Ten years old again,
In a tree ten feet high again,
In scuffed shorts with tangled hair,
And with the boys I longed to be.

Sanctimonious girls in dresses and frills,
Boredom and constraint personified,
Stare up in incredulity
As I heave myself over mossy branches.

“Girls don’t climb trees.”
I do. I roll in mud, play racing games,
Never brush my hair.
“You’d be pretty if only you tried.”

You’d feel alive if only you tried.
The wind on my bare arms,
Dirt beneath fingernails,
Scrapes on my shins
Red and out of place
Like smudged lipstick
On children’s faces.

I’m not you. I’m me.
Boxes serve to keep us in,
Deliver us neatly packaged
To a society which cannot cope
With fluidity,
Individuality,
Uncertainty.
Boo!

She says those two misguided words:
“Make over”.
Impossible. One cannot start afresh.
This is the result of every waking moment,
Of every word heard and spoken,
Each memory joyous and painful,
A piece of art nineteen years in the making.
Not to be destroyed in one act of disguise.

Yet curiosity is my mistress.
She leads me to boundaries
I never knew existed.
Up goliath trees,
Into foreign beds,
To the brink of reality
In mind-bending worlds
Of parallels.

Like a mannequin, devoid of identity
I give my image to you
And you place yours jarringly
Onto my reticent body.

The obliging cheers
At my transformation
Into an eloquent femininity
Feel hollow and worthless.
I have done nothing of merit.

I totter like a toddler
Uncomfortable in my own skin.
I’m on stage, an act,
A project. Not a person.

How bizarre it feels
To wear a stranger’s façade
Of dresses and frills,
When you know you belong
To a different world
Of dirt, and treetops,
And freedom.

The sanguine shades of India
Flow in mantras through my mind
In hashish tones sienna brown
To ochre greens, I find.
The soaring slopes of massif peak
And roaring waterfall
Lead to tranquil rhododendron glades
Capped in scarlet, I recall.

The clamour of the market place
The grimy squalor found
In the gutters on the roadway
With a constant wall of sound,
In the bartering for spices, red
In wicker baskets wide
With the stench of open sewer
Causing queasiness inside.

Dustiness of sandaled feet
Robes of saffron gold
And the gleaming glow of polished bronze
To purchase, should  you hold.
Patterned carpets lay displayed
In jute and woollen blend
Whilst ancient hands on simple loom
Weave more for you to spend.

Ullulation in the air
As turbaned dancers spin
To shrilling ethnic instrument
With drumbeat adding din.
Wild eyed watchers flashing teeth
As rhythms beat the air
Encircled by a chanting crowd
With temperament at flair.

Thronging people fill the lanes
Churning on their way
Interspersed with sacred cow
Meandering to hay.
Children flock with outstretched palm
Surging as they do
Insistently to foreign purse
In urgency that grew.

The sea of dark skinned faces
Mid flashing whites of eyes
An intensity of gaze that takes
You jarringly by surprise
And everywhere the pungency
Of the continent in the air
With the spicey taste of curry
And a chutneyed rice as fare.

But in speaking to the people
I found their manner warm
And their love for caste and custom
And their cricket team was worn
Like a flag around the shoulders,
Like a talisman, so proud,
And their love for home and family
Reiterated, long and loud.

Overhead, the baking heat
Occasionally relieved
By a downpour of monsoonal rain
Must be seen to be believed.
And the total inundation
Of believers on the stair
Of the teeming seeking holiness
In the river Ganges there.

And then as quickly as I came here
It became the time to leave
And the wonders of diversity
Were beyond what I believed.
What was once a frank abhorrence
Grew surreptitiously on me
The splendours of this mystic place
Well deserve their sanctity.

Now far across the oceans
In my safe and sterile land
I am drawn to stare to seaward
To recall my thoughts at hand,
Out across the sprawling delta
Gazing far to sunset sea,
That special taste of India
Flows irrevocably, back to me.

Marshalg
13 July 2014

I want to push you against that wall we spoke by and take off your crooked glasses and tell you that I’m the one

and if you say you don’t believe me, I’ll kiss you so deep that you’ll forget what I even said.

I want to touch that beautiful blonde hair and tell you how it looks jarringly familiar messy, but it would look even better on my pillow at night.

I want your mornings and your nights, but I need those crazy moments where the passion hits again and we can remember why we touch each other in the first place.

I don’t want everything, that’s far too much to ask for. I just need everything that you are willing to give.

