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 Aug 2014 smallhands
emily webb
I.  In the past you were stale and sticky like old beer and I could not peel your hands from my hips.  I know I couldn't look at you when you kissed me, but neither could I close my eyes.

II.  Sometimes now you are a black hole that pulls me in at the top of the steps.  Your shirt is two sizes too big and my hands pull it close around your waist, calming the air and closing a vacuum.

III.  When you put your knuckles to your mouth to laugh, when your sleeves are rolled up just above your elbows, music is peeking out of your corners like light under a doorway and your eyes are a robin's egg on the sidewalk, cracked open to spill a feeling that has no name or ending.
Out of body, out of touch
If I feel at all, then I feel too much
This poem is as shallow as my grave

But I'm still digging

If I want a God then I'll misbehave
If I want to be sad then I'll entertain
Just because I'm found
doesn't mean I'm around
Just because I'm growing up
Doesn't mean I can't be down

I'm sorry, mom and dad,
but if I want to be happy then I'll have to be sad
I'll write until my fingers bleed
Until my words are the blood that the readers need
To Struga Festival Golden Wreath Laureates
        & International Bards 1986

Stand up against governments, against God.

Stay irresponsible.

Say only what we know & imagine.

Absolutes are coercion.

Change is absolute.

Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions.

Observe what's vivid.

Notice what you notice.

Catch yourself thinking.

Vividness is self-selecting.

If we don't show anyone, we're free to write anything.

Remember the future.

Advise only yourself.

Don't drink yourself to death.

Two molecules clanking against each other requires an observer to become
        scientific data.

The measuring instrument determines the appearance of the phenomenal
        world after Einstein.

The universe is subjective.

Walt Whitman celebrated Person.

We Are an observer, measuring instrument, eye, subject, Person.

Universe is person.

Inside skull vast as outside skull.

Mind is outer space.

"Each on his bed spoke to himself alone, making no sound."

First thought, best thought.

Mind is shapely, Art is shapely.

Maximum information, minimum number of syllables.

Syntax condensed, sound is solid.

Intense fragments of spoken idiom, best.

Consonants around vowels make sense.

Savor vowels, appreciate consonants.

Subject is known by what she sees.

Others can measure their vision by what we see.

Candor ends paranoia.

                
                                        Kral Majales
                                        June 25, 1986
                                        Boulder, Colorado
 Aug 2014 smallhands
r
missing
 Aug 2014 smallhands
r
a crumpled milk carton
discarded...fallen
in the gutter, another
black and white photograph

a tooth fairy smile-
something missing,..

a coldness
from the shuttered window
in the shadows
of a quiet day
...Xavier doesn't play here anymore.

r ~ 8/17/14
\¥/\
|   missing
/ \
 Aug 2014 smallhands
cg
Even in your medication, even in the early morning and the foggy air and the heat from a meal your Mother made you, one you ate as if it was a way to recover, your promises haunt you like a quiet hum that no one else notices, one that sits at the back of your skull until it softly melts into something that you call a part of you. And the rain is still there.
Still in its eternal state of trying to find enough within itself to break down whatever doors it believes to be knocking against, and you look right past it.
Your Mother made you this meal, your Mother was singing in the kitchen, the same one that you swear gave color to her milky skin, the same one where you saw that same skin bruised by your Father.
And you don't know how she can make such a place seem so much easier to step foot in, like the whole time you're just looking for a way out but for right now, where you are is okay. With some people, their dreams find ways to follow them when they wake up and then they slowly start to ease their way into places like the bottoms of their sneakers or even their shadow, and then one day, when you try to remember why you are here, and the way the winds would blow right through you in your slumber, you realize there isn't a difference between the skin that held you at birth, (the skin that was there the moment you became and the moment you became less all at once) and the things it cannot touch, and you see that everything is it's own language and has its own way of being and it is beautiful. And every day in your wake, in the moments you rarely remember, you lose a sense as to why, you even forget to ask about it, and it is up to you whether or not you find it, or replace it with the things people give you, because people will give you a lot. They may not notice it, they may not even have good intentions, but they will keep your hands full.
 Aug 2014 smallhands
cg
The miracle, the way that we have found enough light in people to see them as more than a spit of darkness, is my biggest question.
Because the heart is tender, and more of a song than anything else,
and it is up to us who we allow to echo throughout our hollow bodies, proving again that our anatomy an opera house, and coming home a
form of apologizing without even speaking. You only die as many times as you live, you only come back somewhere one time until it starts to become a
piece of you.
People are the same way.

It was not how her hands
trembled pouring orange juice at breakfast, or how I saw his eyes never looking at her the right way,
but it was the silence that broke my heart. The quiet, the absence of everything beautiful floating in midair, suspended like lungs that
were made to be drowned and never had the taste of saltwater.
Silence, more than any word, carries the weight of cities, it is
the red exit sign, sitting atop the door near the back of every
restraunt that you look for without even meaning to. I want to
write about life, and how much it simply is, and how there is so much
to it, but I can't tell the difference between it, and the moments that
define it. All of these personal infinities that shape us like skin was made from wood and hands made to carve, and I find myself grateful for the small
eternities that come to me.
All of these ways to take the tender from the heart.
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