Of the Divine Mysteries (a prayer for understanding)

Day 4:  A poem about a religion you don't understand

Of the divine mysteries
of our forefathers' faith

We pray for understanding

Of the faith they hefted
like bundles of sugar cane

We pray for understanding

Of the pure white faith
like sacks of fresh picked cotton

We pray for understanding

Of the faith that kept us bound in isolation
with saws and axes in the forests

We pray for understanding.

For those who prayed to lay down their burdens
but never thought of putting down this one

We pray for understanding

For our blessed white savior
in the land of the olive skinned

We pray for understanding.

For hair of lambs wool to fall as feathers
on the shoulders of renaissance paintings

We pray for understanding

For the morning star and the angel of light
who turned out to be black

We pray for understanding

For a faith that demands obedience to authority
yet turns our ancestor spirits into demons

We pray for understanding

For a faith that turns its own forebears
into witchcraft and pagan devils

We pray for understanding

Of the mystery of being made in his image
but not worthy to question his design

We pray for understanding

Of an African cardinal
with a European mind

We pray for understanding

Of an American pope
who is wrong for loving

We pray for understanding

That 'America' is the child of
Europe's cruelty and New world innocence

We pray for understanding

For the difference between
Catholic, protestant, Anglican, and Adventist

We pray for understanding

Between Episcopalian, Pentecostal,
Rastafari and Baha'i

We pray for understanding

Of the ever broadening line between
Religion and Spirituality

We pray for understanding

Of what god the birds sing to
when they wake each morning

We pray for understanding

Of why I should not dance in church
when everything else in nature does

We pray for understanding

Of what makes Abraham's new God
better than any of the old ones.

We pray for understanding

Of what makes Abraham's old God
better than any of these new ones.

We pray for understanding

For the supreme knowledge
of taking knowledge with you

We pray for understanding

That despite what you might think
I can believe in several things at once

We pray for understanding

That any dissonance in my cognition
is the radio being tuned towards harmony

We pray for understanding

That my questions about your faith
does not make us enemies.

We pray for understanding

That I love you
and that's all there is to it

We pray for understanding

The Preferred Method of Writers

Day 3: A poem about how you wish to die

If it worked in prose for Virginia Wolf
And it worked in poetry for Eric Roach
When the calm, cool face one day gives me a wink
I'll read her my sappiest one yet, I should think.

Dry Season 1

Here, it is always
cicadas hidden deep in
whispering bamboo

and boisman singing
bout how this place have tiger
striped with old brawl scars.

Heat comes from within:
the Harmattan in our lungs
red dust in our eyes

Young boys drink too much
red bull and johnny walker
staggering anger

Who knows what to do
with a man these days? Give him
room enough to burn

Without catching
us all a'fire.  Burning
both bush and garden

Sac pase, ay'ti?
We are, all of us, burning
in this endless heat.

But boismen know well
the secret of singing in
whispering bamboo

of bringing flambeau
to riverside.  Of making
steam to turn turbines.

Of carrying rage
in belly, in hands, in throat.
Of wailing like men.

Of meeting drumbeat
with karray.  Of that fire
that makes gardens thrive.

So sing the lavway.
Pass body and bois through flame.
Here it is.  Always.

Ribs and Elbows

Quiet Boy, boney boy
all ribs and elbows
and pnderance over simple things.
Did you run your fingers over the grooves,
believe the world you felt
more than the often lying light of it?
Did you think there must be some
secret trick, some magical more-to-it-ness
to the mundane machinery,
the way you do even now?

You faintly glowing ember boy,
grandfather's tobacco boy,
water held tight in hands boy, there's no keeping you here.
Though i'm told your mother sees you often
I am left with only memories and mimicry.
At times, in homage, I seal my lips shut
with hours of silence.
Time spent staring at my hands
wondering which wrinkle in the lines
was you.

You under-kitchen-table-surfer,
you excavator of old valises,
you who knows as much about why
old people hid away old things
as I know why I keep them now.
That relic in your lap
will be yours one day, or one like it.
Treasure hunter turned memory maker.

I sometimes wonder, as some men often do,
would i truly become my father
and make another you. Or at least
become my own man
with my own wife and son.
Will he explore the ruins of our closets?
Brave the perilous journey of the high attic?
Plumb the depths of the under-bed?  Will he be
a quiet boy, a boney boy,
all ribs and elbows?

