from the minds of n.) poems

Rarely i remain in one moment too long
let alone one place;
too many sad eyes i’ve yet to see,
too many bruised boulevards upon which
to stretch my sullen strides.  Rain never

dampened my mental state—not like
the sun and its loathsome rays,
dancing always like cheerful cherubs
bouncing arrows at brokenhearted
girls and boys because the gay (i’m pilfering

it back—yes, and queer alike) light of love
and all its shiny dominions will kill us all
happily to death!—but my heart isn’t
stone, it’s ash—and i prefer the eccentricity 
of storms to the fluency of light.

And this we’d godly enough like to know:
if suddenly earth turned toward itself
would fish fly backward quaintly
and birds swim queerly bellyside up? 

the bend of a wrist
a paintbrush
over canvas scattering
texture, light

sound soaking
the atmosphere
bouncing off umbrellas
into
soul systems
sitting still
tonight not likely

rolling over and
bodies mangled beautifully
eyes of each other
devouring
thoughts entangled
toes trembling

atop a mountainside
overlooking
valley wildflowers
a stream
car bones rusting

upon a bronze stone
sitting
swallowing sunlight

In bending back the branches
of my youth
i discovered in my soul
a seed

into sodden earth
i sank it
one spring night
while the moon was in the shape
of a dimple

having bore the brunt of many
self blunders
i returned years later

to my bewilderment
ascending into the stars
like a coil uncoiling

a sentence
with no punctuation in sight

Like blossoms this morning
my eyes
soaking sunlight

~

Kettle filled with snow
upon a woodstove
weeping

 ~

Winterbirds outside
not stirring
twig legs tied to bare branches

Silly whale she said
shyly
sinking like a drunken
carousel
to the bottom of
the sea

you’ll not find your shadow
scattered upon
the shifting brine
but spread like a simile
across the swollen
clouds
gracefully gliding

Into the eye of you
your storm
the center to which memory
and molecules mix
windows half closed 
doors flung open
as if out you rushed
hurriedly
toward some distant past
where ape-like beings
honed stone with stone
and with one
maybe two violent
strokes human(dare i
say)kind
cleared from Earth
remembrance

and into ancient jaws
you sparrowed like arrows
words as if
with one, maybe two
affable gestures
the cow
could unjump the moon

(I
exist
:
see
mE
!)

Within each
(not one salty,
single
drop rolls
down
which does not)

 tear, oceans
of poetry
disappear
into the dust
of a disappearing

(weep not
for love undiscovered;
search beneath
all stones—
no shadow leave
unlooked) day.

A fresh pallet
this day
organic artwork
all around

come, awaken

Spilling across
this concrete city,
this suburban
winterland,
layers of sunlight

Above gardens
of snow,
trees armored
in ice,
braids of laughing

grey geese
fly southward
(less dismal weather

awaits)—come,
let’s follow

It seems sometimes we hurt most 
the ones we adore.
I believe we all, deep inside,
have only the best
intentions
but somehow and somewhere
along the way
a phrase slips out from within, spilling
acidic syllables over the ledge
of our lips and sending
them into the atmosphere
where they seep
into the ears of others.  I’ve wished
i could sneak back the words
which should have remained as whispers,
swallowing them down
into the shade of my soul
or sputtering them into a plastic bag
and sealing it tightly—suffocating
the syntax
never should i have spoken.  

We sat (in a corner
of the café
overlooking a swaying
bay
of snapdragons and
dandelions),

Death and me (i

trembling petals
of rain
from my goddamn
broken umbrella;
and he
smiling grimly,

one leg draped daintily
across the other,
sinking
into and out of
a cup
of sweetened
hot water
a bag of Earl Grey),

speaking (he of life
and how abruptly
it comes
to a discontented end
and me
of things not so
linear
as i glanced for
an exit not requiring
a long-distance

                         dash).

I know of nothing more glorious than the sound of rain
  tapping its tiny toes upon the sill of a window. 
Late into the muted twilight, when the lunatics, the queers,

the romantically hopeless shift from the shadows
  their undistinguished shapes, i slide open my window
and let slip in the misshapen symphony of a city

which never quite soundly sleeps.  It’s the sting
  of manufactured light, the living corpses with mechanical       
smiles and teeth so blindingly bright that frighten

me most.  Among the hapless i’ve intermingled happily
  amidst this concrete wanderland.  As Black Betty sings Billie   
from beneath the Bower Street Bridge, and Esmeralda,

her back bent in the shape of a bow,
  searches the dimly lit street sides for a lover long lost,
the nightmares of which you scream climb up

through cracks and blossom into deluxe dimestore
  dreams.  All the while, Carl and Henry J. clip coupons
and plan to someday sail so far away upon a boat

they'll build of second-hand hope and cardboard wishes
  to a place where people live in castles still, and every day  
roses so red begin to unbutton their blossoms. 

Like still water waiting for a breeze or a drop of rain
to create a ripple, i sit here (motionless) in silence. 
Cracks in the window,
the one in which the world peers in only to see me peering
out, seem endlessly ever to be stretching.  Leaves have turned;
the earth, from the bottom of the sky to the towering dandelion tops,

is aflame.  This sickness; this dementia of the soul
which cannibalizes self adoration
shatters to ash this organic molecular manifestation.  I’ve left
no bridge unscathed; the trails i’ve wandered are void
of a sole track by which to make a final triumphant arrival. 

