When I die fill
                       my memory jug with things my mother loved.
Leave out her tears, the shivering in the rain.
                            That heart on the silver cross,
keep it,
the scrap she wrote my future name on,
                                     the ink footprints on my
baptismal certificate. But not the bandage
                     from my first stand and step and fall,
her blowing whispers in my ear to see if I
                                     can hear after the fever,
for those are tears  
and this jug has no room for
                                    oceans of such sadnesses
and grief.  
Make room for the things I’ve seen
                                                 clearly in the dark:
a frame of Mifune with sword,
                          E.T. phoning home with a gold
finger
and a happy heart light that beats right here,
                                           Dances With Wolves,
Gone
in 60 Seconds,
    tickets to hand shadow play and future love.
Line the jug with lead to keep
                                    X-rays revealing  true dark. Stash an LSD tattoo
                                            lest I desire a bad trip
far far away from heaven.
                                                 Place the draft card
torn up
on a broken hearing aid.
Put no cancer recovery card, test strips inside.
                                    I am not just my diseases
and will not cling to their memories.
                                              Be glad I am gone
if that is how you’re  bent.
               Remove that one small thing you think
I stole,
replace with a pinch of dirt or ash
   from the graves or urns of those I loved dear,
a wax
seal for this little jug for you of me
                                                            pr­oclaiming a
Thank You
                 God, Mother, Father for creating me.

The memory monster haunted Mavette on the 
platform, the gym, pass the graveyard,
scolding her for leaving the tiniest 
remains of food on her plate, scourged 
her for reading that ***** Jew, Levi.

The swastikas chased her in her dreams.
In her hole in the earth the dogs and 
stamping black boots would pass over her.

She lived with that history everyday,
escorting curious, mournful tourists
through the remnants of Auschwitz.

She knew all the ways of death, could 
recite the roll of who died and lived
over, over until the loop was her life.

Her sister in Detroit would receive 
a postcard from her every week 
with the name of a Jew gassed 
and a list of their left overs 
that were burnt or sold during 
that particular time of the war.

Her sister never wrote back
and sick of receiving this 
unsolicited ******* and 
emotional ***** would 
unceremoniously match 
every neatly written note.

Today a bunch of high school girls
were pleading with Mavette
to put them into the chamber 
and turn on the gas for they 
all wanted a great TikTok moment.

Mavette was tempted but
that was never allowed and 
the echoes of their laughter
followed her and ruptured 
into a migraine by shift’s end.

The next day, a squad of Israeli soldiers,
in a moment of exposed reflection 
after crying and singing the Hatikvah
whispered to each other
“That’s what we should do to the Arabs.”

She was only a little ashamed 
to share their thoughts,
these children and young men,
enraptured by the practical thinking
of those exposed to the simple, 
recreatable reality of the 
**** killing mechanism. 

The next day she did not rebuke
the teenage boy in the brown shirt
who said: “In order to survive 
we must become a little **** too.”

For once she wanted to escape
her hole in the ground and 
be the one with the dogs and guns,
be the one with all the power. 

if she could not escape death in her dreams
she could live by becoming death in them.
Mavette, the Angel of Death—  the idea 
comforted her nightmares and dreams.

And she took her gun and 
locked herself inside the chamber and 
asked those outside to turn on the gas.

The light was so bad I made some clouds—
little cotton ***** taped to helium balloons
drifting up to the heavens.

The first were the standard balloon animals:
dogs, sheep, horses, giraffes, lions.

They folded conventionally but
became much more creative creatures
with more cotton piled on.
The orange poodle became a bison,
the sheep a yak, the horse a hippopotamus,
giraffes just puffier and more absurd giraffes,
the lions awesome saber tooth tigers.

I added man, men, woeful enough
that they needed a woman to tell them what to do.
Later I made the men sheep and the women lions.
I gave the dogs rabbit ears.
The sheep were now wolves.

I made the sky ark a canopy
to cover it from the dissolving sun,
a fluffy river to slack its thirst,
filled it with cotton candy gold fish
glittering bottle nose dolphins and ***** whales
echo locating each other’s existence,
populated its banks with palm trees and oaks
to shade all the other animals airy heads.

I created and created until the
creation created itself.
Lions became oaks,
sheep became mountains,
dogs became gods
wanting only attention
and belly rubs,
demanding all cloud creatures
know themselves only through
the smelling of each other’s *****.  

It rained the last of the rain,
the last bit of **** left in their bowels,
rained until they could only ****.  

I was irritated by the smell.
I was irritated by the noise.
I was irritated by how
they didn’t let me play my piano,
or continue creating my house
or not let me go to bed.  

I was locked in place
and couldn’t look back.

I wanted to cover my ears
but my hands were gone.
I wanted to cover my nose
but it had broken, fallen off
into a pillar of salt.

I shouted until someone
or something heard me
and covered my mouth
with a primate hand,
stopped my ears
with a canine paw.

Creation
had stopped my creation
knowing that I hadn’t been satisfied
with what I had done
that very first day
and needed a reset.

I treat the future as past,
a bright yellow house I inhabited,
filled with broken furniture
needing repair, replacement, to be
quickly put to the match or just all thrown out.
There is a kitchen with pots and pans
everywhere and much flour dusting everything—
and bread, bread, bread, so so so much bread.  
Maybe I will keep that aqua sofa with
the broken frame and pop-out spring
or that oil portrait of my dead father
with the eye gouge that makes it look that his
ghost is still watching over me.
My mother (God rest her soul) was
my door and she took the door with her.

