it's your turn.
go.
"in muddy footprints i see faces
that Picasso would have drawn,
in ***** floors and
unwashed dishes lay the lies
and promises i told myself
in backwards orders,
with misplaced eyes,
glasses,
mouths.
and now, my turn's arrived,
and i've nothing to confess!
point taken.
i don't know what it is.
it's Picasso in my mind.
Van Gogh: self-portrait.
missing parts,
misplaced parts,
misinterpretation of an education
too-well carried out.
dirt piles up and i play,
a little girl amused,
like when i learned about
maps,
navigation,
topography in sandboxes.
i was so much older than a little girl and yet i still belong in sandboxes!
there i can pretend to be
Picasso,
there i can call this
'art.'
and i can't call it art anywhere else
because it's not,
it's not artistic in the real world,
and there,
there exists no ideal.
only confusion.
but of another sort-
not the kid described on these pages.
my pages.
my turn?
i've not much to say, not
that would mean anything to you, anyway.
in cloudy visions i see
smoke
that Picasso could have
breathed,
in,
out,
breath.
in,
out,
smoke.
his smoke must have been
so full of art!
oh!
what is art!"
you'd get along here, just fine,
you're friendly enough,
i can tell.
"so it's my turn?
i wouldn't get along
anywhere, no,
i wouldn't last a day
without him,
but that's a different life.
a life so far away,
built like castles in sandboxes
on playgrounds that wish they were
the beach,
wish to hear the ocean,
wish to feel the waves,
and. yet.
that is art,
is it not?
beauty in the wishes
of personified concepts.
the life that lives in
another time,
(where do i belong?) but
i don't remember and
i
am so tired
of 'i'!
oh. no.
in shattered windows i see
accidents,
injuries,
deaths.
but some of it is beautiful.
you must think i'm
sick,
sadistic,
too influenced by art.
i assure you i won't cut off my ear but it's
very possible i'll dream in
figures
misaligned.
missing eyebrows,
misplaced lashes.
bifocals keep me from speaking clearly,
fogged with every exhalation of
smoke:
1920's Hollywood actresses,
mascara too thick,
lipstick too red,
cancer sticks between slender fingers.
tap.
ashes fall.
in ashes on linoleum floors,
flourescent lighting,
i see-
never mind.
you'll think i'm more dangerously sadistic
than is safe,
at this point.
i don't see anything at all,
no linoleum, non flourescents
to reflect your muddy footprints,
no Picasso faces this time around.
in muddy footprints i see...
faces misaligned, i see...
wheels in overdrive.
and you say i'll get along there,
'just fine'!
go.
it's your turn.
i hope i haven't scared you away.
there's not much time
before another day."

the raindrops on my windshield look like shards
        of broken glass, sharp to the touch when
        reflected on by all the other blinding
        headlights
hers was a black truck, wet in the rain, looking
        rough and **** in the sweaty love-
        making sort of way
i thought about how she had written me that note,
        a secret, and how she had torn it up and
        then thrown it out after i read it. It was a
        whisper, that secret was, a whisper of the
        love and trust she still harbored for me.
maybe we won't fade away, but theses are the reasons
i'll cry if we do.

