Xenophilia

I. Sower

In the crinkled-up inkling of a question...

Cracked voices found me
as they fled throats full-
filled with a caked red dust

Their fleet pleas hounded me:
“Don’t forsake this stony ground.
Lay on patient hands

“Bone-hard, break it. Uproot
its thorns. Distract the birds
toward other pursuits”

I soaked in their shattering
chorus, then it fell – silence.
Someday my plants will come

II. Soil

In the lush crush of hushed hours...

The come-as-you-go wind came
and she scatter-rained
the sparkly seeds she carried

Maybe she had no plan, or
maybe the plan was to sow
her songs chaotically

Either way, she graced me
with one seed to grow. If I can
tend it ever so tenderly

Its complexity will push
through headlong to bear fruits
and miraculous perplex me

(Inspired by the Parable of the Sower, and a continuing conversation with a friend)

Zero emissions: A lesson in sustainable poetry

I. Reuse

Weightless, I walked
impatiently
through this darkly steep
and thorny thicket.
With each step, I passed
carelessly
over a world of wrongs
un-lived,
not committed
if imagined
but razor-sharp
when limned.
They all bled me
till ghostly grey
I left no mark,
only the memorized
feint of pale words spoken
to and for no-one.

II. Recycle

If when lonely roving
thick-lined felt,
rashly I imply
in thin-stalk-fonted yap
we met before
while toeing separate parts
through oily lands
marred by
murky nickle mons,
do teach me
to spare my pitted foe
and deliver me
to dazzle-destined toll hall
where potent word-loss magic
wrings this soaked
throw of noughts

III. Reduce

when
i felt
rashly
thin
separate
lands
pitted
me
to toll
potent
rings
of nought

---

This piece may need a little bit of an explanation as it's mostly an intellectual exercise. For Reuse, I reworked an old poem called "Weightless, I walked" (click the link above). For Recycle, I took all of the letters from Reuse and scrambled them to come up with new words. For Reduce, I did an erasure on Recycle, stripping it down to a few choice words (while keeping them in the same order).

Named drops

My "love" hung inert
When I blurted it, you winced
Then "we" plummeted.

Gritty, take and give

Tide falls, quick
its woe not
gently receding
Freed, sludge-slow
a crescent muck smiles
wide as the foam goes

Doing Christ one better

It’s not just bowed wood slats
singed till tar-black
on that bushel basket
keeping your brilliance pinned.
There are mediations of glass
and twirls of brass fittings
regulating its bold flame down
to dull orange glow.
Smash it all,
obtuse and obscuring.
Where will your light go?
To heavens and its birthing.

(inspired by the parable of the Lamp under a bushel, and a wish)

Decomposition

Glad leaf, gracious host
Gave Not a small spot to rot
It's splotched with regret

Absorption

Leaf-alit drop slips
To pause, stretch, then celebrate
Her cyclical thirsts

Unsafe cloistering

Midnight's ghoulish howls
Rummage macadam rivers
Better pray elsewhere

A sinful synaesthesia

When I said “I love you,” I lied
with a drifting and dreamy head
across the velvety sea
I imagined
resting and narrowly defined
in the nakedness
at the edge of your lap.

I have a history
of over-indulging
mixed-up senses.

I tasted the sight
of a gently curved nose.

I caressed the scent
of a lightly perfumed neck.

I’ll speak but not hear again
of the salty, savory, sweetness;
all bitterness has gone.

It’s not that I binged
so much as feasted
after a prolonged period
of self-deprivation.

And now I’m caught
between two urges:
To shave, to shear, to no longer
shabbily make shrift;
Or to revel
in the sloppy temptation
of recalling you.

Powerless I'll watch
the dissembling
tomorrow makes.

Before it comes, whisper-soft,
I repeat my mistake,
and unreliably say,
“I loved you.”