I wish I could claw out
a space for her in the
partial darkness beyond
but she  refuses
to move from her space in my
soul’s basement in a way I
can not hammer through at all.
Only the heartbeat and
breath we clearly share moves forward.
She was a great dancer
but I could never learn the right steps.
Oh mother, mother dance for me again,
in the distant, distant horizon.

Is it so terrible to mourn a mother on  Mother’s Day,
to cry for the ones that shut the door and never returned,
those never equipped to nurture a newborn from birth to death,
the ones who desperately wanted to be mothers but couldn’t be,
those who lost a child or never wanted to be mothers but are—
should this be a day for the successes and joys and not the tragedies,
for just the good mothers and not the bad ones?

Both get their fare share of good and bad poetry,
memories full of exultations and recriminations,
letters that get sent across the miles and get burned.
It’s by luck that each child gets a lifelong angel or Devil.

Just s ay their name  because they gave you life,
whether it be a shout or a whisper
depends on  the weight  of your joy and pain.

Luna moths flutter in the captive night light
of early December, strong, determined
to mate their way to the electric crackle
(invisible as a secret trapped in the soul)
emitting from the machine in the eaves.

Their disintegration illuminates the dark
with ultraviolet pulses and heavy musk
drifting to mouthless, abandoned mates,
antennae feeling their starvation, extinction,
the end of all their brief cycle of lust.

The creatures in rockers spend the night
brushing the remnants of their death
off their cheeks, cuffs and hair—
absorbed in their dark loneliness,
avoiding conversation with each other,

The widows miles away feel the tug
of a mouth and mandible forming,
a dream of a shout and tear evolving,
the rock, rock, rocking waves telling them that
they soon will feast on these creatures clothes.

Note;
    
Luna Moths have no mouths and thus cannot eat.  They exist for only a week, being born to mainly mate or die of starvation.

I search Google Sky
and there is a night picture.
Yellow dots top and bottom
in fluttering butterfly waves:
too many to count,
small red and white dots:
20 per square inch,
medium red and blue orbs:
10 per quadrant,
red orbs with devil’s tail:
10 falling down
red, purple, blue orbs with halos:
20 (mainly clustered in the center),
purple orbs with blurry wings, flying up:
5

I search Google Earth
and there is my red brick house
(refresh)
blown down to a u,
a guard rail, metal flashing
in the only green branches
of the sole oak that survived the wind,
(refresh)
the remains of the septic tank
in a crater of weeds
(refresh and expand focus)
a field cleared
(click next)
foundation poured
(scroll down)
frame erected
(scroll down)
roof, shingles attached
(click, open folder: blue prints)
(picture)
construction plan: Oxford
(picture)
Heritage Park Phase I


I google my name.
Six Images of a Costa Rican soccer player:
good looking, but not me,
Linked In Owner Profile
with no pic,
Home/Facebook/Profile (no pic)
(click)
Poet—All Poetry (no pic):
(click)
289 poems, two  books listed-
(The Nacre of Cancer)
(Like No Movie I Have Ever Seen)
259 followers, 11 following,
nice pic but old and I’m fat,
(tap back arrow, scroll down, click more results)
(Not me) Costa Rican soccer player Stats/Profile,
(Not me) Instagram Profile
(Me) Wordpress blog site listing,
(Me and many others)
We found (me)— search public records online
(click)
fill out form,
(click search)
results found:
1 (me), 88 (not me)
(click x, close page, leave browser)

Things not found on Google:
my cancer,
my marriage(s),
my dog(s)

Real me found on Google
2%
real not me found on Google:
98%,
Me never listed:
98%.

I am not your dying son, I thought,
as my wife gave me the diagnosis,
remembering my mom in her dying chair.

I will not pass into final memories
watching the Pope in America.
“Bless me, Papa”,
will not be my last words.

I do not believe in my mother’s God
though He did write the best proverbs.
I do not sleep with a Bible on my pillow.
I wake up feeling my heartbeat and breath.

“I am going to die,” she said to me,
days before she passed, on our stroll
to the mailbox, school traffic humming,
finches at the feeder, magnolias blooming

removing her from the usual guard spot
at the window for sightings of the mail truck,
hoping for the delivery of the slightest news.

“You know, I’ve been talking to Jesus
because I don’t want to go to hell.”
“We’ve been through hell already,
haven’t we,” I said.

I imagined a weeping Mary
telling Jesus on the cross
“You never told me
anything of this.”

“Your poem made my day,”
were her last words on our walk,
the last she spoke to me.

A memory of the evenings
of my childhood,
washed over me:

The slice of night
filtering through
as I crept from my bed
to watch her praying the rosary.

Those last days she made a lullaby
with a hint of elegy in the song.
The box of her mind walked there.

The words were nonsense,
just reflections of the melody,
part of all the shining on the road.

She died,
like her mother before,
like her son will,
like we all, like life.

I regret not telling  
her of my dreams,
my nightmares,
my future

while sipping tea at midnight
with her at the kitchen table.
I can only wash, wipe
and pick up the crumbs.

Fallen leaves cannot open time
or add a few short years
to days never meant to be.

In my repose and cancer days,
grey smoke floats the sky
burnt paper and ashes
that drift my mother away.