I  stroke a brand new page
and wonder if rage or
plight or a flight out of this age will
overtake these white spaces between
blue lines,
wonder if I’ve anything meaningful to tell, like
what I think about politics
or **** hips or chapped lips in this winter’s wrath.
I’m on this path, you see, to try
and gain a different perspective,
to learn a different language,
to try and send a message
instead of doing the usual clichés about love and death and
cleaning up an alcoholic mess and
everyone we know has aids but
we like *** and
we hate each other’s different colors and
pretend to be emotional,
you’ve heard this line before:
cry or bleed tears or blood through words or ink onto pages or..
what.ever.
I’m guilty, too, of course, it’s true:
the one who points it out is guilty most,
but now I’m tired of being boring,
tired of not telling a story,
let’s… try… this:
my name is: michal.
I am:
white
twenty one
female
bisexual
jewish
a traveller
open parentheses : a stranger (close parentheses)
I am:
Sitting in a room full of black Africans
in Africa
a stranger, young and white and
interested, and suddenly, it strikes me:
c o m f o r t a b l e .
sitting in a room full of bl-
no.
we are human beings being taught to see in colors and in genders
being taught to judge a person
by the accent by the nation by the actions of the past five minutes by the plan for the next three by the chemicals or plants he puts into his body but what about
personality?
I am:
sitting in a room full of:
POETS.
or people who want to hear poetry,
and though on the outside I’m so…
white – no, different, on the inside I’m so…
warm, feels right, so not
distant. for instance:
you get what it is to let words string themselves on your necklace
and choke you till you’re
breathless
and make you beg for more, you’re masochistic
like me, like that, you
get what it is to close your eyes
and let each others’ words overtake you
like going under a wave in the Indian Ocean
like being swept into the eye of a tornado
like hiding under three blankets in the dead of winter
like turning the engine off but keeping the battery on and parking with dad in the front to let Pink Floyd finish playing Wish You Were Here before we move to open the car door,
you get what it’s like
to open a blank page and let the pen use your fingers in ways you never knew
lingered through the smoke of the incense in your brain,
the drops of the tap of the thoughts
your mind thought it turned off,
those last few breaths you never knew existed,
exist in your head,
exhausted,
I am:
walking out of this segregated room and into the next part
of this interesting test where I find
brainwashed white folks brainwashing my mind and instantly
I’m watching every black guy that walks by
‘cause this is the most dangerous city in the world
and those coloreds and those blacks
commit all the crimes so lock the door and close the windows and
watch your back and clutch your bag tight even in the
daytime and do a double take a triple take and never
talk to strangers you never know who’s a neighbour or
who’s checkin’ out his next
victim ‘cause he’s been
evicted out of society’s boundaries,
out of the space God made for good people,
fair people, people like us who know how to watch out.
Wait! something smells
funny, not really funny:
sad. we must be mad
to buy into this it’s making us
crazy and angry and when was the last time you
smiled?
I am:
smiling, thinking about that last time,
I was in a room full of poets and there was
magic happening and we were
black and we were
white and we were
re(a)d all over, we were
blue with ink stains on our fingers, we were
pink with our vision of life, we were
yellow ‘cause the sun was paintin’ us bright, permanently
green from the grass on our
denim, brown from the earth that rooted our spirits back to our cores,
orange from the flames of our words,
purple like the royalty that shined
from our souls, we were:
rainbows,
black and white are just multitudes of rainbows, after all,
simply shades like the ones we use to cover our windows
out of fear of the next break-in, just
shades, just
shadows, remnants of painful pasts
that we must avoid in our bright & colourful futures –
if we let them be so.
let me catch my breath, I haven’t
been so out of it since that
lunar eclipse that lit up the galaxies,
let me catch
my
breath,
my
death,
my breath, my goodness catch
me now before I trip on your
hiccups before I slip on your
scattered makeup before I slip on your
shallow skirts and dresses,
catch me before I choke on your
grey flavourless cooking before i
regress to the levels of stress
that lead to all our health
deterioration our self-poisoning
medication catch me so I die with a pen in my hand,
righteous and trying to deliver
an emotional message of
love, of coexistence,
I forgot to mention I am:
Israeli,
plagued by hatred in another story,
by violence unnecessary like
painting over to hide the rotten parts,
like pain in modern art,
let’s just lie here together
add a little cliché, underneath the stars,
close your eyes,
feel the dark,
hear our breaths move the air
and start a steady chain reaction,
a journey towards a butterfly effect
(how powerful the breath is!)
let’s call this art.

because even if we say nothing
and do nothing more
than lie beside each other,
the space between us
speaks,
our bodies (eyes
closed, thighs
close) speak
for us,
exchange vibrations we can't see
through an atmosphere we exhale into, in-
hale out of,
where vibrations of our music
run on playgrounds
unseen
and build houses
invisible
upon which we grow
together
and apart

i must admit i've missed the touch of pen
against recycled paper, recycling thoughts
and sensing coarse unity against
the edge
of my right-most finger and its adjacent palm-side.

it is with somber truth from which I can not hide that I
shout
for you to r e a d my w o r d s;
i know not why,
but these are my offerings in such a life;:
all i can honor for a god or a friendship or the strangeness of sequences,
all i can serve as a side to my heart.

at times
i wish
i were more
blunt,

and at times
you throw a glance
which shuns my person
into shyness,

these s e a r c h i n g e y e s run-a-marathon
while you look away,
seeking a face of interest. it is
silly, on my mind's part,
for even if we find a point of interest, it will
remain visual;
these teeth, this tongue-
we forget our purpose when it is most desired.

as it stands, i am a bird alone.
no, i try but remember not the last time i took off with another:
i am single, i am solitary, i am contradictory conflicts
.

through contradictions words stand strong and i will always have you,
even in death I will write you,
even in life at its fullest,

apologies fly like fireworks;
my obsession with my premature death is leaking onto pure word-pages and suddenly the sanctity of poetry is
tainted

but it is looming here,
in this atmosphere,
this knowledge of the end of life before it's started;
and that is why danger is seductive
and adventures are a weakness,
and that is why:
I love with all my soul.

