ALL RESPONSES |
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She looks twice good
in this white room;
my blood labor
swells in delight
just to gaze.
She is my private season.
No, a homemade path,
a garden moon made mine.
A rhyme of gifted sequins
and brilliant white light.
Please let the calendar
be flawed, the clock blank. |
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My muse is succulent,
she drips down my chin and entangles
in my hair. She throws off the covers
and stretches languid and arched like
a cat, prowling round my heart
for tid-bits to nudge my way. My muse
dares me to bite into her warm flesh
or to caress a silken thigh and watch
the pleasure ripple like a stone thrown
into the pond or the figure skater’s
blade slicing the ice into calligraphy.
My muse breathes into my ear and I
must obey or be burned by regret.
Why didn’t I write down what
she told me, why did I refuse to
play? |
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| When she wakes up, Alicia will stumble to the bathroom to tinkle. The sound of urine streaming from her body into the toilet water is an early-morning wind chime. Some times she inhales and learns the smell of what exits her body—it’s still a mystery. Or, struck by the amber color, she wonders if she has been drinking enough water. The observations are simple, unassociated with emotional baggage. Back to bed, she’ll draw the teal bed sheet over her hips, make a pillow of her arm, and slip back into slumber. She’ll slip back into weightlessness and forget how strange it is to her, at five AM, that she is wearing a body, that the body has a bladder and can wake her, at any hour, to care for itself. |
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Sometimes what we see can’t be identified
at first. We look at it dumbly; our eyes can’t
get ahold of it: a bright patch of sunlight?
a clump of ivory? a bird, white, landed in a nest
of white bright feathers? What to do with this?
The eyes struggle, crouch at strangeness,
stumble away and back, hand shielding them
from brightness, mind fumbling with orders:
back up, run, don’t touch. The brain, unable
to come up with a name. (Names always calm,
give a sense of direction, status.) Then what?
In Thrace at least a thousand years ago
jewelers made gorgeous bracelets, necklaces,
wreaths of gold. They had their tools, little hammers,
pliers, gold-softeners. Even today I recognize
their shapes, press forward in awe to see. See.
To imagine how it’d feel to wear such light brightness.
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I Dream of Horses
They rush out of the night
shaking four walls, sleeping body,
whipped by a fury somewhere behind...
horses warping my dark
window-glass as they pass, driving the pulse
in my throat, starlight-muscled
thick flesh rippling, the great heads toss...
2
Night after night horses thunder out of the roots
of an innocent tree, out of angry grass, stained asphalt
bare-dirt of the playground, swings twisting
on their chains in the wind...
out of my father's grey wasting, out of his
old-man sunken face, out of my mother's colossal
disappointments, out of the humming ground
where grandmothers buried
under an immigrant name cut in stone...every night
the horses, the horses, the child, repeating
her disobediences…
she unbinds them, she sets them loose.
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I know her hidden
between
very few lines;a cat
camouflaged by the leaves
of autumn, golden
purring animated curses
at her wanna-be gawkers.
In her open cage
she is strangely obscured,
deliciously distant
and yet disturbingly close
(or is it the other way around?).
Winter will bring her the wind.
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Alicia visits Doctor Fleming, looking for relief from her ennui. Even though there have been ethical questions about his medical practice, he has many adherents, all who will testify to the success of his treatments. His stubble and 50ish wrinkles are in stark contrast to the youthful twinkle in his eye. She feels at ease. After a brief discussion, he asks her to lie down on the couch in his office.
“Here,” he says, and hand her a pair of retro 70s sunglasses, “you’ll need to wear these.” She puts them on and lies down. Next, he hands her an interconnected web of spheres and instructs her to lie on her side, holding them in a fetal position. They feel warm and lifelike, and she is filled with a sense of contentment. “How do you feel?” He asks.
Alicia whimpers softly. She’s focused on the comfort flowing into her from the spheres. “Mmm…..good…good.” Dr. Fleming smiles. “These spheres are tuned to the personality signature in your neural network.” His face turns serious. “We also have the capability to modulate them with all the other signatures in our worldwide database.” Alicia is listening, but she continues to mumble. The doctor asks, “Shall we connect you to the others?” She nods. |
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Last night
you opened me
a ziplock bag
trapped in space
Warmth
permiated
through
me.
Softer than a cloud..
deeper than the ocean
touch was not human..
love sipped divine..