Aeration

Boring worm whispers
Through the soil's firmest clutching
This joy is release

Cold seeps

I would have posited longings ago
this short-shrift to-do over such a curt list undone
was inconceivable
outside
the pages of deceptively practiced perceptions
published in a pop-up book smirk,
or beyond
the canary-yellow frames of a cartoonish
distortion relishing its mired but spongy giggles

A
Been-here-all-along,
you’ve-never-bothered-to-look
lake sleeps implacably
at the bottom of an irascible ocean

Be
Whatever it may,
you can’t deny the wantonly
watted life teeming pretty as it pleases,
untroubled by a hollow-core belief
or the extremest demands of our foul temper

See
How I could have,
if I’d only swallowed
those bubbled-up blurts
ring-wronging the tip of my wriggling tongue,
never been audibly
landed by one alluringly barbed certainty

There are supine bodies—
stagnant, quicksilver pure—
no material ship navigates
and no intentional intruder can swim
without
emerging atypically
unsettled by the caustic exposure

Tread lithely
when you go;
this shoreline bites.
Its clustered rocks will snap shut around you
after digging in below you with a protruding toe,
and its carmine stalks will sting you
as they writhe past you
to mime a part-less goodbye

Here be where
the monstrous cold seeps
and a hellish hot vents
in compliance with this centuries-old complaint:
too-short was the time we wept
for those wiggly wonders
we could have kept
if we’d only octopus-arm embraced
the inevitability of their bandy-legged escape

Hard learning

Listless parable travels
On a pebble's parabolic curve
Then its lesson hits, blah plunk

Whiffs

Decayed leaf, damp soil
Whiffs of an oaken schism
Tween summer and fall

Croak

Paired wasps buzz its pond
Mate-less the bullfrog responds
An awful low croak

In the minute coming of His second, all hours turn to dusk

Who’s to say how
He might come back for a second
inhumanely heaped-up helping,
if we grant that immensity
of our assumption He did come
kingly first into this inside-
out size from a do-you-miss-me-
yet’s mirthfully mythical realm

I have seen Him
lurking in a particle-board fine
finish on the thin outer membranes
of our estranged and better faces;
He’s Higgs-boson omnipresent,
but far too theoretical
for our broadly practical, turned-
away gazes to rediscover

There He is now
rising in the favela’s gap-
toothed grins with fabulously naughty
corners this glee-pawed grandpa twists
using cur jests his nappy charges
imagine as flightless quarrels
grey-hooded pigeons would gaggle
were they over-stuffed on golden grain

And there again
on a Calcutta mound’s cluttered
conic end, smog-like He slowly lifts
with the crust-gnawed, razor-wire crimps
of a soup-can’s unconsummated lid
as dainty fingers crawl in toward
a gelatinous glob still clinging
to the powerful pretense it’s meat

And there once more,
conceding oms, He restless flickers
at the margins of blocky beige
Beijing screens as crisply clicked clacks
circumnavigate the darkling
smooth patches and spit-spark a few
conscious drips to squiggle out from
the babble of noxious red seas

Emerged, this welp
won’t toddle off to dribble-stain
the dressy linens of a made-up
nanny’s well-mannered and ornate
evil; it will curl up instead,
a swaddled yawn with no yearn to
suckle under His real mother’s
gaping wide and grungy bloused best

Blood XV: Satisfaction

At first sip blood's thirst
Swells toward destitution
Its curse fills oceans

(And thus it is concluded...)

Blood XIV: Somnabulatory

This night drips sticky
Blood-soaked fingers, no telling
What things they'll cling to

(Only one more left of these, then on to other things...)

9-11: Art, poetry and ritual remembering

Yesterday's debut of the September 11 paintings by my friend George Kokines at the Gail Borden Public Library was a big success. There's a nice piece of coverage on it at The Courier-News website, including a photograph of the Ground Zero piece (but ignore the characterization of the mixed-media pieces as a sculpture).

The library is a lovely building, and the organizers did a wonderful job of arranging the three pieces in the facility's rotunda. If the estimated 200 attendees hadn't been moved enough by the art, they were brought to their feet for a standing ovation after George's emotional description of the pieces and his experiences of the day that defines them.

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn sent along a declaration honoring the occasion, and after it was read, I got to recite my three poems that were inspired by George's paintings (Morning, our tomorrow; Saint Nicholas; and Silver Wings). Despite a mild case of nerves, I didn't trip over any lines.

I'd like to thank George for including me in such a special occasion, and Kate Burlette, Director of Library Experiences, who acted as emcee and created a nice display for each of the poems next to the corresponding paintings.

Blood XIII: Amorous

Love crowds dingy streets
Once certain to bring blushes
Can the blood make room?

Blood XII: Humility

Pride draws lines in blood
But finds with time its fiercest
Roars do diminish