Upon Seeing an Egret on a Telephone Line

Sister,
You aint no pigeon!
Why you spendin all that time
trying so hard to look like one?
Trying to look like something most girls
would be ashamed to be called?
Trying to look like something
that hides its face
under tattered, greasy wings
for every hour that its not
filling its gut
with birdseed
and guilt
and cigarette butts
and shame?
Why you spendin all that time
standing out on the street,
marking time
till you're standing out on street corners
standing on lines thinner than your
girlish legs.
Stradling lines between worlds
between whoredom and
"Oh, what a good little girl."
Why you spending all that time
trying to get some arbitrary amount
of grime under your wings?
As if they were marks of pride
sullying your feathers,
anxious for a spot
of color or
something to justify why
you cry everytime the sun
rises
or sets,
sister?

Why you sullying your feathers, sister?
Don't you know that
you were hatched into this lesser world clean
and pure as both
simile and metaphor for things
most people in this place have never seen
Like fresh fallen snow?
Like a peaceful, welcome death?
Like innocence?
Don't you know you are innocent?

Sister,
bobbing your head
back and forth for these
froggy fools
is a waste of your time.
There's no need for all that ocean floor talk.
If you want to cut them down,
your mouth was made
for more
graceful
thrusts than that.

Sister,
why you
wasting all that time trying
so hard
to stay so high?
When even in the lowliest fields
men will stretch their necks
to see you wading through marsh waters,
hoping you will strut for them,
hoping you will call for them.  Hoping
you will spread yourself open,
welcome them
with your wings perpetually parted,
revealing your quickly beating heart
beneath your tender breast.  And really,
you need only step lady-like
and reveal a bit of yourself
unmarred
by the knee-high mud and shit of this world
to leave them
dumbfounded.

Sister!
I know you hear me calling you, sister!
You can ignore me all you want.
Sister!  Sister!
I will never stop calling you, Sister!
I will never stop calling you
sister!

The Girl You are about to Meet

The girl you are about to meet has a name that sounds like something men used to pray to.  She is waiting for you outside.  It is cold and the wind has teeth tonight, but she'll brave it all, waiting for you with two tickets in her pocket, smiling politely and shaking her head 'no' at all the people who pass by.  She'll say 'No, I'm waiting for someone' to the men who ask after her safety and comfort, even the ones who smile handsomely.  She'll brave all that too.  All of it, just for the sake of waiting.  After all, she's waiting for you.

When you get there she'll look relieved.  You might recognize this look.  It can either confuse your or embolden you.  She will be taller than you expected.  In her boots and winter clothes she will be taller than you.  You might think this means she is too tall for you, too large, too square shouldered.  She will stop you at the box office and present you with the tickets she bought, refusing to let you pay her back thinking its polite, or perhaps thinking this will make you less likely to be worried about money in the relationship.  This will cause you to worry about how much more money she must make than you and whether you are man enough to seize control of this relationship.  This will also lead you to think that she is too tall for you.  Too big for you.  Too much for you.  You will not think that she is a girl.  Just a girl.  A girl who waited outside for you, enduring the rapier wind and ravishingly warm looks from handsome strangers.  A girl who waited outside in the cold...for you.

You will notice her smile once you're inside.  She has a cute smile.  It shines with a sort of modesty; humility brought on by her uncanny ears.  She will catch you looking at her smile and thus prompt you to look at her eyes.  She's pretty.  Far too pretty for you.  She is perfect.  If things go well you will wake up in her apartment surrounded by her clutter.  You will see her childish, un-sexy underwear.  You will see the dark splotches on her skin; on her back and on her thighs, and the ever-present fuzz of hair covering places on her body which your mind and issues of Playboy tell you hair should not grow on a woman.  If things go really well you will discover hair too bold to grow in peach fuzz.  You will encounter her most intimate of briers.  You will find she is a terrible cook or that she puts ketchup on her eggs.  All of your favorites will be absent from her movie collection.  If things go really well, you will become privy to her every imperfection; not in one night, but certainly over time.  And you may just come to love her for it.  But tonight, things will not go that well.  Not as long as you are intimidated by her.  Not as long as you fail to reward her graciousness with your graciousness.  And certainly not if you keep a girl like that waiting.

The girl you are about to meet is actually your enemy.  There is only one copy of that special edition book signed by the author left on the shelf and both your hands will fall upon it at the very same time.  She will pretend to be modest and shy.  Will apologize, because she is a girl and, unlike you, is cautious about unsolicited touch.  She will tell you, 'that's fine.' and 'You can have it.'  You will not consider the questionable judgement involved in starting a relationship based on a lie.  If you really look you'll notice the way her eyes never leave the book; and how want and disappointment never leaves her eyes.  You, however, will be concentrating on how cute her glasses look.  You will offer her the book, thinking nothing of her eager and unhesitating acceptance; in the hope that you will be able to parlay it into a date.  You can, but you will have to be a lot smoother than you actually are.  You will in fact, have to take on a completely different persona to pull this off.  See previous caveat re: starting off relationships based on lies.