I’m tragically in love with the idea of you.

i will give you things.

at first, i will give you honey suckles bound in the locks of auburn hair,
a gentle smile, a refreshing breeze. i will give you monuments dedicated to a single glance, and you will take all of these things with pleasure.

i will give you warm rain, and deep woods, and all the clichés we hear every day but we still love to talk about because we love them, i will give you love like them, like stars showing the dawn their shy bodies, like waves proclaiming all of these things i will give you.

i will give you all forms of love.

i will give you the best possible physical love, i will give you the most elegant touches and the most jarringly inappropriate whispers. yes, i will give you *******.

i will give you lessons in art, lessons in cooking, lessons in life. i will give you honesty, and truth, and commitment, and i will give you spellbound nights where all we do is talk about how the philosophers got it all wrong, that Plato was an idiot for saying we could only find death in love, look at us; look at this. i will give you the ability to teach me, i will give you the crescendo of my youth.

i will give you the crescendo of our relationship.
and then, one day, i will give you a little less. i will still give. i will still give you speeches about world events, i will give you the coffee i make in the morning, i will give you touches that aren't as passionate but they are touches nonetheless.
i will give you midnight runs to the store, i will give you medicine for when you are sick and i will give you the ability to nurse me as well.

i will give and i will give and i will give every day, each day & it will be a little less, until one day, i will give you nothing.

i will give you a profound silence, i will give you the absolute void. i will give you a pitch black abyss, nothing at all, and just when you reach the pit of despair, just when you think you've hit the bottom, the bottom will fall out and i will give you less than nothing.

i will give you screams instead of silence. i will give you hands peeled to the bone and bleeding because they have given and given and given and there's nothing less but less. i will give you a broken home, a broken heart, i will give you memories that will anchor to the bottom of your sea & know you will never be able to get rid of them because they are the skeleton of a ship wreck & did you know, in the Mediterranean there are still preserved shipwrecks in the murky depths of that ocean from Grecian times? i will give you these little reminders of mortality.

i will give you regret that sits on an empty shelf collecting dust particles. i will give you a taste for whiskey because it allows you to languish. i will give you the worst kind of wounds, the kind that time does not give a **** about, the kind that stars even pray over. i will give you a little less faith, i will diminish your ability to trust your instincts. i will give  you complete and utter devastation, i will give you repeated cliches on their backs: hurricanes, tornados, tsunamis. i will crack your collar bone, i will crack your skull. i will leave you as an abandoned house, worn down and empty.

i will give you everything, all of these things, and more; if i give you my hands right now.

Oh' glamorous god glassy eyed, in me
you have so very much time invested
I burn past tense n’ loosen tight lips. I may
be lost without Love jejunely injected
regularly in to my life made little with
worry and neglect. Love's politics ensue; know
I am not the one for you. I have not been
properly tested. Jarringly elected
for your need with a kind word herds
your starry glossed eyes to my body infested
with your skin and visible wet wild sin.

I tried drafting a poem about the dyed daffodils perched against my window and I was even going to make a half-hearted slant rhyme for "daffodils" with "windowsills" but my slanted heart gave way because suddenly the flowers appeared so artificially tacky, so stupidly hopeful with birthday glitter dusted onto their unnaturally painted petals as they tried their best to soak up some sunshine though outside it was an ever so naturally unnatural temperamental March day coating the green grass with snow flurries though the weathermen expect nothing short of seventy tomorrow so the cold coat seems jarringly out of place like a good intention gone horribly wrong and I couldn't help but think, and think, and think

We never fit, did we?

filled with pleasant praises, add to the noise
outsiders merely hear a clanging gong
misguided stooge, highest priority poise
broken, segmented; melodious song
pitchy, discordant, strident, jumbled throng
cackle, not laughter; like nails on chalkboard
screeching halt, hacked lung, dissonant ding-****
novice strum, harsh ring, disagreeing chord
overpoweringly awful, not dexterously ignored
discrepant dichotomy, add worldly confusion
you learned disciples, jarringly shored
bash uncomfortable jangles, chime the delusion
like the bells in your tower, you inharmonious bunch
wanderers offput by your lazy, Sunday punch

the cool air of the morning awakens me,
bird's bustle and gossip in the first rays,
of a new turn around,
the sun.

tears pool and nestle,
at the bridge of my nose, thick with emotion
left from a dream.
devoid of details,
but rich in sorrow,

a hungering feral sorrow.
that still lingers,
licking at the corners
of my mind.

i feel a discordance
with myself, sighing to expell this thing prowling, my breathe,
catches on a sob.

the kookaburra's laugh, jarringly close
and then further away.

i wipe at these tears, unbidden, unshed
and turn?
to find my grounding,
my steadfastness,
my hearts ease watching,
he draws me to him,
his lips,smoothing
my furrowed brow,
his hands creating an intensity, that is ours alone.

we make,
sweetness and beauty,
joy and oblivion, before falling asleep once more.

Oh, yes, I was in love with you.
I hadn't noticed,
I didn't know.
Someone else burned in my sky like the sun and blinded me,
But, still, quietly, you were there.
You were different.

I think I loved you because you smirked at me.
Because you cried to me.
I loved your mischief,
Your fragility.
I was mesmerized by your rawness, the tortured look deep in your eyes that made me want to hold you,
And captivated by your wit, and your playfulness, so jarringly out of sync
With your shattered-mirror soul.
You were so beautiful
And when I'd catch myself thinking it
I don't know how I explained my love away.
You could draw me in,
Hypnotize me
With your paradoxes-

You were made of glass, but you had the entrancing audacity
To dance anyway

And yes, I see now
That of course I was in love with you.

Sometimes there's something jarringly disparate About the fresh sea salt fog and the beauty queen moon of the Monterey wharf.

