In my dream am standing right here / you were by the window / gazing at something more interesting than me / I was reading you with distant eyes / like my favorite book with folded pages / I have highlighted you / as important / and you have me down as nondescript / a black and white photograph fluttering to the floor / I've faded into many backgrounds / a moving shadow watching light from a distance / You are light from a distance / and I am all to ready to be your darkside.
Longing (A Never-Was Poem)
Kids Are an Inspiration...
Baby, Go Soft
He blows bubbles
thin fingers gripping the wand and huffs hard
the bubbles reflect the overhead lighting, refracting
and I see visions discriminating themselves from the soapy sheen
how many times we’ve blown bubble before
and we’ll blow bubble after
or I’ll put my lips together, paused to blow
he’ll learn through imitation
though my fingers gripping the wand are bigger
and the lips hold in harsher sounds
that’s the natural roughness of surviving life, sometimes it pays to just be more gentle.
Memorial Day
I.
I will always remember blazing across the state
following a course set by
I scorched
and shaved a full hour off my estimated time.
I’ve never needed a compass to find home,
but in the middle of the movement
You never realize how fast you’re going.
II.
The fireworks burst in slow motion
insistent on attention; she adverts her eyes
unblinking, I stare straight ahead.
III.
I walk the vacant streets after dark alone
summer in
a deep breath escapes pursed lips
it’s the first time in months for easy thoughtless breaths.
The Trouble with Remaining Professional
Because he views speaking as a profession
he tells me, “memorize your piece, paper
shaking between your fingers is distracting…”
he doesn’t know that I seek the distraction
like an ADHD kid ‘stiming’ on moving lights
transparent, the paper my grip on what’s permanent
because motions are as faded as memories and words flee yellowing pages
as the years spin across my chest and I’m caught
standing still again, staring pass the window and the spotlit open mic
at another sun devoured by the oak trees.
Marathon
She found faith through submission
the destruction of her spine and days
turn the wired spokes down memory lane a bargain:
be careful for what you wish.
She says the evidence of her life,
calluses cracked and bleeding rivulets across her palms;
I could have traced the lines
into an autobiography of self-portraits.
I visited seeing concrete frown.
The sky knew nakedness without eyes.
She doesn’t understand. My shoes were tearing sentences,
like being reminded of a waving checkered flag;
Gamma Rays and Abandonment Issues
Dear Dr. Banner,
You’re father never hugged you
enough. You have a right to be upset. Anger Management
gives you someone professional
to talk to. Open Up, Share.
From a Leonard Pitts editorial(See the Article at www.miamiherald.com)
Sweet Soul Music
―A Found Poem for Gerald Levert
A singer of thunderous power, mimicking dance steps
he watched from backstage; borrowing
vocal dives and climbs, barrel rolls
from his father's playbook
imagine what it must be like
to lose a son
Remember when black music was about soul
and soul was about truth and truth
promised the moon and stars to a woman, and truth
pleaded with breaking voice and teary eyes for another chance, and truth
made you hear echoes of soul that came before, echoes--
Cherish women. Baby, please; is becoming a lost art
but imagine what it must be like
to lose a son
Sometimes, begging
is the best part. Sometimes make up justifies
break up. love requires vulnerability
more: baby, please
less: too proud to beg
we held one another and shelter each other from life
wrapped in a need deeper than sex
but imagine what it must be like
to lose a son
"Baby, hold on to me," he sang
because he knew what we were missing.
With Her Six Words Etched in My Skull...
She masks her love in sardonic laughter, diagrams
her breaking point with chalk, maps of boundaries.
She says, “We don’t mix well, I’m oil, you’re vinegar
or water; I’m no chef, I just blow smoke.”
It’s too scary for love to be written in cursive on her spine and her heart
is too fragile a package. She says,
“I’m use to packaging other’s pain, it’s normal to hate
me.” Tries to mask the scent of fear in a strong stature, the unmarked change
in her spine. She stiffens
at the thought of weakness, chalk outlines of her tiny deaths
exhaling the smoke of burning funeral pyres
where tears are as good as oil.