You will think yourselves compatible.  You will have all the same interests and you will both think "Hm.  Perhaps this is the one."  And because you are both contemplating this, and because you are both becoming tired of meeting new people you will both be on your best behavior, and will therefore continue to lie to one another about things which should not or would not normally matter.  At the end of all this she will call you a red meat eating, uncultured, whole milk drinking douche bag, and you will call her a clove smoking, non-dick-sucking, two faced, hipster poseur bitch, and you'll both part ways searching for the girl and boy you respectively met before one another.

The girl you are about to meet has eyes like you've never seen before.  She is tired of hearing about them.  She will stare at you after you say it to her, lock you with those unprecedented cliches, challenge you to say something to her, something new, something--anything more.  You will understand thins inherently, feel the hollow Christmas ornament nature of your polished tin complement and search yourself for something with a little more...moreness to it.  By the time you think you have it, the bus has stopped, the doors have opened, and she's already left.  You will never see this girl again.  You will always, always want her.

The girl you are about to meet has been told she has too much meat on her bones.  The moles on her face mark strange shapes between her mismatched ear, her prominent nose, and the excess cheek that hides her eyes when she smiles.  And yet, she is beautiful.  She wears clothes that do not flatter her but at least they drape in patterns that disguise her paunch.  She is too much of herself.  She has grown to dislike the taste.  And so, you must taste her.  You must kiss her so deeply that she discovers brand new flavors in herself.  You must do this so often that the hands which come up to brace herself against the assault of your pressed bodies become quaint tourist attractions.  A place for you to visit and imagine a time when such a great nation needed protection from invaders. The girl you are about to meet will some day open her borders to you, tax free.  Her hips are beach towels.  At the sunset of your lives you will find they have spread and you will both still enjoy the warm comfort of them long after your children have played in the surf, built their castles, wrapped themselves in their own beach towels, and put all the toys away.

Untitled

There's a bit too much milk
in the chocolate here. 
They don't understand when
I say cacao just
how deep from within me
the sound of it comes. 
They don't know what its like
to put a spot of
darkness on their tongues
and just let it sit there
melting...for...hours. 
Instead they say things like
"Boy, da girl rel sweet. 
For a negro girl." 
Sugar is poison and
cocoa butter makes
all dark choc'late smoother. 

All they taste here
is so much bitterness.

Tinder Box

By all means;
kiss me tinderly, mother-bird.
for too long now there's been
a tree growing in me
so thirsty for last season's rain
that its leaves are all yellowed
and its boughs are growing withered.
Place your scavenged twigs
into its deepest crooks.
Weave them loosely as you like.
Line them with fruit peels
and fragrant petals.
Make a nest for yourself
just here
where the wind can push all it likes.
You'll be comfortably preening your feathers
through most every storm.

And should some day an hurricane blow,
one of those cleansing squalls
who's winds and rains
make the ground into porridge
and uproot that dry old tree;
then I'll cleave to the heart
of the fallen trunk
and from the wood there I'll make a box
where I can place what's left of
     --your gathered twigs
     --your fragrant petals
     --your cherished fruit peels.
A box where I can keep
your tinder kisses.

     Have I ever told you
     how much your touch is like
     striking flint?

Kevin

(Inspired by ToTO's Catch a Fire prompts for June 2011)

When I was a boy he had
not hands but
cords of muscle,
sinew, tendons,
richly vibrating strings of flesh
filled with liquid-fire spirit
brimming at the eyes.
Even saw it spill out once
when they wouldn't let him hold his son.

He was the fire in our home.
The uncontrollable element
in our family's Feng Shui.
Made winter times bearable,
shielded us against tedium and cold
just from the sound of
     --Hip-Hop blaring;
just from the sound of
     --maniacal laughter;
just from the sounds of
     --the outrageous things he would say. 
Other times, he was just
a fire in our house
and it would break my grandmother's heart
just to think of putting
her youngest son out.

Saw him shave his head once
in the bathroom mirror
between rounds of Tekken.
Saw him give me a look
that was all confusion and anger.
"You scared?  Why you scared?"
Saw it spill out more than once.
Saw him cover from view,
too late,
a mound of Cocaine
the size of his hustle.