you feel pianos speaking to your fingers
and i'm afraid to let you slip through mine..
unbearably bare in slow motion,
first our center and then the edges,
your lips soften mine.
warmth: inside, and out,
the energy that travels from the
first kiss through my body, through
my abnormally beating heart, my
sensitive stomach.
i hear words in my mind and
you, melodies,
and this is so scary i'm ready to cry.
precious as we, here, are, now,
i manage to think how i'm thinking all the wrong things, how
i always manage to feel so
insecure at times like these, how
i can so easily f
                            a
                                l
                                    l
                        in
            love
with you, how i shouldn't  because i
                                                                      n e e d               w a l l s , because
mine are missing, how
it's too soon to show you these
words of mine, how
god laughs at me so, now, here, how
am I always so
crazy, so
swept so
easily?

i greatly wish my words were great
because in describing us here, now, i
am losing my senses, i am
losing my thought patterns, i
am afraid of my strong intimacy, i
miss you!
(do you allow me to exaggerate so?) how
Strange how this all came about, how
mystical the world is, how
wonderful that you, too, believe, that
we, together, naïve,
i wait for wiser words,

b r e a t h e

(my worried thoughts pierce such calm,
calculate the ways i fear of letting
such beautiful precious moment:
your lips in slow motion, your
eyes with truthful intensity –
slips through my fingers:
sand so delicate i'm not worthy at all..)..


wiser words do not arrive.
it is me and you, here, now,
and my heart which breathes as if it's drowned,
and melodies i wish i could hear from your soul,
because this irrational pain from such unbelievable joy
makes no clear sense in my mind, my
eyes, my body, my
mind surrender to sleep,
surrounded by your body, your
arms, your breath on my neck, (this for the
first time in a while i let one get
so close), i
sleep softly, safely, i
must have cried in such dreams
that night, and when i
(frequently) awoke (momentarily), i
felt myself smiling although
the words were climbing and i,
silly, now i think, i
did not stir to write them down,
for fear of your disturbance, and
please, when i read you these words at some later moment of ours, if
this is too much for you to grasp,
please,
dismiss my thoughts as
exaggerations, as
no reason to slip through my
longing fingers, because they
want to be with your piano'd ones
and they are most afraid of:

losing

(again)

because they were once told
(when they left a love):
it is only once you've lost all,
that one may truly be free
[and they are tired of such empty freedom]

your screaming cigarette smoke rises and i,
in anticipation,
know not
what
to make of you and your-
my!
my misinterpretations of you.



your exhale clouds my kingdom and i
am walking with intention,
trying
not
to mention
that my bloodstream is swimming with-
(drowning in)-
the friction
between us.

soft-spoken?
a shady spectacle,
that cigarette is,
exploited by your splendor…

bear with me! I’m
baring my soul, your
spirit-
[make me drunk on your truth!] i
know it-
(tho’ hidden by soft petals,
pollution—{your
body}) – exists, it
is brimming, is
dancing
at the edge of
your smoke, (your
exhale clouds) my
vision,

…, my apocalyptic intimacy:
pure, untainted thought
shared in mind- (no words required)-
a b s o l u t e l y g r o u n d e d !



your
inhale, (i
watch you dying!), you’re
still alive, my
(cough) inhale, I’m
dying!- you’re
watching and I’m
still alive,

on the brink of chaos, i
watch,
on the brink of perfection, i
write
you
with
fragility,
but speak
in harsh ironies- you
do affect me, i
regard(less of) your
opinions,
the ones clouded by the ocean
of your self-imposed
poison, (this
catastrophe of your
tidal tombstone).

condescending? i
told you, no, i- i
just speak in
mundane repetition
of scarlet lies,
mundane motifs
in this life.

It’s just that…
(no. never mind.)

i wait for you to appear anywhere that is not under my skin,
or under my eyelids,
in the space between my thighs when i lie on my side and rock myself to sleep.

i do that,
you should know.
i rock myself to sleep like a baby does on his mother's shoulder.

for you i wait under a starry sky,
for someone who gets the way that i birthed you,
for your maturity and my forfeited release of you,
my heartbroken relapse of painted-over, washed-out days.
starry skies add reminiscing to their picture
and i, with you, am forced to collide
crash and burn our mended memoirs, hope for a replacement

for you I wait,
my dear replacement.
I close my eyes and type you out and maybe something good will arise from my madness.
I do, I wait for you, I do so sometimes and you do not arrive and I am blinded that you are busy and I am less important so you will visit and I will wait,
wait,
wait longer and longer and then I will have missed
all the other words that could have come my way
which I deflected in the hope of the bone you may have thrown me

you teach me wiser things than you think you know, you know?
I gather wisdom from your child-like behavior,
sift it like sand in between my own two hands,
clasped fingers,
cup your wisdom as my eyes are shut and you come to me,
and I write you out,
and no one else will understand, I suppose,
but the one that will:
if it is you, now,

buy me a rose and that will be our sign.

