Two-timing you, but for a good cause

I've begun blogging at another site, but that doesn't mean my heart isn't in this relationship any more. I'll still be versifying life here, but I'm doing some more prosaic work over at the blog for NICODA (the New International Center for Diverse Artists). NICODA is organizing an arts festival entitled "How We Are Connected" to take place this fall in Queens. I could tell you more about it, but why not go read the full story on their blog? Here's a snippet. You can click the title to read the full post.

How We Are Connected: The revelations of art and science

... Using the Genographic Project as inspiration, “How We Are Connected” (HWAC), an arts festival organized by the New International Center of Diverse Artists (NICODA) is trying to uncover similar connections, but from a cultural perspective. The HWAC project integrates theatre, dance, music, and multi-media from a broad range of artists, all responding to the deep inter-connectedness put forward by the science at the heart of the Genographic Project.

Not only does HWAC provide insight into the ways the modern and ancient forces of migration, both voluntary and forced, have contributed to the mixing of cultures and the interchange of different forms of expressions, but it also allows us to trace back the paths of development for each of those art forms and see how they’ve influenced each other as they matured together. ...

Inspired by true events

I’ve read the news, and its red
with painted lip prints, and the stain
of stranger thumbprints. They’re not
mine. Neither of them. They belong,
lip and thumb, paint and stranger,
singularly to those others who don’t
read or write such things. They may
bleed, them, but the blood isn’t red,
or crimson, or cardinal, or scarlet.
Pick a shade of red, and it isn’t that,
at least not until it’s too, too late
to stanch. The bully’s standard is to take
it all, all of it except the fall crisp that led
into this strangely warmer winter. I took it,
and I saved it in my bones to prepare,
but the cold didn’t come. Not like we
were used to. I’m told the bully wears
what he takes with a dashing style. See it,
that royal blue that outfits him? The flowing
robes? The gold. I’ve been robbed. We have
been. Not of things, but of a view. A view
with no room for us in its downside-up
very periscope-unlike perspective.
There’s no upside to the up-down
and just around the corner trips
I take. To the grocer. To the bar. To
the five and dime. It’s fattened up
to a dollar. And the slimming newsprint
costs more than what I get
without the paper. I don’t
get it, not the print, not the paper, not
the red lip prints, not the thumbprints
left by strangers, not the news
I’ve read and I’m reading.

Neologist

The accentric in me wants
to pronounce it
unclude
and to show you

Black Stork

Happy Birthday Jill

Oh, how at ten-o-six
pee-em o’clock, three tens
and a pack of five years
ago, a bounteous-
ly boughed world, filled with so
much love, beauty and grace-
fulness got more gracious
still, and its lively gifts
more exceptionally
exquisite with her birth.

Fun with fruit

What's wanting

So, why won’t you,
(as if my asking’s enough) go,
when you’re wont to,
(at least it’s what you say, or show)
and I want you
(yes, I’ve left off the “to,” I know)
too?

My bubble

My bubble doesn’t trouble
me. It’s clear as smutty blue glass.
It keeps me cool, and I’m doubly
safe inside its gelatin grasp.
Out there is where dry misfits slip
by unaware. Whetly I watch
them, and most fittingly my lips
I press against its oily splotched
membrane. What they dare to
do or not isn’t troubling either.
I’ve got this bubble to
maintain, and the air’s not free here.

My bubble gives me a crooked smile

When the white wants more words

If I could still hold your hand in
my eye, I’d turn it over there
and I’d pull it into mine, my hand
and my eye, and I’d use it, no them,
your hand and mine, our two
pointing fingers pointing out like
two small sticks parting from the same
broken branch. We could scratch-
write together our word, one word,
maybe two words, before the fickle white,
and your hand, and mine slip away
again, a foot, a yard and then
a mile falling between and on
us to break that branch’s end.
Our word, or our words, might stay
behind to look out on two new children,
a boy and a girl, well-bundled in blue
and red cottons, by mothers, against
the cold. They might, this boy and girl,
in one afternoon, assemble, then tear
down an icy fort, a fort made of more white.
It, our word, or them, our words, might
stay and pretend other words are
coming, other words to keep it or them
company when the boy and girl go
back to warm suppers. Words
we could write, or could have
written, of the ways we’d live
and love and share in each other’s
tomorrows, and of the way we’d hold
the suns-to-be, the suns of those
tomorrows, up against one light,
the brightness of this white and the one
or two words we’d left in it. There’s no
sun today, there’s just this white, and it
shines instead before it parts with
our two hands, our two sticks, our one
broken branch. I’ll hold them all in
my eye.

[another poem for Jill]

I reject

I reject
empire I reject
an empire can be good I reject
the idea of this nation
this good nation this beacon
as defensibly indispensable I reject
the false divisions it sits on
sitting behind its walls its guns
pointing out in every direction I reject
its standards of living no matter how
now diminished They're still inflated
at the purchase of the blood
of our dispossessed
at the purchase of the blood
of innocents abroad
at the purchase of the clearest
blues and the deepest greens despoiled
at the purchase of a future
counted by too few breaths
I reject all it takes to make itself
feel proud It takes all I can bear
not to tell it how much
I reject it

Sometmes-things (the poem)

Sometimes-things, they aren’t
drawn clearly enough. Sometimes-things aren’t
meant to stand out. Black sits on black,
then it moves around to white. Come lie back
down with me here, I’ll tell you about them.
They’re most times things, but sometimes I see them
and they feel much closer to something living.
It’s not that they speak or move, it’s something
in the way they lie so still but are still shaking
within. Are you shaking now too? No it’s not shaking,
it’s a hum. A string continues to play its song,
much later than, long after, we’ve stopped listening. Long
after we’ve stopped. Can they be, when I know they’re not?
I can’t see them seeing me or being, and they’re not
like me. They’re more and they’re not, but it’s just then,
when they are just things to me. It’s then--
are you still listening-- sometimes
I know I disappoint myself by thinking it. Sometimes
I know they mean to have more meaning than I can find
in them. In the blank somewhere spaces where I lag behind
them, sometimes I crave to catch up. The wind can
make such a pretty knocking sound if the tree’s hands
will play along. No don’t get up. I’m almost done.
I’m trying to tell you I want to be that someone
who’s willing to live sometimes like them, and when
not, not frightened of some place where I’ll lie down by them.

Sometimes-things

Exercises in Anthropomorphism

Five stoic sparrows
sit in vented heat. Don’t mind
the nervous starling.