Heard a rumour he was dead.
Heard a rumour he was living
somewhere in Mexico or
Guatemala or
some place he had no business being.
Heard him say he hated the medication.
Heard he was taking up meditation
but only ever saw him staring
out a dirty window
on the wrong side of the bed.
That's not Zen.
That's Benzodiazepine.

"That's not how life works",
Hear my mother say when
he showed up to her office
smelling like three weeks on the street
And ready for whatever job she had.
Heard his cousin tell him
"Look, even my dog have to bark to eat."

Now that I'm a man with
not hands but
cords of muscle,
sinew, tendons,
quietly vibrating strings of flesh
brimming with spirit
like so much smoke,
sometimes you can see it
just at the eyes
when I dream of
what it would be like
to not rely on rumours,
but to have him close
without his fire dampened,
but with a mended spirit
and a heart the size and shape
that his son must be by now.

Racism in Belize

Its a lot like beans
cooking on a Sunday morning
in the biggest pot
in the kitchen
to be eaten Sunday Night
and all of Monday
and maybe even Tuesday
or Wednesday
if you can keep it fresh,
or for the rest of the week even,
if you know how to do it right. 
Its not just beans,
but rice and beans. 
Refried beans. 
Scrumptious egg and ham,
and some beans on the side
just so you know its there. 
Fried jacks or toast
smeared with beans,
or stuffed,
depending on how much of it
you intend to swallow.

And you don't even have to see the steam
jetting out of the pressure cooker
to know that there's a pot bubbling. 
You can tell,
sometimes even in dreams,
sometimes the very moment that
your eyes are opened to the real world,
or as the boys who hang out
under the house would say:
'Stop Sleep Up.' 
You can tell
by the invisible aroma
all around you. 
You can tell
by how it makes even
the bedroom sanctuary
that much hotter. 
You can tell
because no one wants
to be in the kitchen right now. 
Even the sister at the pipe outside
would rather scrape her knuckles
on the scrubbing board
than use the fancy new washer
mama get for dollar down
and deal with that heat. 
"It wash better anyway",
she says "And ih nuh bruk down
as often as da third-world piece a ting
so and so in deh."

And its happening. 
Even when faamly come visit
from New York or LA
and stand at the back door
fanning themselves,
too scared to go wander the street outside
and too naive to know why
the heat is so hot;
its happening. 
Its happening in houses where
the beans are red and shaped like kidneys. 
Its happening in houses where
the pots are filled with pintos and culantro. 
Happening in houses where
fat butterbeans melt enough to be ladled
over perogies. 
In houses where
the split peas get nice and thick,
and the pig tail meat falls
right off the bone. 
Where black beans stew in one pot
and bamboo shoots steam in another. 
The Secret to Good Chili
is a fresh jalapeno
(not the canned stuff)
and a tablespoon of Sharps.

Cherry

I'm always caught wishing
I could just hide myself.
Only, unlike those that
want to hold out until
the storm has passed and some
outside force tells them
'Its okay, little children.
You can come out now.';
I want to stay inside
even after that.
Even after after that.
I want to ball up and
hide until either the
world changes or I do.
And faced with the entire
spinning globe as my
stare-down opponent,
I'm pretty sure we all
know who's gonna be the one
to feel the sting of
mortality in their eyes
and blink.

So let me be the one
to change. If such a thing
is possible. Let me
be like the deluded
girls I knew in high school
who gave up all they had
to the world early, then
hid,
thinking they could grow back
their mangled purity.
And why not? Its just a
bit of flesh. Its just a
splash of blood. The pain will fade,
given enough time.
That's what we tell ourselves,
isn't it?

---

July, 2009

Cherry by Andre Marsden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Poet's Braggadocio

I could take the disarrangement of stars
and fit the universe in my throat.
I could spit out constellations
and have them line up obediently on paper.

I could make metaphors
out of valleys of lava and sulfur
and cradle the unattainable in my arms
as if it had just been born
into the raw and tangible.

And i could do this all
with little more than an empty field,
the crushed,
bleached
and dried remains of a tree,
the feather of a bird
and something to dip it in for ink.

Yes,
my god loves me,
and he lets me borrow a little taste
of his power
in special moments
that I call inspiration.