Sometimes you need the painfully cold sludge of a Cleveland street with no sidewalks and the crying skeletons of trees to match your black coffee soul.

it wasn't writer's block, i decided,
not even my lack of ideas can
steer me away from producing
something, anything
my skill to make sense
of everything through written texts
that even the most discombobulating
thoughts and emotions and anxiety
has almost never failed to be presented
out for me, like my fingers
have their minds of their own

and i'm terrified that if i write
it'll make it jarringly clear
that what i felt
three years ago
are resurfacing again,
just when I finally thought I'm okay

but my god,
my fingers
just can't stop writing

When you watch something alive get shot
In the head
Where the third eye would be
The gateway to the spiritual realm, so they say
You see the gate knocked off its hinges
It becomes quickly and jarringly clear
That this was never just wood slats
Sandwiched between fenceposts
Grown over with ivy in someone’s backyard
It is a floodgate, a levee
And once the water starts climbing the banks
There is no putting the horses back into the stable

The blood is insistent, demanding for somewhere to go
And that freshly minted hole cannot handle the volume
It’s opening night and the staff can’t keep up
The kitchen is sinking
****, we’re in the weeds
The patrons are storming back out the front door
In search of immediate accommodation

They get what they want, there are options nearby
Cavernous spaces that acquiesce to their needs
The mouth becomes a waterfall
The nose a babbling brook
At the start of spring when the rains fall hard and heavy
But time passes quickly in seconds and seasons
No sooner have you accepted the flood
Than summer comes, drought begins
The wells and the waterfalls
Begin to run dry

jarringly
my head spun in circles
what do i do?
standing there
the tears poured
and i screamed
what is there to do?
all i can see(what is there to see?)
is a hazy vision of your presence
but are you really there?
is it an illusion?
i ask and i ask but i dont
know
will i ever know?
i ask myself
and i pull forward
a shower of blossoms appear
red as the moon shining above thee
the shadow of you breaks through
what…. was i to do?
your body falls
my hope falls
i drop the weapon, clattering on the ground.
hope fled, fear ensued
the shadow of you breaks through
and i fall

That bitter brass crash
punctuating every beat
is jarringly unsettling,
just a toy monkey indeed.

Tell me what it really means.
Tell me what it stands for,
why was such a thing created?
Wound up tightly, set it free.

The zombies will all chase it,
relentless and ever mindlessly.
Just a toy monkey?
More like a bomb, indeed.

Preface:
Earlier today May 28th, 2021,
the 12-member jury unanimously
found Cristhian Bahena Rivera guilty
of first-degree ****** in brutal stabbing death
sentenced to life in prison
without the possibility of parole
of Mollie Tibbetts remembered as then friendly
20-year-old who was studying
to become a child psychologist.

IOWA CITY, Iowa
(killingly, jarringly inexplicable,
horribly, gruesomely, and forlornly),
the body found July 18, 2018,
an exhumed decayed corpse
belonging to young
vibrant coed twenty year old
college student Mollie Tibbetts.

Impossible mission to deduce
senseless killing of innocent babe
wild speculation perchance
spurned, snubbed,or scorned
love seriously gone wrong,
she who disappeared
from her small hometown
in central Iowa sad swan song
now plays, where every
last drop of sorrow rung,
now weeping family, friends,
relatives, et cetera subjected wrack
with lifelong emotional pain,
which searing inescapable
grief twill unrelentingly track
ferociously, fiercely, and figuratively,
doth disallow recourse
to duck away
from heart wrenching quack
king unbearably, terribly, and scathingly
will fully bill leave ably
beak homing a folly,
mockery, and travesty,
sans time heals
all wounds (truly "FAKE"),
nonetheless psyche riving tragic
(irrevocable loss) doth pack.

Grievous punch greater then any
all star olympic pugilist
straight to the ab
domain of opponent, where
rumor mongers mill and blab
how this, that, or
another potential suspect,...
whence tissues dab
corners of crying eyes,
an endless stream
of tears merge with gab
bullying utter disbelief.

Family/friends question
the supposed almighty
at devastating loss
to do nothing but bawl (at Baal)
into the fox sized rabbit hole
trying with futility
to block (even crawl
ling into every
rabbit hole) no bastion
against implacable
maddening crowded
house alive with murderous frenzy,
and a dialect (non
tickling) gentle Iowan drawl.

Third anniversary regarding
asper the impossibly steep toll
the purposelessness killing,
aforementioned deceased  
affected sodden wet soul
cannot process any (defying) logic,
a foregone lovely gal (same age
as my youngest daughter),
whose missed presence,
(albeit said slain lass
Mollie Tibbetts – permanent absence),
now created an expansive
infinite black sink hole.

i reached for the golden cup
the sparkling wine rinsed my throat
but i still could not find a reason
of course
there is good
and there is bad
i find, however, that
the funny memes
the pretty marriages
the jarringly melancholic pieces
just aren't
i tell myself
that every reason must have a reason
however, all i see is a breathe of possibility
once warm, once cold
now, simply lost in a definitive ocean