Writing poetry for me is like fishing in the wind:
You shoot your arrow-net into the air
and after many failures you snag an ugly bird
that you make beautiful the more you see
that it really resembles you.

One night when skies have donned their stars
         And parted the lunar drapes
Scattering silent bats to afar
         To huddle with their mates,
We’ll fix our eyes northward, my dear,
         To distant lush Spring realms
Where musicians play songs with cheer
         And nothing overwhelms.

And we shall travail lovely streets
        With restaurants and bakeries,
Serving all your favorite treats,
        And just your recipes.
Here we shall build a ***** manor
        With ovens to bake tarts,
Rooms I can pen my psalters,  
        Hearts sharing each’s art.

I  play with the sand,
crush it to a globe of
sun dried golden particles,

until the thing in me
that is the ocean calls to
release it to the tide

so full of  the incessant
sorrow  upon sorrow of other’s  tears
forced daily to kiss the shore-

its roar constantly reminding me-
the ocean hates the land-
the ocean does not love the land.

I am not a sailor.
I am meant to die on land,
ashes spread above sea level,
or in a coddled urn above the hearth.
My voice is paper and
where I choose to exist,
a white world that is not sky—
this voice of mine.
I have no ensign.
My heart beats soft, beautiful words,
a language of stars,
that knows that the twinkle
was once magnificent suns.

Never summon the evil whales forth
lest they hunger for a salt’s ******
or seek to ravage their ship.

They cry out havoc, scream tempest
to the ocean and sky
so the illhveli hear not their name.

Their harpooned blubber
boils neither to heaven nor hell
but vanishes only inside the soul.

They fear only the steypireydurs
the Great Blue Behemoths,
the protectors of sailors and crafts.

The salts’ wives smell the devil in their remnants
and to keep the fury at bay they call
their men honeyed names clothed in peace.

The mates consign this sweetness
to the void, a sea of faceless women
to be left alone in their slumbers.  

At dawn, they  return
to the great wide green ocean
that hungers for their flesh.

They chum cowshed, yarrows, ash,
throw plowshares, axes and pots creating
a sacred din outside the incarnadine circles.

Cat Whales would come forth
with their devil-angel flukes
half in sun and watery dark.

They mewl alongside,
resting in the craft’s wake,
diving when the waters darkened  

And the roar of Bull Whales spouting loudly  
through their blowholes would scare
the distant  cattle to stampede the waters.

The Ox Whales, swimming
faster than hand and mind,
would devour the calves

Leaving only nibbles
for the belugas that trailed
behind in white silence.  

Bottlenose Dolphins after herding
the Ox Whales beyond the spray
would jump straight high

out of the water
exposing the sun and mountains
appearing underneath them.  

In the rest between breaths
a Taumur awaited beneath their crafts
for the opportunity to break them apart.

On the glint of the horizon a Ling Whale
drifting like a mirage of barnacles
waited to maroon them on her hide.

Today, the Great Blue Behemoth
heard their anguish and would gently
guide them back to their sandy, rocky home.  

In their unsteady slumbers
they would hitch a ride
on the back of a Heatherback

And dive with it
to the ocean’s floor until
their last bubbles floated up.

Around them all the dorsal waves
of the Sword Whale splashed them
while she sliced them in two.

Far away, the Narwhale sniffed
their blood in the water and
waited her turn to eat.

When the color goes away for the day
the night beach revels in the shadows play.

The cold blows north and the city falls
into the cycles of a leafless world.
It feeds off the brick, licks the shoes,
tastes the cotton of jackets,
gnaws hands clutching the last warmth
of summer close to their heart,
cuddling its last embers,
huddling to the next soul
with faint fires when it goes out.

Dogs on the leash paw the air
delighting in distinguishing
the smells of life and death all around.
Autumn is their rooting season,
their time to sniff for the rat
hidden in the pre-collection trash,
to proudly drop the last migrating Warbler
wounded by the reflection of sun on glass,
at their masters feet in the remaining
scent of the Great Wolf Hunt.  

With each gust their master’s minds go south
to thoughts of changeless sunshine,
snowbirds migrating in caravans
to The Villages filled with plantation magnolias
scarred with the memories of rope swings
and before that, feet swaying in the dirt,
never mindful that it was the African eye
who first caught the non-reflective sun
and bleached skin, the first shudder of cold.

The taste of cold on fingers and faces
etches their tundra souls
and in the rubbing of hands,
the warm breath of air in palms,
they almost feel the sun again.
They sense something invigorating,
thrilling in feeling the right amount of cold,
the wind howling  in the cave of their hearts.

The not not bird
listens to its not not song
in the not not tree
near my not not door.

And in its song it hears
something not not grand
compared to all the other
not not birds
in all the other not not lands.

The not not bird
doesn’t know
all the not not things
it’s suppose not to know.

It sees not the not not leaves
written in this poetry.
Smells not the not not flowers
swaying not in the not not breeze.
Hears not the buzzing of not not wings
of all the yellow not not bees
supping on all this wondrous not not majesty.

For this not not door of mine
is neither not not open
nor not not close.
For that is not the not not providence
of this not not poem to define.

I choose wether or not
all this not not nonsense
shall be or not not be
in some future not not prosody.

For those who beg to decline
I privy thee to write
your own **** not not rhyme!

Death has left its imprint on me so much I
don’t know who is touching me inside anymore.

Certainly it’s another presence,
a voice apart from God.