---

Written sometime in July, 2009

See there, the Grackle

See there, the grackle
with its golden eye fixed tight
upon your delicious own?
See the scratching claws?
See the razor beak?
But most of all see the plumage.
They've made feathers out of inkwells.
Made down and flight out of blackest night.
They've taken sticky liquid fright and made it into a bird,
smooth and slick and powerful enough
to shrug off gravity itself.
See it slip between wind drafts
like a thief through louvers.
It is a thing of beauty
if you can brave staring into its golden eyes
while it stares into your delicious own.

See there the grackle.
See it rest on the perch above your head
too far to touch but too close not to be frightening.
See it puff to a size three times its own.
See it raise feathers along its everything,
along its very being.,
See its golden eye gleam brighter
and more darkly all at once,
see it seeing somewhere deeper
into its very own soul,
into that black pit that only black things see into.
See what mammals know as rage
written on both rigidly held wings.
See wrath spelled out on splayed tail feathers,
see the promise of vengeance for every hatchling
falling its nest before its time
from every public park tree you quietly watched them chop down.
See it open its jaws and reach down into itself
letting out a sound that danced on that line
halfway between funeral wail and battle cry.

Now see the grackle smooth itself.
See it make itself into an oil slick
resting carelessly on water.
See each feather go back in place
like children after curfew.
See it shrink, three times, to its own size
and see its eyes dull
to something more like a living thing
and less like something set afire.
Most importantly, see it forget,
as if it could never harm a soul.
As if the entire second stanza
has been just a cruel human work of fiction.
As if it could not possibly be capable
of feeling such rage.
See the outburst and the aftermath,
as if you were watching two different creatures.
Now see the sweet grackle turn to you.
And flex its dainty talons.

And when my son asks me
what we'll eat while in the forest
I'll show him the trees and their leaves and bark,
how to spot it at a glance and know good plants from bad.
And when my son asks me about women,
we'll talk about the birds and the bees.
This is how I see it.
He'll ask me questions too big for classrooms
and I'll point him to nature,
where all the answers present themselves to us
like open books.
And when my son asks me where his people are;
when he points to pictures older than I am and asks
where are all the dark, smiling faces
who used to drink cashew wine at parties
and make music with their own hands
and the things men throw away,
and where are all the people
who used to brukdown and bram,
the ones he's heard stories of,
the ones he reads of in his atlas.

I'll say: Look, son.  See the Grackle.
Really see it, beautiful and horrible as it is.
See its blue, brown, black plumage,
See its golden eye sizing up your delicious own.
See its rigid wings.
See its splayed tail.
See its sudden gentility.
Now see yourself.

If the grackle knew how
our mouths have been shaped as little children
and how they reached in past our gullets
so that we said the word the same way that we vomit.
Black.  We still say it like vomiting.
Like calling someone Black was the same as
leaving sick all over their shirts.

If grackles knew how much we hated their blackness,
they would lighten their feathers to grey. 
They would practice to sing the songs of other birds
in voices and accents that don't quite fit the strict patterns of Kiskadees,
but they would persist, painfully. 
Painful for everyone listening but none would be harmed more
than the grackles themselves. 
They would destroy that thing that made them grackles,
and instead they would be simple-minded mockingbirds. 

If grackles knew how frightening they were
they'd never smooth their feathers,
but wear them raggamuffin rugged
They'd fly only in threatening dives
and steal food from your mouths
and your children's mouths
the same way they do other grackles.
That's right, not even other birds would be safe.

And if grackles knew how frightening they were
perhaps they'd spend all their time
dipping into that pit in their gut
and acting only from their rage.
And perhaps then they'd be hunted, killed and caged.
Just like us.

The Negro (In Progress)

Photo by Jorge Larios (http://www.flickr.com/photos/vasagritarwow/)

The Negro dreams of rivers.
The Negro dreams of seas.
The Negro dreams of oceans crossed.
Leeward.  Windward.  Antilles.

The Negro dreams of Empires lost;
Ghana, Mali, Songhai,
And Cries himself into forgetting
Till centuries and centuries nigh.

The Negro pines for Gods of Thunder
and deities made of sweet yam.
The Negro calls himself Ibo and Ashanti.
The master calls him Sam.

The Negro knows nothing of Mahogany,
Cotton, breadfruit, Sugarcane.
The Negro knows only calloused hands,
fear, loathing, pain.

The Negro learns that kindness comes
with cruelty to his fellow man.
The Negro snaps the masters whip
and eats from the master's hand.

The Negro learns that secret things
are where power is best kept.
The Negro summons Ancestor souls
and says 'Nah, man.  Is just a fete.'

