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have you ever felt the intimacy
of sitting alone in the dark
with nothing but rain and fear
as your only companions?
 Mar 2019 charlie darling
r
Sometimes I drink by myself
like too many do, maybe you, too
when the wind blows like it does
here on the coast when it’s clear
and the light of dead stars come
down to swim in your circle of blood
while thinking back about the sisters
of boys I used to run with, oh, you know
we’d give our trigger fingers just to
touch them again, but the war keeps
seeping back into us like the poison
that pours into our rivers and creeks
from long gone cotton fields now paved
where the clouds of those days
are all that gets weighed in at the gin
I swear, there’s a pattern to all of this
like the weave of a tight skirt on a girl
who I once fell in love with in school
I went all crazy from watching her twist.
 Mar 2019 charlie darling
Grace E
Kiss my neck
The way spring kisses Paris
Make my colors
Come to life
God creates
The colors are beautiful
I lost the hands of God
Wearing my long blue skirt
My feelings become intense
I'm a young girl
with a round face
My eyes narrow at the corners when they smile
Smiles brought about by a girl and a boy
Passing through all his smiles
Having a smell of my childhood dresses
Similar to all paintings in my drawing book
of that river
Sharp mountain
and ugly crows
''I love you, God of jasmine flower''
No one knows the death of flowers
Just telling that flowers are beautiful forever
and time is the murderer
Wanting my mother's arms
Her ******* are beautiful
I smiled, knowing a pleasure
that will not be in my ****** relationship
The sky smells of death
Last night I dreamed that a flower was dead
I saw death  
Go out of my window
with white curtains
We are playing
Making songs and dancing
Humans didn't accept the dreams
''I love you so much, God of jasmine flower''
Big
Round
and beautiful
Innocent and depressed
His eyes, are
His hands will be for whom?!
Both his eyes flew
One day, all the birds in the sky will grow up
and will have no hands anymore
Your hands have two jasmine flowers
and I will taste them till the end of my life
His eyes are beautiful
I will see the sunset in whose eyes?!
Sewing all the floral white dresses of women, tender
Devoting my eyes to my mother
Giving my heart to my sister
''How much I love your eyes''
Eglantine flower has the most beautiful smiles
The sun is young for me
The God of jasmine flower is happy
A light has remained in my heart
with his leaving
I repeated it, endlessly
and keeping his soul in my heart
Now, he is a happy butterfly
has grown up
Fluttering, slowly
Sitting on all the flowers
It is happy and free
Children and rainbows always follow the butterflies
The death of each flower is not beautiful
''The God of jasmine flower''
Oh, beautiful flower !
Still wearing your childhood golden earrings?!
Your playmates calling you
among scorching summer grass
Do you hear the innocence in children's smiles?!
The jasmine's hair is long and dark
Butterflies
dancing
and gone...

خداوند می آفریند
رنگ ها زیبایند
دست های خدا را گم کردم
دامن بلند آبی ام را پوشیده ام
عواطف من زیاد شده است
دختر جوانی هستم
با صورتی پهن
چشمانی که وقتی می خندد
گوشه هایش نازک می شوند
خنده هایی که یک دختر و پسر می سازند
از میان تمام خنده هایش می گذرم
بوی پیراهن کودکی هایم را می دهد
شکل تمام نقاشی های دفترم را دارد
با آن رود
کوهی تیز
و کلاغ های زشت
''دوستت دارم خدای گل یاسمن''
...کسی مرگ گل ها را نمی داند
فقط می گویند برای همیشه زیبایند
و زمان قاتل است
آغوش مادرم را می خواهم
سینه های او زیباست
می خندم
لذتی که در رابطه ی جنسی ام نخواهم برد
آسمان بوی مرگ می دهد
دیشب خواب دیدم که یک گل مرده
مرگ را دیدم
که از پنجره ی اتاقم
با پرده های سفید بیرون رفت
بازی می کنیم
آهنگ می نوازیم و می رقصیم
انسان ها رؤیاها را نپذیرفتند
''من خیلی تو را دوست دارم خدای گل یاسمن''
چشم های او
درشت
گرد
و زیباست
معصوم و افسرده است
دست های او مال چه کسی خواهند بود!؟
تمام چشم هایش پرواز کردند
روزی تمام پرنده های آسمان بزرگ خواهند شد
و دیگر دست نخواهند داشت
دست هایت دو گل یاس دارد
''خدای گل یاسمن''
و من تا آخرعمر آن ها را خواهم چشید
چشم های او زیباست
غروب را در چشمان چه کسی خواهم دید!؟
تمام لباس های سفید گل دار زنان را لطیف دوخته ام
چشم هایم را به مادرم هدیه کنید
قلبم را به خواهرم بدهید
''چه قدر چشم های تو را دوست دارم''
زیباترین خنده ها را گل نسترن دارد
آفتاب
برایم تازه است
خدای گل یاسمن شاد است
با رفتنش
نوری در قلبم ماند
که مدام تکرارش کردم
و روحش را در قلبم نگه داشته ام
او الآن پروانه ای شاد است
بزرگ شده
که آرام بال می زند
روی تمام گل ها می نشیند
آزاد و شاد است
بچه ها و رنگین کمان ها همیشه به دنبال پروانه ها می گردند
مرگ هر گل زیبا نیست
''خدای گل یاسمن''
! ای گل زیبا
گوشواره های طلایی کودکی هایت را هنوز داری!؟
همبازی هایت
از میان چمن های داغ تابستان
صدایت می زنند
معصومیت خنده های کودکانه را می شنوی!؟
موهای یاسمن بلند و سیاه است
پروانه ها
رقصیدند
و رفته اند
letter to elana