We flew as one..
transcending the universe
in an instant...
throughout eternity
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The spaceship rounded Pluto,
the cargo aglow in comet tails,
asleep, earbuds pumping mission
statements, news from earth,
the calls of former lovers,
Bowie tunes on loop. While deep
in her core the motions of
Saturn continued to echo, her
responses forming parsec
by parsec, the words she would
say when she returned. |
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She bathes in the dark,
blowing out candles
before going down
into the water; fragrant as cinnamon,
wrapped in cocoon of soft waves lapping
at the hard cast iron lip, eyes open
watching imaginary air bubbles circle to surface
Groans of the city abate beside
warm water cooling.
The new womb dying.
She stays until the water leaves her
goose fleshed, nipples ripe buds,
blossoms to keep.
Lowering herself inch by inch
into bed, she says a prayer
to no one in particular.
A light, harsh in it’s beauty
erases new bruises, smooths old scars.
Incubating, she dreams of nothing.
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falling in love
is like jumping into the ocean,
and falling out of love
is like diving into a Dixie cup—
you get wet either way.
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A sleeping Sun’s
fingers uncurl,
revealing newborn
beauty – light in our
universal palm. |
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She stacks my spare change into uneven little silos,
leans her head forward and nibbles on my chin.
She smells like a lily-shaped cigarette,
like September sitting on a barstool,
Gliding from my chin to shoulder,
she asks me to put her in a painting,
to make her nose shrink if I could,
to make certain that I am on the canvas with her
not naked or dancing, just there in plain view
of the gods and treasure maps,
of this hard, loud song, and of the constellations
she is tonguing slowly on my back. |
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She tells me about him -
waits to see what I'll say.
I think for a moment -
grab the lamp by the neck
and throw it across the room.
The bulb shatters and I
storm through the new black,
pulling whatever hits my hands
off our shelves and tables
- force it all to the floor. |
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he teased me
about glowing
in the dark
there’s something
unnerving
about swallowing pills
i’m not allowed to touch
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The darkness of the world
outside of the soul within
illuminates
her inner features
like wings torn off a fairy
to be given to a firefly.
Float on, loving woman, float on. |
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| we glow from the inside, but no one sees how hard we try, lapping at the edges of life, pushing, mauling every moment until we learn to let the moment pass us by; lying in bed. the first crow call of morning to wake us, or maybe it is night that rakes our eyes, and we must try to live a bit more before it passes by. |
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When I stretch
my nighttime
glance
across your twilight
walk
the sleepless
night of your eye whites
glints like
satellites
o how I would
admire
your affected smile
orbiting this
celestial mile!
But No,
the tartar of these lambent
stares rarely
glides past my tongue
and
morphs into
the longest constellations
my breath
has
tightly
drawn!
But when
they
make, entrance!
my body
models, traces
your silent
figure
you woman stardust
as it
performs
on the asteroid stage
of an endless void.
I, still, avoid
the silent distance
we share
and although moonlit
hope is rare;
perhaps I will
find constellation
in knowing I could
almost applaud
you in the auditorium
of the
cosmos.
Do
you hear me
flashing dancer?
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Sand and sable Venus
radiating foam and light;
a land-bridge of
Egyptian cotton.
The sun sees her from the inside,
out.
She is Sahara,
cinnamon-spun, rolls of smoke and
icing,
sex for the tongue,
beautiful mantis,
widow lady long-legs.
The heat rages, she burns.
Who remains on her sheets,
has mapped her acres, mined her fields?
When Thomas said, 'against the dying of the light'
It was her. Venus. It always was.
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A woman beautiful in motion
Deserves the benefice of dance.
No duller gift permits devotion
To woman beautiful in motion.
But cold and witless as the ocean,
Flowing past all circumstance
Is woman beautiful in motion,
Claiming the elegy of dance. |
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He said:
All women are beautiful.
You tell them they are beautiful
and they become beautiful.
It works.
They glow.
He said:
You’re beautiful.
He said:
You’re glowing.
She knew the compliment
was not specific or personal.
She also knew
he meant it. |
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Christmas lights held close to your body
in the darkness of the night.
An illusion of warmth,
of love for you that lost both.
Can you feel ancient and proved by life
even if young in the body and years?
The black and white of this image
of shadows, of darkness and soft white lights
is strangely comforting.
What can hurt you in the night
when awake you can't dream of his eyes?
Nothing more than your childhood monsters
now stored in corners, drawers, behind doors
sealed forever by adulthood,
the one you wish to escape
now that for the first time,
you have known love and pain at once.
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There are no open doors, no bastions
I have left noone to conquer me
I am an impregnable gate
you cannot enter
you cannot slide into me
stop for a while and listen
there is only one river
flowing through my body
put your ear on my stomach
this river wants me to stay in its water
can you hear the noise?
even if you stand on the higher balcony
you won't see the flood coming
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