and the trail of her spine that led me back to earth.
There’s man with his grey socks still on his feet, dark matter on the sheets and a wrapper on the floor.
Rubbish I thought, but in the sky…
That night my mother asked me why I am smiling.
I said I have become an astronaut in orbit with a woman who I love in space.
She cried shes lost it.
I smiled, nodded yes, I've lost it to her.

I lost cuntrol when the earth, heavens and waters fell in love and sailed and soured as we danced on the tree tops of your garden, with waves crashing beneath us leaving salt shimmering particles like diamonds on your feet.
You were my alphabet soup that filled me with too many words, the thrill of the prize at the bottom of the cereal packet and the noble intentions of stopping the Titanic from sinking with the touch of button.
We had love at first sight like David and Jonathen, Ruth and Naomi who boarded the ark as my back arched in passionate throws below deck, as Noa held Emzaras hand smiling.
Adding a letter to her name on Transgender Tuesdays was just an afterthought.
Opening her drawers to pack up her boxers and bind her breasts Noa smiled as the clock cocked Tuesday.
She entered her escapism; what the Bible calls a natural disaster, I just call natural.

I lost cuntrol when I re-arranged the stars like pick and mix, so I could always find my way back to you. When you said I love you I wondered whether I’d had too many dolly mixtures and where jelly babies came from.
Sugar rimmed your lips like salt on a martini and left me drunk with desire as I licked around your edges. You slipped a haribo ring on my finger and I gave you my loveheart.

I lost cuntrol one day when my lover Alice said eat me. She showed me Dinah who hide beneath her skirt and I followed curiously.
I didn’t ask her to say please but that’s another story.

After her lesson I was told the Sputnik satellite was man-made and I laughed.
Oh no, women have been launching rockets with complete cuntrol between their legs for years, leaving the earths atmosphere and dreaming of everything else but dirty Dick’s dick.
During countdown they think of shopping lists, whether they’ve burnt off enough calories for wine with their girlfriends, and sometimes, sometimes, of her.
Do good girls go gay?
In space, my mother said, in space.

He smelt like smoke
as he leaned away from me,
texting himself with my phone.

We left the campfire outside,
in our shoes by the door
our socks overlapped in a tangle of limbs.

In that leftover guest room,
on the bottom bunk of the microwaved bed,
I remembered why I thought I knew what love was.

He was tired and needed a nap,
I was restless and cold.
Trapped inside because of violent temperate rainstorms.

This boy owed me stubbed toes,
thorn pricks through my jeans,
nicknames and rubber soles.




This was the boy who had always smelt of smoke,
who knocked over dead trees for me,
who lied about being able to rock climb.

This was the boy who went swimming in the ocean
before summer had properly began
when it was still much too chilly.

I taught him a new card game,
he beat me at badminton.
We played capture the flag and threw pinecones.

We sold cookies on the side of the road,
ate dusty blackberries,
traded innuendos and bad jokes.

This was sea-urchin boy,
slug boy,
the boy with the bird's nest hair.




This boy grew taller,
dropped his voice like a used bus pass,
looked past the top of my head.

He laughed when i stepped in a mud puddle,
dared me to walk in bare feet.
This boy suddenly went mountain biking.

I talked extra loud, in hopes that he would overhear me,
offered him rootbeer straight from the can.
Ate pretzels and learned to read his mind.

We shared our childhoods like penny candies,
switching all the peach ones for strawberry.
we agreed these are the best years of our lives.

He layed beside me, underneath as many covers as we could find,
taking up too much space and he knew it.
my cartoon boy.




My hand-drawn boy,
With smoke coming out of his ears
moved away.

We didn't talk again

(- This is originally a spoken word poem. Read aloud for maximum exposure.
-Asterisks indicate the necessity to pop your cheek with your thumb.
-Answer the two questions correctly and I will give you a hug.)

He fell asleep while traveling time
where a true name
becomes everything else.
So please give me a minute to explain myself
through the doorways
that I see champagne on a windowsill
walking across the room with blue
and fine china feet
saying again and again
drink me.
Until somehow
the words become a song
singing and swinging the bottle like a dinner bell for thirst.
A kind that we've settled to quench
with television
and somebody else's dream.
So don't pour my drink.
I'm trying to uncork it with my thumbs.

POP

It's flat
and I still have a tongue
so I will use it and I
I will use my thumbs to push back time
until hitler
becomes a baby.
Dr. King becomes a baby.
Until the left and the right and every dead genius in between
becomes
a baby.

Tiny feet trying not to crush the wet salad of the lawn
because it is green,
like my heart
that has learned
how to break fine china.
From experience,
let me tell you
it's a lot more tiresome than a blue dream
but he fell asleep on a boxcar crossing Germany
where mustard gas
drowns you in your own lungs
and he tries to breath between the joints in the track

the

click
...                             clack
click

as years
hurtle by.

Asking again and again,

"Who killed me?"
           &
"Who am I?",

until dinner was served without grace.
Until my head becomes stiff and bubble shaped
having been conditioned by
their
piles
&
piles
&      mounds

of
ob        cation.
fus

So we should tell all the baby hitlers,
that become children
that become us,
that a lie
is what you become
when abusing language to distort a reality.

And when you make a fist
you are handing lies out at random on a silver tongue.
But I still have one
and I still have thumbs
so sorry to burst your bubble but,

POP.

Child,
I don't mean to put

barbed wire

between us.  
I know it hurts
to have something so precious as the world
taken away.
But walls hurt worse
and through them only muffled sounds are ever heard
until your world is made of mute prisoners
that have forgotten what silver
really sounds like.

Blessed be
for I also have ears
so give me second place
and I will throw the medal against your walls.
Ringing out,
the universe doesn't look like an ebony tub,
with knobs we can't ever see,
full of infinite shining marbles to everybody.
Your mind
is a library of language,
so free will isn't a book written in english.
And tourists,
those know nothing infants trying to travel,
belong
where
           ever they
are
                             going.

Belonging like this medal bouncing trying to sing
off your wall
and
falls

into


your world.

Where again it will ring,

we've all been runner up

and somehow
we still get annoyed when another doesn't enter our library
instead of trying harder
next time.

So,
let me say grace.
Let me set l o n g tables
with the gruel that's been given
served on b  r                     n.
                         o
                           k  
                                        e          
china,
spooned
with sterling silver.

Its the sweat and tears
That blend the years
And end in undying bliss

Its the love and pain
All the feelings you gain
From doing something you miss

It fuels
It drives
It keeps you alive

My love
My love
Its just

This