for the poet elana bell

~

in a different cafe,
on a Manhattan streetscape where once, years earlier,
violence was the purview of West Side Story gangs,
ruling their internecine non-intersectionality territorial blood lines supremely

nowadays, violence replaced by the frenetic
noises of Lincoln Center theater goers,
student dancers, actors, musicians and poets joining the throng
of those who sup and run,
all hearing their own frantic
curtain calling, saying, announcing,
music dance voices words require your obeisance,
needy for a mutual worshipping reassurance fiat that:

life can be made transcendent
if even for just 90 minutes or 120 pages,
or a 3 minute poem reading


this city of millions requires billions of poems that spoon stirred  
and yet, almost always fail, to squeeze, all of the human essence that is in its ultimate source, clarifying nyc tap water,
containing the storied remnants of a hackable continuous,
single human stanza cell osmosis - a blockchain like no other

two poets sit side by side each in their own lapsed dreams,
she, a published poet of prize and rank, ^
he, a rank amateur whose only prize is his unpublished anonymity,
poetry, is his just a nightly soul cleansing,
an imported remnant of his Marrano piyyutim ancestry

one turns to the other,
in the inexplicable daily crazy miracle
of city fashionistas

in a city where stealing a parking spot, or the
forced squeezing creation of a subway seat space
where physics proves none exists,
are oft the roots of slashing and stabbings faithfully reported
on the 11 o’clock news,  
and trust and/or other encouraging words
are seldom heard and even less demonstrated,
the make-no-eye-contact of Camus’s L’Etranger anomie is the
normative, paranormal, paralysis cloak of we city separatists

“Can you watch over my electronics and stuff?”

Sure says the grayed and grizzled,
an all life long veteran of nyc,
judged to be trustworthy
based on a few seconds of being upsized and downsized,
a car wash (exterior only) perusal
despite a
“no direction home, like a compete unknown, a rolling stone,”  
this signage, yellow star permanently chest-affixed,
conveniently ignored, as it seems impossible
thieves don’t look like me,
don’t likely in their possess,
a distinguished head of gray hair (yeah, sure)

a thank you reward of (or did I imagine it) a lean-in,
a momentary head on a shoulder,
the chit chat now grows earned and earnest,
she confesses her cardinal poetry profession,
eliciting an ‘Oh Boy’ utterance from the poet
of a thousand names
and a thousand textual emendations

a fastidious nyc boundary is brief crossed for one short meal,
till the end when time sensitized IMRL intrudes and
the showtime calls out,
if not now, when? if not me, then who?

I read her poetry later in the praying supine first position of
three AM, and laugh with delight, at the contrast and no compare,
the styles clash and tho the stories told
are both writ in the aleph bet script,
there ends the Ven diagram overlap and
into the night’s coming of a Elvisian blue suede coverlet,
we both disappear, and if not for this recording,
history says, you old man confused, never happened,
just an imaginary poetry ink blot dream breaching...

~

postface:
another poetry book is no longer homeless,
comes to shelter upon my shelf, close to Angelou, far from Whitman,
now all the book’s nooks eyes collectively
reassessing the new old-owner, parsing his syntax,
undecided if his readership is worthy of them,
concluding that all these books are the
man’s owned roughened stones,
to be placed by human hands on the
serpentine curvature of his literary tombstone,
and until all stones fully read,
they all agree,
will they and he
be fully freed,
smoothing his legacy’s edges
Feb. 21 -March 5, 2019
NYC
another true story

^ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elana_Bell
cardboard crowns   (awash with)
liquid laughter   (cascading)
all around   (litany)

empty eyes   (searching)
borrowed bliss   (enlightenment)
stale sorrow   (breaks me)
when i was born
my mother said
it felt as if a new mathematical state had come into being
       new creature.
              new possibilities
              
when my grandfather died
my mother said
it felt the same- as she sat in that old room, his spirit slipping into a new form
       old creature
              new possibilities
 Mar 2019 charlie darling
Elena
Have you ever looked evil in the eye?


           I have


    And he winked


A tone as smooth as velvet

A grin of a boy

His lips parted seas,

of churning lava

But I saw a pool,

     to dip my toes

He splashed playful twists and turns

    Till I was soaked

And drops trickled down my skin,

    scathed by sin

That murky tank of burns.
This was on my old page & I didn’t want to lose it as part of my collection, so here it is.
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