The Negro seizes Saint-Domingue.
And moves into the house of kings.
Oh Haiti!  Oh, Mon dieu!  Quel Doux Cadeaux!
Sad land of such hopeful things.

The Negro knows that profit
is the name of the game.
He makes good on the only threat he has
and sets fire to the cane.

The Negro grew scars like crocodile skin
long before he was fitted with chains.
What was once a testament to a tribe's nobility
becomes yet another source of pain.

In time the Negro comes to know his work
and the value of his hands.
He also knows his seed will not take root
until he owns his land.

The Negro is offered freedom
and told it is a pittance of a cost.
Simply fight our wars and wait a hundred years more
and pray your children don't become lost.

Rainy Season - Day ??

[re:Stacks by Ben Foster]

I set down my cup,
you fill it up.
I drink, set it down,
you fill it up again.
We do this until we are both
laughing madly,
dancing and smiling.
Only I am too drunk to see
that you are not drinking;
that you were never dancing;
that you have stopped pouring
and we have nothing to laugh about.

How long have I been the only drunkard at the table?
Did your lips ever even touch this wine?
Did you ever even crave a sip of it?
Or was all your pleasure in the pouring
and watching me dance
and laughing?

Why I don't call everyday

[Kindred has Left the Building by Kindred Pasana]

Because she has eyes
the color of greetings.

Because she has eyes
that are just the right distance apart,
but are never distant. 

Because she has lips
that are thin and smooth,
and in their movement they turn me
into baby birds:
Exuberant and chirping and thriving
off the things that come from her mouth.

Because she has legs suitable for traveling
and set my mind wandering whenever I see them.

Because she has a neck
which I would pay to leave kisses upon daily.

Because she has hair
that thrives on a lack of discipline.

Because she has skin
the same color and texture as the warmth
that I keep within me whenever our knees touch
and neither of us moves away.

Because she has a beauty
that is made luminescent by heat
and becomes more oppressive than the humidity.
A beauty
like Remedios.

Because some days I see her
and can't bring myself to look away.

Rainy Season -- Day 14

Tonight
it will be just the city and I. 
Just a street lamp dripping dew
and giving me silver and gold light
tonight. 
No moon face to remind me
of beauties far away,
of loves unattainable. 
No shattered shards of space-stuff
to dirty my view of the sky. 
No constellations in the shape
of faces we mourn. 
And no angels.  No.
The choir is at rest. 
It will be just the city and I,
and a blank slate sky. 
The hills send me fog to touch. 
The sky sends the rain. 
They sing to me till I wake in the morning
when my city will be new again.

---

My city is new today.
It has forgotten, for a time,
its heartbreak.  Its loss.
It has spent its allotted time weeping.
It has bathed itself inside a moon house
made of thunderstorms and mist.
It has flushed out
even its most private of crevices
and stepped out renewed.
My city is pure again.

The dirt of its streets
has been washed away. 
Not simply swept aside but driven
out by spontaneous rivers. 
Driven out past the hills,
carried over the valleys,
and swept out to sea. 
My city's houses are still damp. 
This is alright with us. 
Let the warmth of home dry them out. 
Let our bare feet feel mud again. 
Let the bucket tip
and the mop sop and soak
and sweep out even the insides. 
Let the city be clean today.

Let the parks know
that they haven't been forgotten. 
Let the grass be cut and mixed
with warm breezes and sunshine. 
And of the perfume made,
let it be the bouquet of
just-budding flowers
from full, verdant trees. 
Only, do not place the oil
behind the ears of the city
or between the breasts of the city. 
These secret places are for us
that have found them intimately. 
Do not let it drip down arms like juice
from the fruit of your neighbor's yard. 
Do not let it spray along cheeks like juice
from fruit of your own yard. 
Let it waft, instead, across the body
and through the streets.

If the city is as leaving Eden;
innocent, naked, and pure
but just for today;
then let this perfume be as entering Nod:
east of nowhere,
wandering everywhere.

The Only Reason I Would Attend a Cricket Match

I want to kiss you
under hot sun, spinning in
a crowd of thousands.

Rainy Season -- Day 8

[The Sound of its Own Stillness by Otto K.]


It is quiet in here.
It is loud with the sound of humming
It is cold in here.
My skin is wet.
But I am warm.
And if I could live and live
until the day I choose to die
then I would choose a day like this.
With a heavy blanket of rainclouds
weightless in the sky
to keep my cooling body dry.

Fairy Tale

Once upon a time
I would say something
and somehow your heart
would know my meaning.
It was back when
men knew the names of their Gods
and there were dragons in the earth.