Or is God the sum total of
all my known deaths?

My soul is an oarless canoe
afloat a lake of tears

seeking both initiation
and response to steer it.

Every death is almost next to me
entered gradually,  disappeared,

not gone. Internalized.  
Just almost next to me-

done being themselves,
but not being part of me.

Sometimes the separation,
the loneliness is so extreme

that I am moved
by almost everything,

the body of life not
touching against me,

just moving the canoe
along.

Many say the last thing the dying see
is the flap of dove wings
or Jesus caressing their hair.
  
Her hallucinations were full of Him
smiling at her, speaking words
she could not understand.
  
And when I draped the
blanket over her cold feet,
crowned with the blue bruise
of all her past complications,
she was convinced I was Him.  

I played the game.  
“Hush, little one.  
I am here for you.  
Do not be afraid.”
  
I left for a moment.
I wept.
She had fallen asleep.

Before I could
return the next day,
she had passed.

Her eyes were closed.
Her mouth was a half smile,
as if she had heard a bell,
had tasted the sweetest thing.

I wondered what was that last
great thing she had heard or seen,
but she had taken her memory with her.

Elvis loved his peanut butter.

Gladys, who loved him the most,
as all good mothers love their children,
would feed him grilled Hawaiian bread
sandwich after sandwich of peanut butter
with chopped caramelized bananas,
or gently mashed fork bananas,
sometimes with bacon, sometimes without.

He dreamed of peanut butter and
Gladys would feed those dreams
with Fool’s Gold loaves made each of
one pound peanut butter, jelly and bacon
lovingly folded, like Graceland,
into  two foot slices of Italian bread,
cut by Gladys into pyramids
so the crusty part would never
hurt her Little King’s mouth.

He would go to bed with peanut butter
on his breath, on the roof of his mouth,
his tongue pressed to his palate so
that the peanut butter would never dissolve.
He would greet the dawn with
peanut butter morning breath,
peanut butter on his lips and  
peanut butter cloud swirls on his cheeks,
peanut butter like ant trails on
his satin pillow cases and King size sheets.

Gladys would be in the kitchen
plopping a tablespoon of buttery
peanut butter into  a skillet  
before adding two eggs and Canadian bacon.

The peanut butter shaving cream Elvis used
would still be on his neck and Gladys
would kiss it off in vampire pecks
that still made him squirm.
She would curl his cow lick  
in place, as she kissed his forehead  
smelling the scent of the peanut butter
pomade that gelled his beautiful pompadour.
.
And when she died, and he died,
it was those peanut butter kisses
he missed the most in his world.

“Are you okay?”,
my wife asks
when I cough.

“No. I’m fine.
Yes. I’m not”,
I respond,

stumping her
in the poetic irony
of words that

encompass the
yes and no
and the in between.

She flips the finger
at me and I return
the bird to the nest.

We go back to our life
and our tablets,
the drip, drip of my chemo
and I wonder about okay.

“No.  You’re fine.
Yes. You’re not.”,
the bag stares in response.

Its leaves fold,curl in
Their grip yields to the cold wind
The elm knows their loss

Every touch is a devotion,
every soft phrase a prayer
to life, to continue living.

A nightingale, a dove
gowned in heavenly blue
a ministering survival chant.

Thank you
and double checks
are abundant.

They minister
consistent kindness
for they live
among the blasted.  

There is no sniping,
no rivalries,
just respect and support.

They are special.
They are there by choice.
They work double shifts  
or come in on short staff days.

The cancer center has regular hours
No Nights.  No weekends.
Burn out it is low.  Effort is high.

Their patients are a pretty grateful lot,
so their compassion comes easily
from the first tuck to the last.  

The nurse knows
some will sleep
and some will awake.

Everyone dies,
but today they
will  be spared,

for tomorrow
is nearly far off
in the rising sun light.

I will spend my lifetime
fulfilling the dreams of the dead,
writing to the living of
how their hopes were fulfilled,
hoping their prayers
will blossom a million miracles.

“I am but mad North North west; when the wind is Southerly, I know a hawk, from a hand saw.”
(Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2)

Only God sees and knows dove from spoon,
can feign the smoothness of heaven,
let the mind see hawk and handsaw
open in the wide shed behind the house,
not the falconer’s falling glove
and the hand severed from the bird’s wings.  

For thoughts are to the manner born
and God knows the risk of our reach.
He feeds both dove and hawk
while the saw is being oiled.  
The cut finger howls His name
and cannot fly or make wings.

Line 7 references:
Hamlet, Act 1, scene 4: "But to my mind, though I am native here / And to the manner born, it is a custom / More honour'd in the breach than the observance."

On my father’s house
three slaves and six horses
died when the old stable blazed
a  century and a half ago,
and three union and
two confederate soldiers
slayed each other
in a forgotten skirmish
a few years later.
Their skeletons were found
two years after the war
under an uprooted white pine.
The county let the field return to forest,
except for the old stable.

My father, a nonresident,
cut a dirt road through
the upper quarter,
built a cottage house
over the old stable,
a gate house fifty yards leeward
with a pond in back
and a large windowed manor
that cut a wing between
earth and sky
just beyond
at the edge
of the rocky wrack line to the bay.

Until the houses settled in,
the earth screeched its pain
and revealed its ossified sorrows.
After years this plot
finally  accepted his tranquility.  

My father died and was cremated
far away from this adopted place,
He  returned only because
his will demanded
his celebration of life
take place here.

