A garden stoop to sit on, peeking neighbors crane their necks
over bushes and fences, observe your behaviors as if they were birds, and you, the birdwatcher.
generous amounts of time sits with you on that stoop, trucks pass, bikers, vans full of gardeners to their next assignment.
a sound of daytime in the suburbs is a miser's foot, a flower.
fistful of coins, fistfuls of flour, a mouth in the foot, an egg in the brain.
the shape of a tree-branch, caught up in flames.
(we are:
- blankets of flesh stitched together with needles and blood.
- a soup kitchen that weeps tears like an onion.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Monday, May 30, 2011
don't hurt me, i got nothin'
10/1/10
the feel of that back point
of the skull, resting between ears
that can't hear
and directly opposite eyse that close too much
the piercing of the head to the
floor, heavy, like a dynamite egg,
like a broken machine, total stillness.
It says, kill, kill, kill.
And the backpoint sketched smoothly
from a thousand strokes of the artist's
pencil, that is the murder, too.
All falls to the floor, is broken.
Already rested, the skull finally dies, is free.
the feel of that back point
of the skull, resting between ears
that can't hear
and directly opposite eyse that close too much
the piercing of the head to the
floor, heavy, like a dynamite egg,
like a broken machine, total stillness.
It says, kill, kill, kill.
And the backpoint sketched smoothly
from a thousand strokes of the artist's
pencil, that is the murder, too.
All falls to the floor, is broken.
Already rested, the skull finally dies, is free.
Tablescape
5/15/11
(Ed. 9/27/12)
On the last day, there was a last meal. The last bread, the last tears. Departure from this life forever- a white drifting noise, a great wave of silence.
The table is set. White cloth of course, John's drifting cloak. The candles burn with vehemence borne from desperate survival,the last of a dying breed. Bread, warm and soft, every few feet, their tops etched in paradisic perfection. Flowers bloom, the cloth is clean. Soon they will be serving.
The whisper grows louder. It is the call to the end. It pulls while it weighs, like Death upon your chest, beckons you. The blueberries, scattered just so on this saintlike cloth, turn to stone, smoothened pebbles. Let me tell you how one becomes a saint. First it builds up in your heart, truly from a whisper to an uncontrollable rage - but never escapes. One must hold it in for an entire mortal life, and therein at the moment of reckoning perform that guiless art - the exhale, letting go of that breath and with it everything - the universe, which can no longer be divorced from itself. Such is the path to canonization - a tricky art, indeed.
The table requires attention. Yes, the moment when life turns to stone, what then? A feathered platter is set upon you from the gentlest of hands. Its beauty, in which it surely holds your happiness, oh and your terror, when you realize the bird has been plucked from your own feathers, that it wears your plumage upon its lifeless eyes!
The loudness, long anticipated, does not come. Softly you cry, "ah, little mother! I am dying..."
A vision that seizes you - and is gone.
(Ed. 9/27/12)
On the last day, there was a last meal. The last bread, the last tears. Departure from this life forever- a white drifting noise, a great wave of silence.
The table is set. White cloth of course, John's drifting cloak. The candles burn with vehemence borne from desperate survival,the last of a dying breed. Bread, warm and soft, every few feet, their tops etched in paradisic perfection. Flowers bloom, the cloth is clean. Soon they will be serving.
The whisper grows louder. It is the call to the end. It pulls while it weighs, like Death upon your chest, beckons you. The blueberries, scattered just so on this saintlike cloth, turn to stone, smoothened pebbles. Let me tell you how one becomes a saint. First it builds up in your heart, truly from a whisper to an uncontrollable rage - but never escapes. One must hold it in for an entire mortal life, and therein at the moment of reckoning perform that guiless art - the exhale, letting go of that breath and with it everything - the universe, which can no longer be divorced from itself. Such is the path to canonization - a tricky art, indeed.
The table requires attention. Yes, the moment when life turns to stone, what then? A feathered platter is set upon you from the gentlest of hands. Its beauty, in which it surely holds your happiness, oh and your terror, when you realize the bird has been plucked from your own feathers, that it wears your plumage upon its lifeless eyes!
The loudness, long anticipated, does not come. Softly you cry, "ah, little mother! I am dying..."
A vision that seizes you - and is gone.
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