aesthetics pt. 2

one by one, she said,
& she placed yet another on the string—

her hands, stained by ink,
rummaging through a dictionary &
thesaurus & the wet negatives
in her mind, brain synapses
becoming words, women
becoming fairies, dreams
becoming figures cloaked in colors,

& everything becomes a
clumsy chaotic pile of beads saturated with melody,
an audibly acryllic symphony of sperm & egg
& yesterday's conversations about god & history & dinner & why he loves her,

& her fingers grasp bead on bead,
stringing them on form and flavor,
how they roll sumptuously off her tongue,
until a necklace emerges &
a poem receives the breath of life.

& you can almost see it:

the naked, youthful poem
rinsing the blood from its emancipated body,

how it stretches its gaudy limbs,
rubbing the sleep from its newborn eyes.

aesthetics pt. 1

what is poetry
if not
a complex underground of scribbles
holding back the hour—

the way her arms
make triangles around his
soft clock of minutes and seconds—

words growing nimble legs
& dancing a spritely jig
disjointed
harmonic yes
and no
the monkey will not dance without his forest—

the oceanic overwhelming
warmth of
joyous mass
when her arms & the words & monkey & scribble
become one
titanic frankenstein chorus—

an infant suckling upon the breast of
hypnotic misery—

the moonlight, blushing,
as it slips quietly between lovers' tangled limbs—

the titillating tick tock of surprising syntax,
where vocabulary has a harsh & violent undertow
& death remains the midnight chime.

words unlike woman, or, aesthetics pt. 4

words
don't
come

like
a woman
comes

they don't grow,
surely,
quietly,
arching their
backs, their arms
stretching above
their heads, eyes,
wide open to the ceiling,
building,
blossoming,
into an overwhelming
backing down of
soft,
hard,
beautiful words—

faster words—

more complex
rhythmic lines of
orchestrated flutes and violins of
symphonic lingual rolling-off-your-
tongue-and-heart words

they don't grab your hair and
press your pen onto paper and
yes! write a stanza here, an ode!
there! a haiku! a sonnet oh god
write what you want! and
misspell! write sloppily! or
calligraphy! an epic of titanic explos—

—

—

—

no,

words are juvenile males—

they leap on your mind

they come,
they go

lot's wife, or, aesthetics pt. 3

i am full of blinding visions
i am chock-full of first attempts—
revisions—
weighty,
symbolic
tangerines dancing—

i am the pomegranate and the apple
i am the teeth of eve on apples
i am the beauty of the apple

(i am round
ripe
ready to be plucked

i am the serpent and the temptress
i am babylon and israel)

i am pregnant with metaphor
as mary with messiah;
as judas with his master
i sell meaning for thirty shekels

i illuminate through symbols
i am sodom and gomorrah
the salt becomes my tongue
my tongue salts the pillars
lot's wife becomes my rhyme

my words take on divinity
thrice they smote the angels
twice i ransomed syntax
once i sound the bell

(my words split hairs in heaven,
my words are kept in shells)

The discourse lies in the dust like fragments,

and I asked myself about beauty and freedom
and these golden wings I daily clip to keep myself grounded.

I dreamt that the Wind carried a whisper from someone's tears,
inviting me to lie in its ocean of hue and calm.
But dreams are a cripple that Jesus does not heal,
the epics of yesteryears when questions had no legs
and there was a peace we did not know,
the snow-soft bones of which trembled beneath the fragility of words.

Sometimes I wonder whether this human inside
is a phoenix, or whether the skeletons in my
closet, closed, clothe me in the cloths of colorful array
merely to invite these strangers to dance
in the moonlight obsession.

Are we the embrace before the sunset?
O lilac, riddle me this:
Did the blood turn violet yesterday on its own accord,
witch-like, this cackle on fire with hysterics,
when it seemed the shadows laughed
and I was the silence in someone's eyes?

a more human space.

"We were contented
with constant things, and stood there
in the interspace between world and toy."
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, "The Fourth Elegy"

***********

Let me say, old children,
let me say to the angel-crumbs,
as I flee to play
in the attics of dreams
and yesteryears,
that you, whom the angels embrace,
you who feel the hand of God
on your knee--

you are clay and kama
and I envy your buoyancy.

You age like a bottle of wine
in the belly of an unknown virgin,
you sing of the swelling ocean,
you are pirouette and hunger,

while I, cosmic astronaut,
orbit round Babylon and its whores,

I suck the marrow from the steeple
and spit the stained glass nativity in the offering plate,
I arrange the shards in patterns
that reflect the Virgin Mary and her gestation.

I weep over my thumb-sized spirit,
bruised from the slamming of Heaven's door.

it's not

---

(really) the way you hold your pen
as i imagine an ocean holding its waves
(it's difficult to keep such a
force placid when something
untamed, something yours,
beautiful, must be born),

or how the buildings and business-people
smolder into complex forms and shapes and
angels and demons
models
begin to dance feverishly, gloriously,
in your head beneath your unruly hair,

nor is it the
sex so suddenly saturating
veins and words,
how peaceful and turbulent it felt,
to be one,
or that your touch awakens my skin
(your lips a new drug
and i am your junkie)—

but maybe
(perhaps),

it's the way your eyes stripped off my eyelids
and reached inside for my heart,

how we lay breathless and
my right ear
it felt wind and air converge with
meaning from your mouth

.—and they were earnest gardeners—

that, when the dandelions of
youthful hurt and distrust were so delicately
plucked,

i felt a world collapse under my stomach,
i felt a new city begin,
i saw stars and choirs and,
yes, skyscrapers,
and merry go-rounds and
ice cream trucks played joplin's "entertainer"
and a freespirited child tapped its foot—

—but mostly,
mostly really,
i felt,
and i felt real,

and i couldn't help that,
when you pulled my heart through my eyes,
it got stuck in my throat and—
(and i can't get you out of my head
and i smell you on my clothes
and i will miss you in the morning when you are not asleep beside me)—

and out tumbled, "i love you, too."