Except for the family,
who undutifully held
onto their allotted share
of his ashes, the attending
mutes, sobers, wailers and criers
faithfully flung
his cremains in the breeze.
They watched, cried,
bemoaned and wailed
as every speck
refused to settle
and blew out to the bay.

It appears  just weeks after the last tear,
my mother’s sky blue dress on her life ghost:
same walk, dove shape, soft voice, brown hair cut short-
at least from behind, in the same love light
that moved from donation bin, rack, to her
in the way that the poor are ****** to wear  
the dead’s clothes, hand me downs echoes worn thin
enough to be bleach clouds or ghosts of ghosts,
the seams just barely holding together,
hem taken up from low earth to sky,
the orphan leftovers recut and sewn
to match the little girl holding her hand
tight enough to be a matching heaven,
memory of a bright and special life.

I loved this old crooked tree
that refused to grow straight
with the sky but willed itself
to stretch with the horizon,
limbs resisting what every oak
near it wanted— to kiss the sun.

It had a brother, long since cut down,
its stump never uprooted, ground to chips.
Decades of weeping, trying to caress its kin,
had left it defiantly stunted, a hunchback
to its grief, its refusal to be another proper tree,
limbs desiring earth’s comfort to cloud’s hope.

The tornado swept south and
my old brick house was
left a blasted finger to its whims.
The old crooked tree was uprooted
like all the others oaks, yet granted the mercy
of caressing its waiting brother in its final fall.

My wife spent the time after the uprooting
like all the others after the storm,
dealing with the adjusters, collecting
the ashes, saving the memories that remained.
No thoughts of trees preoccupied her
and I was convalescing from cancer surgery.

Before we moved into a temporary place,
before the winds of rebuilding where beginning,
I asked for a quick drive by to see the damage
because I only ,imagined the destruction
from the aching confines of a hospital bed
and needed to firmly root it to mind and soul.

The reality was a little worse than the imagining.
The roof was gone, only an L of bricks remained.
The PTSD, anxiety, the sheer exhaustion
was already planting in my wife.
I cried for her. I cried for the last sight
of the old tree hugging stump, earth beneath.

On this acre of unspoiled comfort
the hard winds blow once again now.
Through this acre of unspoiled comfort
the house falls once again now.
This acre of unspoiled comfort
so unlike a broken cry.
This acre of unspoiled comfort
once so sun caressed with smiles.
This acre of unspoiled comfort
once standing on unburied dreams.
This acre of unspoiled comfort
lingering near death.
This acre of unspoiled comfort
praying for its life now.
This acre of unspoiled comfort,
now I pledge my love again.
On this acre of unspoiled comfort.

In a realm of two moons and three suns not
afraid to be besieged by everlasting brightness,
where everyone speaks from their heart spires
and devils and scorpions cavort with sprites,
magic coexisted with every day miracles.
People would cross on invisible bridges
as easily as Jesus walking on water,
on their way to their great soul’s quest.

Now as tablets led to handwriting and
then to thousands of computer fonts,
where seeking adventure becomes
short code for finding death and despair,
where sprites now dine on pixie sticks
and fairies no longer spread their dust,
where those who believe in magic are greatly
outnumbered by those who don’t,
where everyone’s top half exists
with their bottom self wandering about
and never finding each other,
where wizardry is replaced with technology-  
the common light bulb and automobile-
is when wonderment gets consigned to the
bottomless pit of foolishness.

Then magic waits in hidden castles,
patient not for those who have it
and don’t see it, but those who need
it the most and know that it reveals
the truth behind the disguises,
waiting for that old broken stead
to reveal that its Pegasus
and that spell they chanted
to lead them back home to
the magic of their parent’s’ embrace.

When I look at the sky its blueness mixes
and cycles with thunder, lightning and rain.

I notice, the  vulture, content to feast on leftovers of once
beautiful things, fly  with the same majesty of the hawk.

At night, I see the stars burn bright and smell the rain’s petrichor snake off the worn sides of Racoon Mountain.

Yet, I the only thing that is neither sky, bird, mountain nor star,
wonder, spend so much time wondering, if this is peace or joy.

I am scared, mommy
like I was in the summer storm
many months ago.
I tremble in my feet and hands
as I was in the deep puddle,
eyes open, screaming, shaking, mommy,
dark words want to come off my tongue.
Mommy, I am shaking as I come
down the stairs, light as a ghost.
Make me some milk, mommy
milk, if you see me there.

My grandmother was my oracle,
speaking stained insights in a Spanish
I hardly understood at the time.  

My offerings were small but true:
kisses, hugs, “I love you” on paper scraps
translated by my mother for her knowing.

It was as if I had written them in blood and
it became a forever tattoo of her heart,  
a pumping cross, always giving and forgiving.

The yield was quarters, dimes, pennies
doled out from a repurposed wide-mouth
banderilla jar for the corner candy store tour.

She lived in a temple of rust seeping down walls, paint cracks, peeling checkerboard linoleum,
chipped ceramics, relics broken and glued back-

an unsanctified housing of brittle bones and
striations of hands and feet, sweet blood,
passed from thirteenth child to second son.

As my Spanish improved I was able to praise
the oracle with all the many spoken and
scribbled ways of Latin gratitude and adoration

under the watchful eye of my mother and
the care of twelve others who still lived
within the realm of her unwritten wisdom.  