our kisses were as soft as our hearts & this must be the seed of all that came thereafter,
and all that didn't see light outside my mind.

perhaps our soft hearts led to my current introspection and my disposition when it comes to
pens, papers,
and all that lies
between them in truth,
in confessions by
soft tongues in shaky lips in scattered sheets in paling cheeks and blushing eyes,
in that which lies
between thought and its expression,
between brutal honesty in the heat of an oncoming summer,
in mosquito bites and my sweet blood which attracts this
violence, this heatstroke
sunshine;
it is divine,
like we imagined,

it is hectic like we desired,
it is nonsense and is madness and knows no explanation other than our
awkward silence,
our differences in imagined futures,
our various degrees of love/hate passive-aggressive
actions and feelings and resentments and appreciations;

we both are optimistic but you believe in that which counters my belief and it is
strange and unexpected and before you,
i needed someone,

and after you,
i need to be alone

my polygamous relationship with you distances me from the monotony of monogamy and makes me feel lonelier than the loneliest mundane monogamist. my mere apologies for my misendeavors, the malnutritious morals of my miseducation propose metal mirrors and castaways controlled by cutting carvers, craving crazy letters and loyalty from lengthy lies and lonely lives. lethargy overtakes and vowels reign, raining drops like rainbows and rocks in rivers, rusting relationships, rusty railroads at intense intersections entwined in everything inside and nothing on the outside anymore except these
muscles. we are back at the beginning.

my mind marvels in the magic of the memories, the madness of the morbidity and the hesitations of your reaction. his, I take, is misunderstood as my misfortune, but it is not a miss, my fortune: it is a fox in feathers colorful like friendships 'fore their forfeited and feigned approval, forced for fear of polygamy tho' it promises the purest pleasure, the most personal independence and precious pearls of princes, princesses, powerful, plight-less

poetry.  peace surrenders,

souls surprise themselves, surprise their cells, call for curious catastrophes to take place. colorful and calm they coincide with cooperation that can not contain the context of truth, of teases, of teasers and targets and tonal dualities and we endeavor, we endear you, we dare destroy the darkness of the devil in its disguised diamonds.

words lie at my feet like pebbles of poetry and I promise personal demise, deterioration and ridiculous obsessions- there's madness to be had and fragments to be written and I play with silly alliteration instead!

serious and serene you stare as if my sanity has slowly faded and I sternly helplessly smile shyly.  I suppose you are sincerely offering me your blessing before parting, so stumbling slightly I surrender…


if this is the prevailing promise of mere mortality, I'm graciously aware I was worthy of words.

loss
and rainbows where two edges meet
orchestras of cellos (purposely out of tune)
shallow gasps manifested in rest notes between the spaces of off-key melodies
mosquito bites and your suggestion that my blood must be sweetest but I can't take you as a compliment;
this is not a time for threats, my darling, nor is it a time for deaths. it is not a time for spaceless thoughts nor for confessions with political motives under white garments of smiles and spices and seductive entices

the breath gets deeper even if only for a moment and then the gasp returns:
     the window blinds my glasses
      the windows blind the masses
       the windowblinds conceal the sun from me which hides my sanity and peace behind the instruments and their voices but it is probably to be found in the rests where the bars meet each other at the edges, where the silences collide and burn as substances react to oxygen and oxidized carbon and I don't feel god and that is startling,

it is starting to sound like a long bar of rest notes
or a mind which deciphers like stars out of their constellations
                                                       out of their occupations
                                                       out of their spheres
                                         like stars unaligned
                                         like lies out of signs in the open blinding sun shining minds sparkling like water after a chemical synthetic process (like most of our bodies) and my condescending opinions on all who give in to fabrications and useless surgeries and drugs to feel
or to stop feeling, or to reverse the effects of
our sadness our misery our traumas and dramas
without seeing them face to face, eye to eye, because to turn around blindly is
so. much. easier.

paper playgrounds for people who are post-
trauma,
who talk to words instead of
people
who talk to people.

we, on our page,
we play with words, we
dance and distance and die for each other,
(cry for each other),
exploring letters & sounds & rhythms & rhymes
and crying
                                      up
as we mix each other        and calm each other
                                                                                  down,
we slip & slide & lock our lips & hands & feet
(and paint each other
against each other's bodies,
changing letters to other letters) and listening
to the winds
which warn us from the coming sandstorm,
the tornado'd gravel in our playground of ink addiction and diction,
and we
            fall
                    and bleed
                                    but know
the loyalty of letters
playing on (these)