Into cinders i’ve burned friendships, left loved ones standing along
roads i was too fearful to travel.  Against a wall my back
seems always to be anxiously pressing.  In the middle of my existence
i’ve become ensnared, like a fishhook entrenched
in the flesh of a fisherman.  Still this sounds more sorrowful
than i would have it seem; for tomorrow

this sorrow may seem but an erroneous dream, and the voices
whispering within my skull may whither with winter away. 
And as cocoons begin to burst open,
and newborn birds
begin barking from branches, the beauty of a world devoid
of flawlessness may seem satirically             flawless.

I’m trading back promises for
guarded perspective, my love of longing
for love of self; how many silhouettes
will shade the burning eyes of those
deficient of ample rations, water, medical
attention, shelter, Pablo Neruda’s

unapologetic poetry?  Am i a socialist,
an anarchist, a humanist, an anti-capitalist,
an unorganized atheist, a brokenhearted
down(but not)trodden bearer of bad counsel
double disjointed stone skipping skinny
dipping whale watching sexually

inactive yet awkwardly attractive earth
loving dish washing gun fearing blue eyed
cynic minded escapist?  Karma cures
little the inhumanity swelling like woodland
fires consuming and consuming…
But what is the point to this bewildered

writing—hope at best is hazy and change
probable but slow moving; though my brain
is bruised and my heart…breaking
beauty exists so drink it down deeply for
it’s worse by far to stop believing that veiled
within all is a brightness worth breathing.

I tied to a tulip to a pole and tried
to tilt my thoughts into a more
terrific tomorrow when the world

no longer turned miracles into
moments of muddled unmagic but
instead bore from its miraculous breaths

madness so magnificent mountains
became as mole mounds and above
seas and snaking valleys i soared like

a bumblebee: defying reason and
buzzin’ like a busted bottle of Burnside’s
rusty gin-soaked backwoods blues.

Charlie was here before me.  Into his rumi
apartment i moved my belongings; 
it seems much smaller now,
still, he seems to mind not at all.

Scurrying along on all eights,
Charlie scuttles:
benign, black, and draped
delicately in shag.

My slight arachnid friend stops(.) 
and fills me in on the events of his day. 

Charlie, i remind him,
please slow down and speak up;
it’s quite difficult communicating with a spider:
very. 

Before i have time to respond,
he’s frantically scampering away. 

I worry about Charlie sometimes; 
with these abrupt cummings
and goings,
he’s bound to have an attack of the heart.

 

Several day and nights have waddled by
since Charlie last visited: 

please Athena, i pray, let no harm come to him. 

Into the gloomy shadows i peer: nothing;
behind dust freckled boxes i peek: again nothing;
beneath frayed furniture i seek: still nothing;
around, within and below my shoes
i hesitantly peep:
thankfully…nothing. 

That Charlie…where in here could he be?

She takes from the top shelf a hammer,
a hammer and wedge to split open
her body.  Something it seems stirs within,
something that is neither insect
nor animal, but heavy—heavy and thick
like bitter honey.  This same sorrow
engraved its couplet into the bones
of her grandfather, her mother, her gods
and their gods the same.  (X=Y yet

Y≠X.)  Upon the top step,
embraced by twilight’s shadow, she bends
into a ball as if suddenly unborn. 
When the last beads of hope spill like
sad sonatas from blue eyes, when each grey
breath becomes burdensome, when plums
taste of purple brine, we sink beneath the swell
of unyielding silence. 

To the darkness, the fissures in the wall,
the spiders spinning death, her piteous
sonnets are scattered. 

And if perhaps the moon amidst her
magnificent spectators happens to be eaves-
dropping she’ll stretch tonight a luminous
limb and with a mild whoosh
of the wrist stroke Maggie athwart her soft,
streaked with sadness cheek. 

Along an upward winding trail i wander into the arid
western outback, packing little more than my blue eyes
and an active imagination; sometimes i’m too serious

and forget there is only so much one soul can do so i scan
the horizon and breathe the dry air and from my bottle

drink warm water.  Out here where the jagged rock ridges
scrape the sky, and crows squawk and brazenly fly by, i tap
back into the tranquility of myself: my guilt and epic expectations

i left home on bookshelf near a volume of Milosz’s unhindered
poetry.  Clouds crowd in, thinning the desert heat—rain

looks unlikely.  I trek on, following the path as it winds through
cactus clusters, sagebrush, and weathered limestone formations. 
How did this appear one million years ago; how will it appear

one million years from now, when we are no longer?  I think
about her smile, her green eyes, the spill of her hair like cool

silence upon my face; i remember my grandmother,
my grandfather—i wish i could once more tell them how entirely
i adore them, how brilliantly their brightness burned. 

Farther on i ramble, lost in the grey stillness which is eternal.
Like water caressing earth, lizards slithering across sandstone,

a slender zephyr spilling sunlight into my eyes—i embody
movement.  I wave to a chipmunk and smile as it gathers
pinon seeds; she’s too busy to notice, too engaged to say hello.

With crumpled fingers she tugs
at her skirt,
slipping it up
above her knees but a little. 

She bends over only barely
and pulls a white tulip toward her. 

Like a bowl of rain
she holds it lightly within
her palms,
cupping the curved petals.  A slight

summer breeze strums her tangled hair
as she plunges
into the flower her face
creased with damaged beauty. 

She breaths into her bones
so deeply
the dry scent of sun-soaked water,

her eyes lids locked tightly,
as she savors
the encounter—disregarding
the world
whirling rigidly around her. 

Slowly she unbends her body and smiles
as if granted
the greatest gift to be given.