When her vision stopped and her blood
no longer flowed she was relocated with
all solemnity to rest under a Boricua tree.

My mother doled out her oracular inheritance
whenever I stumbled, wandered, questioned,
encouraging me to write it all down.

Now, she is mere dust in the echoing wind
and I am a childless prophet who appreciates
all the oracles that came before my time.

1.

The motherless-fatherless God
orphans the world in His own image,
His experience, His own elevated thoughts.

Yet He is unsatisfied, unhappy for
His creation is not perfect enough.

Even the little man with His breath-spark
is an unfulfilling design, in tun dissatisfied.
  
Everything has weight but
nothing has fullness.

Only the birds achieve effortless flight
and the planets spin easily in space.

2.

Creation shatters in the layers of night
and reforms in the weak rays of dawn.

The moon shows the scars of His longing
and the sun the flame of His abandonment.

In punishment He permanently
orphans the land from the sea
and the earth from the sky.

In scorn He lets His man creation
people the earth and die too soon,

the posthumous orphan left-behinds
of His own abandoned dreams.

His child cries out “Father!”
on his forsaken cross.  

Only the Romans sate
his thirst with vinegar.

He can not listen, only turn away
and resume creating and
spinning far better worlds.

3.

The orphans of God feel the fatal loss,
the doom of the abandoned earth,
and refuse to cringe or weep,

hoping the manner of their death
shall redeem their birth in His hope
even as they lurch toward the grave

They pass the plate between them

mother to daughter, father to son,
a communion stretching to forever

until the plates are full
and father and son retire to
the living room to watch the game.

The mother advises on the adornment’s
of the daughter, the father pats the son
for his stratagems of the future.

They have always been this way and the
singing cold coming from the window

only makes them closer to one another,
that thing they do to get through
this meal and the next and life.

How many solitary meals they had
together they can’t remember.

They know not what they have
given up, if they gave up anything,

only that the meal was solid and filling.

I wander through this secret city
mapped in the words we only know,
and we can only define.
I am the citizen of you
and you of me.

Everyone we know drives bye,
their cars filled
with everything we own
flying out the window.

The next vanishes
into the mist
beyond  the curb
of what we once were.
Or, is it, will be?

Where they went,
we know.
Where they’re going,
we know.

Our eyes and ears
want to follow,
it’s so bright and loud
and hard to hold inside,
even in all the shooting.

“If you do not write or film”,
the director wonders,
”am I alive?”

“What limbo am I in
when the shooting stops?
When my camera no longer
holds the beautiful prism.”

His films stay the same,
only he changes,
exchanging the silver screen
for glistening tin foil
heated under with a match.

When his pain matches
the others, he prays.
When greater, he’s an atheist.

The films are his only company.
He lives with them and for them,
remembering the cinema of his youth
filled with the scents of ****
and jasmine and summer breezes;

remembering the cave
where he learned
to read the light,
understand its alphabet,
and eventually, vocabulary
with each discovered ray.

He smiles as the music track
of little angels being taught
by the local parish priest
to match his voice note
by note flickers in.

I tried to bargain away all
the sickness and death
in my life  with the
skies and mountains.
They refused to disperse my
pain in the sunlight and clouds.
The void rejected my life,
eternity denied my love.
The moon stayed its silent course
watching my fate fade away in the night.
Time denied my burden.
The wind swirled to heaven
seeing me coming near.
The waters cascaded away
fearing my touch.
God was on vacation
and not due back until
two days after my passing.
My heart opened wide
and I emptied my pain
on its breakers and shore
until all that was left was words,
these words in the color of clarity.

I should have broken my back by now
with my lupine spine,
feet screaming as if in a wolf trap.
My outrage prowls the low valley
searching the arid land for water
to slack the thirst,
the howl inside.
Once there was real silence
but no answer.
Now, rage is my lone truth.
The lamb has been eaten.
Nothing stays in my broken jaw.
What is caught just slips away.
The times are always lean
for those who howl alone.

There is a certain satisfaction that comes
with shrinking language and imagination
to a rectangle, fitting black-and-white
words into a prescribed length and width
given human depth through inscription.

The filled sheet of paper almost
transcends its smoothness and thinness,
its very blank expression and dullness.
It reveals exactly what it is meant to say
and the colors one wants to see in it.

Move the imprinted strokes up and
it becomes the verisimilitude of art;  
move the line down and there exists  
scientific equations in plain view;
give it power- and it becomes money,
an official stamp- and it’s the recorder of
birth/death and everything in between.

All of it can drift away if unbounded and
catch fire with the right or wrong spark.

If you accept the apple
you must accept the bite,
the lips that bit the flesh,
the legs that climbed the tree,
the eyes that looked and lusted
for what was in between and above
the white cleft rising in the speckled light,
all the crucifixes after and the rising flags since.

Parasites: they insinuate themselves
into your head, your heart, your art

They exist in the schizophrenic zone:
the lower right corner of your painting
looking for patterns that go to childhood,
the well rehearsed gestures that
allow them to take over,
plant the image in your agitated brain
that makes you doubt your love,
sign over your entire identity,
make you think that they can ****
with a scrape of peach fuzz,
until everything smells, feels,
tastes exactly the same-
a collision of **** and water
that knows money and not art
is the iron that smoothes
out all those creases.

The concrete jungle is the exam.
Their goal is to dominate it.

