the theme of this person-to-be is footprint.  for years I hated my figure and for years I went undetected.  I had female heroes both sad and sad reboots.  for a fee one told me I was fleeting.  the fee included the thumbtack moon my heel had liberated from a schoolchild’s diorama.  we come as babies so none can ask us what we remember.  the theme of this person-as-is

is mouthpiece.  her red phone has been tapped by those my blood is filming.

The blue pales white above the echoing horizon
Seen fourth times, edifice, sea, wire, sky
Venture, traveller, approach him at last
The air blazes all approaching, stabbing the sense
Palpable is none among you, gliding through
The streets, the cars, those striking titans lining
The eclipse, shivering white cloud on cemented bone
Lackadaisical walk, breezed by wind into drowning
Dusk, when the aching red pours, staining blue, lost

Our sky vibrates, oscillating, drums on sea
Vision blurred, though it seems natural, myopia
Taken by the Pan, made real on nature
Isochronal to all around, who watch in vivid gawp
Neither spectacle, sight nor sear, means much to other
The world breathes, not to ignore, or worry
As clouds drift on, through the rose-bleach
The animal clings into itself, all moves toward
Horizon, a carnival to unknown spots beyond sky
Denizens to the untouchable, we onlookers know

from father, footrace, fistfight (poems, June 2014)

(available on Lulu)

duologue

we’ll start here, turtle.

this is what I say to the grey thing I’ve been talking to.

the only buffer between engagement & constant engagement
is life
during wartime.

I conceive of a dropper
but hold it empty
above my eye.

because it is the one word without a beginning

suffering
because it is the one word without a beginning
is not limited
by its
vocabulary.

we wanted a sophisticated god
but in immediate
unison
called it
god.

this is the grey cream
that gives her privacy.

I am drawn to a sort of journalism
by association, a campestral formlessness
attached
for example
to the term

carpet bombing.

how is death, here? in an orange ball of yarn

she is not ahead of?

she has to stop, turtle.

to declaw an electrocuted kitten
she didn’t
electrocute.



isochronal character

the theme of this person-to-be is footprint.  for years I hated my figure and for years I went undetected.  I had female heroes both sad and sad reboots.  for a fee one told me I was fleeting.  the fee included the thumbtack moon my heel had liberated from a schoolchild’s diorama.  we come as babies so none can ask us what we remember.  the theme of this person-as-is

is mouthpiece.  her red phone has been tapped by those my blood is filming.


impossible beast

the whole town was in the parade. the newer babies had a float to themselves. at some point I was shot by a gunman so disoriented he mistook himself for my father. I swooned as if trying to avoid landing on a board member second-guessing her proposed location for purgatory. somewhere in the darkness the firehouse caught fire. I followed my blood but to me it seemed a celebrity’s sadness. my mother found me in her bed with a part of her heart. she was bright with the rumor that my sister’s snake-bitten neck had some takers.

With closed eyes, I inwardly spy on the enormously arbitrary stockpile.

Her picture drifts by, escorted by a brisk convoy of memory -
those strikingly timeworn matrices of hoary but lasting stories
from her youth, then from the wrong side of forty…
and now about the beginning of wrinkles on her rickety little fingers –
feeble and gentle.

There she is…smiling unconditionally at me, not concerned with my status or money,
or, for that matter, my other silly intimacies that keep waxing and waning like an isochronal scream.
With all her warmth and affection – unqualified and plenary
she waits at the doorway…across time…ever-ready to accept me
for whatever I was, am and may continue to become.

While I have ignorantly swerved this way and the other
erring, straying, scouring the world over, she has been invariably there -
my unabridged blessing, my true well-wisher.

My mother, any mother –
The best girl-friend ever.