Oil paint mosaics of lust have smeared with live creating
an unwanted package, a miserable masterpiece. Alone
she smokes long unlit cigarettes, leaning against life, wearing
a ceramic mask of cool confidence; feelings,
momentary butterflies, chalked up to indigestion—bad food—
she imagined tingles on her spine.
Sometimes, spines have been known to compress due to pressure, grinding axes
and bones make sharp edges, not body oils, unable to move without stabbing;
chalk-up inability to change to re-learning
history. She is packaged jade: smooth and hard. For years, she’s juggled
her handful of makeshift masks or she hid
underneath a thick screen, walls of smoke.
Through the smoke clouds, she watches a wounded back disappear, sees
her red handprints, a burden of proof, seared in her lover’s spine
time can’t mask the force of a shove, unwillingness
to oil a rusty heart, locked and lost
packaged to survive life, a war?
She never crossed the dividing chalk line, just sat
in her self-made cell marking off victims in chalk, comforting herself
with smoke, matching black lungs. She makes
perfect packages of heartaches, numbs
the tingles in her spine. Remembering to keep
her steel doors well-oiled and ever-revolving, someone has to perfect
wearing masks.
When love tries to ease the mask away, erase the chalk lines, she disappears
in the smoke of her oil-fire tears, off
to package her heart along with the awkward tingle in her spine.
After Sean Carswell....
The Moment you Know…
-After Sean Carswell
When you walk into your second period English Lit. class on tender
teenage legs with nothing but fifteen years of angst to live up to
and you take the blue plastic seat in the back near the row
of huge sun-filtering windows, you fix a decidedly nonchalant look
on your face (though English is your favorite class) then she
walks in, your friend (and more…?), and takes the seat next to you
and you realize since she arrived you’ve held
your breath.
When she grabs your sweaty palm, smiles at you mischievously and drags you
to the empty girls bathroom; you sit on top of the dirty fifty-year-old radiator
and act cool and collected when really you’re all bundled nerves.
She sits next to you, legs crossed and lights a thin cigarette, recounts
some story that you only half listen to, because her thigh is pressed
against yours and she leaning conspiratorially into you. Her voice
becomes indistinct echoes and all you want to do is swallow kisses
from her neck or brush your suddenly dry lips against her
still moving ones. She asks, through thin smoke trails, “Are you listening?”
the only answer you can give is an ever-reddening blush.
When your best friend asks you to deliver his hastily written love note
and you jealously do, not because you’re a great friend, but you’re curious
what did he write? what will she say? and why are you feeling this way?
After she reads it, she laughs and you laugh too, she shakes her head
and you shrug, walk back to him trying not to be a happy bearer of bad news.
When she’s got you alone in her boat of a car, outside your house
and you both stall for time and then she gently kisses you, instantly
you increase her momentary boldness, as you break moments later, breathless
her smile reaches her eyes and she knows and you know she knows
you know.
Karmic Cultivation
-“Tell me, who I have to be/to gain some reciprocity?”
-Lauryn Hill, “Ex-Factor”
I am the third reincarnation of myself; the daughter,
a woman, the holy spirit?
Malleability is the lack of formation, I’ve adopted—
she’s adapted to stone or she hasn’t developed at all
“Give me your heart…” Her long curved fingers grasp
at my chest, I hand it over still rapidly, beating;
she only showers ,me with steel flakes from her thick thirteenth skin
it’s bad luck or bad timing, she’s not shedding,
—I sew pieces of discarded layers with others; make myself: chainmail,
a shield, armor to sleep in.
Each day brings new cells a change in cytoplasm prisons that grow
not wiser, but weighed down by its own thickness, harder.
Mostly moisture making too big a show of cohesion, I can’t corrode anything,
lacking the acidity, too ph balanced…
So I replenish myself in myself, seventy-five percent water; submerged
I drown myself clean.