You enter through the black portal
searching for the thing you lost
in the right corner a long time ago-
the thing you call son or daughter-
tapping out SOS with your forehead
on the button on the wall
that connects with the light outside
until it reads SON to that distant brain.

Whether you **** someone or betray
your country doesn’t matter.
It is just the thing you keep
hidden  in the basement
that doesn’t know  
that all it needs to escape
is to walk up the stairs.

The sand holds our faces.
Every thousand grains
forms a man, a woman, a child.

Every millionth there is your mother-
young, stunning, beauty mark
perfectly spotted on right cheek.

Every billionth adds a little weight,
gray, tears and beaches of separation.

Every trillionth might be the dirt
blown away at her funeral.  

It’s not hard to find a thousand
coffins nesting in the shoreline.
You just need to adjust your eyes
to focus on the tiny-ness below,
to see every relative particle.  

Sand is but the erosion
of the once impenetrable.

You may find your father
coasts away from your mother,
his bald-headed frown
etched into a tableaux
of a thousand grains.

The semblance of
your sister’s smile
and your brother’s jeer
not embracing each other
are also there,
shifting closer
or farther away,
based on the whims
of tide and wind.

Your history has been
etched into the grains
centuries before your birth,
yet your fate remains beyond
their sway and maybe even time.

No  one can explain
why vast deserts exist.
Why their very ash
is forever tendered
and remembered.

All we know is that
the shifting sands
will be there to always
greet and bury us.

Passion’s Cursive Highway

P
It starts with the line, an upwards curlicue,
the noose flapping rightwards in the wind,
at the top of the curl, an afterthought,
because every line needs a curve and a loop
to follow the road set to the next ones beginning,
less it turn in on itself, circle about,
or start and end nowhere.
a
The next road is not a road,
but an interchange, connected
curve flowing at the bottom,
arching outward to the top,
to half the height, straining
to touch the loop behind
and just above, falling
in an outward curve
that delivers the scribbled
start that is the highway
of their journey.
ss
Their highway starts in swagger,
they thinking it’s straight
but it really swerves and swerves,
she existing in the sedan
of soul and soothing blissful union,
he riding in the open convertible
the slapping wind of ***, sin
and self his indulgent mantra,
the rolling curves of the highway
unfolding, a striking rattlesnake
pushing them together in
a union of fear and death
stuck half in trust and mistrust.
i
They exit the highway their auto
in the fleeting traffic streaming by
an unnoticed sensible sedan, SUV,
minivan amidst the flashier styles
until a passing train forces a stop
at the gate till the arms clear
and the red lights stop flashing
and they can continue the little ways
to the incline street that halts
period, at the dead end that is their
garage and two story home.
o
Everyday they drive in and out
of the interchange that is
their two kids, two cars,
back and forth from shopping,
home, work, garage to garage,
other stories and two story house,
she practicing, and refining the
upward curve outward *****
that is her harmonious devotion
to perfecting the craft of family life,
he to the obsessive dedication of
work, promotion, goals, achievement.
n
At the up stroke, halfway to the end,
he crashed and she was there
to pick up the pieces and give him
her half of the inward flexing n,
loosening the noose to fly in the wind,
finally uniting their divided passions
into not a marriage but a union
that respected the middle ground
they had created with each other
and the true real love that was there.

I.
All through elementary school
blonde beautiful lip reading teachers
would try to correct my “th”s by snaking
their tongues between their teeth and
holding it there, ripe cherries
tempting me to bite into them.

This was the one thing my withdrawn self
throbbing with the first thrusts of male
enthusiasm couldn’t stop thinking about—
all those thin throats with patchouli scents
wildly, willingly, whispering interdental fricatives
like a throng of French kisses to my thirsty lips.
I thoroughly desired the apples of their necks—
to chew them, **** them, swallow them,
eat them all -all of them- all of it,
every one so meaty-sweet and
erupting with wet dreams.

They would undress themselves,
my harem besides me on the river bank,
their white stomachs dewy and shivering,
the ribbiting Croquis behind the marsh
chanting to me to instruct these chicas
in the ch’s— chas,  cha-chas, chochas
of the Puerto Rican mating call
with no use for this, that, these, thems,
just the rich vowels of legs parting
telling them each where
ella es hermosa como la luna.
(She is beautiful as the moon.)

Once Senorita Lujuria brought to class
a persimmon plucked from her garden
ripe with the musky  smell
of what the girls thought was chocha
and the boys imagined was ***
that she sliced into two equal suns.  

Knowing that it wasn’t ripe or sweet
I refused the first bite she offered.
I watched the  others spit it out,
their palms full of bitter disappointment.


II.
When I got home my mother was cutting
off the crown of a pomegranate, scooping
out the core without disturbing the berries,
scoring just through the outer rind, until
it quartered and could be gently pulled apart.
I stuck out my hand and she inverted the skin
until the berries fell warmly filling my palm
and then into a red plate

Her body was a bruise, especially her hands
I gently rolled her wheelchair
to her cluttered room
where she sang an old Spanish song
asking for the ghosts to take her away.
Her song swelled and she cried it out of her
heavy with sadness and sweet with love.

After she had passed I stumbled upon
three scrolls tied with purple velvet string
folded under a down blanket in the basement.

I unrolled three paintings done by my mother
in the Frida Kahlo style.
  
