Friday, August 26, 2022

Finding Out

 Why do adults like things that taste bad?

Why do we sometimes laugh as we cry?

Is coffee bitter, is bitterness life?

Why in the pharmacy do women buy cakes of makeup to conceal their bruises?

A cynic's wit aims for the knees until everyone tagged is bleeding out.

What is it about things 'bad for you' that are good for you?

Who buys all the sin they can get, and wants more? More punishment?

When blood quickens and parts soften or harden accordingly, 

who says you move towards the good

the yielding, the syrupy thick sticky sweetness of that unknown fruit

with a hard, high walnut of a pit,

shiny with the pain of finding out?

And who says you lock up the sweet,

restrict the calories of the erotic

to fit into an outfit all rolled up in roles?

Who says good is bad?

Can bad be good for you?

When that curtain is pushed aside, would you recognize the country beyond?


Sunday, May 6, 2012

In a Thunderstorm

If we made love in a thunderstorm,
Sidled up to each other in the sticky heat of that expectant afternoon,
Our sweaty brows would be thunderheads
Born where two fronts meet
One warm, one cool, to bring forth rain and fire.

If we heeded the call of those rippling winds,
Following a current of longing
As tangible in the hanging air
As the first cool breeze that heralds the storm,
Our hearts would thunder first and loudest.

If we gave in to the looming presence between us
when that desire became too great to contain
And our touches crackled and sparked,
Then it would start to pour.

If we took our cue
From the staccato on the roof,
Water would fall fast and furious as kisses.

If our bare skin purred like the thunder's rumble,
Sending shivers up our spines,
And we gasped in air that was suddenly honey,
Then waves of lightning would finally crash over us in relief.

If we made love in a thunderstorm,
Then after we rolled apart
We'd reach out to brush against each other,
Lightly, just touching,
Gentle as rain.

A constellation of hurt

I'm an astronaut.
I've visited you.
As I look up in the sky I can see your home,
In a constellation of hurts, lost loves, and lonelier plantets.
It is a place of regret for me.
We don't go there anymore.
I'm a star and you're a star. 
When stars collide, the shards of shrapnel
Hang in the void and aggregate around
The biggest lump of heartbreak they can find, that lump
An iron block in the pit of my stomach
That rises to choke off my voice.
I've traveled the stars, I've shone so bright,
Yet all that answers my stuttering fear
Is the darkness.

Monday, August 29, 2011

Dishes pile in the sink when you're with the one you love.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

New home

I am moving to
http://bloomlate.wordpress.com

I will still post some poetry and thoughts here, but more chronological and contextual information and pictures of my surroundings and my work, will go on the new blog.
I have also moved to the Grand Canyon.
See you in the world!

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

A cat--whose only signs of aging are a deep chest cough and balding eyebrows--insists on sitting on top of my arm. Life is quiet, by which I mean I am quiet. The seven of pentacles, three of wands, and the Hermit. I am coming up all waiting cards, dreaming of the return of the perversions of hope.
Diogenes follows me through a prolonged literary ramble, from an anecdote in a self-help book to a slick reference in Neil Gaiman's short stories, and now this. He is carrying the hermit's lantern, always lit in his search for an honest man. This light here has just gone out, a blown fuse I expect, and it's hard to replace.
I made no choice when I wrote down that my purpose is to create masterpieces of time and evolution, and I cannot take credit for this bit of spun silk and dreamstuff, though since the age of twelve, I've been very concerned with the puzzle of my destiny and the scope of a human life. In the Mastery of Love, Don Miguel Ruiz simply states "A dream master creates a masterpiece of life." Making a leap here, the purpose of my life is to live it, and the life of a human is itself a masterpiece of time and evolution. FORTUNE COOKIE: BE THE SYMPHONY. It is hard to loose my grasp on the idea of production, of forcing my life into some vessel of lasting worthiness.
I have reached the point in the Two Towers where I no longer want to rush ahead. This is where Tolkein splits the action into two books, the first accounting for the adventures of Merry and Pippin, Legolas, Aragorn and Gimli, and their dealings with the Ents and the Riders of Rohan and with the affairs of wizards. My favorite of all the books, I think because my motto is "Follow the wizard". And the second half, my least favorite, in which Sam and Frodo take a cold hard slog over marshes and dusty lands into Mordor, with the treacherous Gollum in tow. No magic or gallantry there. The transition from companionship, cheer and daring deeds, to a present and growing horror leaves me shocked every time.


Thursday, January 6, 2011

Creature of memory, she- never, unless Einstein- Aliens have landed-lived, loved

The enormity of small events colliding:
the feeling built slowly
all day
pearls sliding one by one onto a string
sending tremors back and forward
along the whole strand.
Every moment felt as if it had already been lived
already carefully examined and savored.
It felt too familiar,
like snapshots of life pinned
where the wandering eye would memorize every detail,
a school or an office, memories pinned above a desk,
the everyday bustle meaningless, and only those
celluloid squares framing life, the real story
the one happening just now, filling every corner
with the sensation of seen-this-before.
Not only, lived-this-before.
Stepping from one image to the next, walking through walls
like the paper filling of a plot, one sheet at a time,
flipping, flipping
and no one, (or is there?) to tell the heroine,
turn the page, he's right behind you,
open that letter from your uncle,
grab an umbrella.
Creature of memory, she
had always been. But this day
made an ocean of her sunny fishbowl.
Now in the depths of it, in the reaches,
she remembered things she had not yet dreamed.
Two women with the eyes of fishes, eyes of the dead
one looking forward, the other looking behind,
sisters never seeing the eyes of each other.
Speaking truths that pass like ships
One knowing what was, one knowing what will be
one who is, coming for counsel.
A merchant or a thief (it's one and the same)
holding a green glass bauble before a boy.
He is slippery, untrustworthy, but he means no harm.
That image, there, the dish on the stove
this girlish sashay through the kitchen,
breathtaking sprinkle of stars in the heavens,
A small step for man,
the steps of a careful dance around piles
and boxes in a crowded flat.
She has lived it all, so attentively, before.
This time she is careless, bored,
overwhelmed, and paranoid by turns.
No one writes you back, she observes.
You can never write anyone back. You don't know
what it meant to such an author at the time, or what it still means
no experience is truly shared
if our lives are moving targets.
You can only write forwards, write for the moving targets of the future
those who can never, unless Einstein,
unless traveling against that flow,
those who can never write back,
only forwards for them too, trapped in the flow,
no reciprocation, equal and counterpart, action-reaction.
Yes, your cipher worked.
Well done. I am here. Aliens have landed.
it will not say, the message you can never get.
I have heard you. I am here too.
because they have shared what you
once were, a sloughed skin
your futures will be their pasts,
or is it their futures your pasts,
and you will look past each other
at the screens of each other's experience
encrypted
and they will always long for who you were
when you, in past, in passing, left tracks.
Beads, pearls, colliding on a string
separately resonant, but when you
string the last bead and fasten the clasp,
will it slip gently around your neck?
Are those pearls cool on your skin,
or warm, holding a trace of body heat?
Were they a gift to your past or future self?
Two-way mirrors set at right angles.
If the affair is remembered before it can be lived, loved,
she is always haunted by the shadows of what comes next.