The first was a self- portrait of her holding
a quartered pomegranate in one hand,
a sliced persimmon in the other.
The second was of her staring out at the ocean,
her body bulging with the idea
of my joyous conception.
The last, was an ****** tableau
of her and Senorita Lujuria
in a forbidden embrace, signed and
dated two years before I was born.

The first two painting had the deftness
of a thousand skilled repetitions,
the taboo one sprawled with arthritic loops
but still hathe talent of muscle memory.
My eyes teared with the knowledge that
my mother never lost the things she loved,
her son, the colors, scents and textures
of all the persimmons and pomegranates
so neatly sliced and lustily devoured.

The piano player
has already been shot.
He is no longer a musician,
less one that sold-out halls.

Once he turned the river’s chant
into a jazz so fine that fish weeped.

Now, he plays only
right-handed counterpoint.
His left is still paralyzed,
even after a year of PT.

He only knows Bach,
the old bebop has faded.

His laugh,
a faint rhythmic sigh
is the only time
he knows how to keep.

He grows frustrated
when a two-handed Schubert
plays on the classic radio station.

He was acclaimed
for the way his music
triumphed over time and adversity:
the weakness of an inferior piano,
his own chronic fatigue, his very pain.

He would admonish those
who broke his concentration
with chronic picture taking
and excessive coughing.

He grunted whenever
he heard his imitators
in the elegies of Muzak
floating from the big mall speakers.

Now, his drummer and bassist
have died. He is alone.
His past brilliance is a cosmic taunt.

He realizes that he never
could have done any of this
without them
by his side,
keeping his time

The small, sleeping audience
of the nursing home
of which he is a resident
is not convinced of his genius.
He is no longer convinced of it.

He plays jazz in his dreams.
It’s as messed up as his left hand,
messed up as his waking life.

Perfection can only be seen in the descent,
the glow of spotlights colliding to true whiteness,
the realization that grief touches the ground.

Mary, they say, you never experienced birth pains,
but the linen folded eternally beneath your son
shows that his final blessing transferred all  to you.  

Your tears wash his feet, and I imagine,
you wiping them dry with your hair,
a doting act of love he passed to his disciples.

Your grief remains in your soul.
Only the pain is collected in
the last descent of angels.

I feel the slow bump when
the descent must hit the earth,
the slight stumble to awkward reality.

I wash my feet everyday to honor
the perfect glory I’ve been blessed to see.

Note:
This is a memory of the 1964 World’s Fair where I saw the Pieta in the descent of an escalator. I was seven and  the experience lasted all of fifteen seconds, roughly the time it takes to read the poem.

You worked hard for the plum,
to bite into the Mariposa
before the heat comes
and it rots.  

Its purple plumpness
pulsates with juice,
so dark and clear
through and through.

The comfort is not startling.
It’s the taste you know
from a thousand memories,

What takes you back
is the shock of seeing
your heart in your palm,
the taste of your blood rich
in this other thing.

Yes, it’s not what you hoped,
maybe more for such
a late summer surprise.

Yet, in the shrinking light you
don’t begrudge yourself
this small purple reward for
a lifetime of regrets and doubts,
unborn hopes and still-born pleasures.

This plum blossomed
despite you,
apart from you.
 
It reached you
skin sweating
ripe to be your miracle.

It’s not just sweet,
it’s sweetness,
full of the seasons
of its short life,
your everything- nothing joy.

Bite into it, and
you must bite into it,
taste its smallness
in your fullness.

Feel it run
down your cheek
overflowing your palm.

Feel it mesh with all
your runny happiness.

Our marriage is old enough to vote now
and on this our porcelain anniversary
I vote “Yes, I do,”  over and over again.

A score of fine filigree plates I will gift us,
two broken to match the fragile times,
the eighteen days past the towers fall
when we married amidst grief and joy.

Our Noritake sacraments survives the bombings
of a blasted world, the cracking, fractures,
the buffing of our mistakes to a translucent
perfection, all frozen details rimmed with gold.

Cancer is etched on the lip, but so
is cure, joy, longevity, beauty, respect,
and the watermark underneath, our keepsake
forever, irreplaceable love.

I have to sew my memories
inside the lining of my coat
to keep them close but not inside,

something to take on and off
when cold grief needs warm reflection
or remembrances flash painfully bright,

when chemo and radiation
makes it difficult to feel my teeth,
tie my shoes, retrieve the hem of a future

through the barbed-wire fence of past life,
the cancer, the bad brother that shoves me
through, leaving me bloodied and betrayed

but safer in the ways of nothingness,
the death of my bawling infant self
that I just begin to fathom.

I lack the humility to pray for less,
just close my eyes and find kindness
for the coats I sew for others in the dark.

A bicycle splashes
over a puddle
and its aura
reflects down
the streetlights
praying halos
on the umbrellas
of the pedestrians
that pass under.

Down the block
two stop signs
on opposite streets
both signal WALK,
letting the crisscross
of the quotidian begin.

This moment it’s
a blue umbrella
******* around
a red one.

Earlier a chihuahua
in a poncho sniffs
and wants to nip
at the English bulldog
wearing a Mac
in the pouring rain.
(Is it so strange.)

Hours later a woman
in a white dress
and black high heels
will struggle with
the designer handbag
slung on her left shoulder
and the Bergdof’s bag
grasped tight in her right.

The crossing mother
with the black stroller
sings a shushing lullaby,
hardly noticing
the little stumble.

Oh how,
The city releases
its spectacle of life
when it rains.