what peace must feel like

my father is a runner
'the trails are his church'
& god
the fine dust sticking to his socks
the plush feel of his running shoe
under his flexed foot
heat pouring from of his loose mouth
out into the early bay morning
(steam inside a blue watercolor)

Grace by Mary Oliver

I don’t want you to just sit down at the table. 
I don’t want you to just eat and be content. 
I want you to walk out into the fields 

Where the water is shining and the rice has risen.
I want you to stand there far from this white tablecloth.
I want you to fill your hands with mud, like a blessing.

Mary Oliver

after snyder

prairie of             sea    


dog in grass
          dried yellow weed

       
         winter wool
steel  cloud

On Having a Seizure: Part 2

Last night I dreamt of the wave. It was a tall tombstone of dark water.  It came up quickly on us at the faded beach in our red frilly bathing-suits and umbrellas. It hung over us like a skyscraper in an avalanche. I ducked my head under my little pale arms and didn't move. Everyone else was running, their towels flying behind them like colored tails.  I took a deep breath and froze. The wave turned into sheets of wind and mist and blew over me like rays of gray marble light.

When the swell rose again, I ran. I didn't believe in double miracles; I knew this one would come down like cement on a tenderized body. I ran as fast as I could up the moving sandy hill. When I looked back from high ground, I knew I had made it to safety. I saw the crest of the wave curl into itself and I said a terrified prayer.

On Having a Seizure: part 1

It’s like turning around to the erection of tidal wave. Your back was turned for a moment and now that your facing this monster, there is no time to run. Of course there is no surviving.

First the brain is flooded with hot syrup, and immediately you can feel the heavy slug spread over the rubber. And the brain, like a child drowning under the blue wing of rabid ocean, sparks and screams to grab on to its little life.

The brain becomes a body trying to wrestle itself out of a shark’s mouth, it becomes the arrows of terrified fingers, and the wild kites of elbow and knee. So it jerks, it jerks to break free. Again and again in the same direction the brain bangs on the door of the giant molasses wave. The old splintered house is being flooded but the bedroom door is stuck, and so the knees and elbows and eyes and lips of the brain jerk together like a mob of men to break free. It has to break free.

And then every muscle becomes that child behind the locked door, and every muscle is also the mother outside on the street screaming for someone to save her baby. Every muscle is mother and child together. And every muscle screams. The eyeball and in the hair and down the legs and through the fingers heave and writhe in saving this child.  Until the entire body is a scream for the last red glares of hope, a scream for life slipping down like a feather off a table.

The child dies under the ocean, under the floor.

*

When you wake up you are a soaking dog. Stinky and moldy and slick. Every joint is trembling with the storm. What a lonely wet dog you are.

reposting this old guy, because it reminds me of cold nights

in the fall i played soccer.
the grass was cold and wet and smelled
like moon
over jade.
we sat in silence
rolling up our socks
over our little
beggar knees
bruised around
the crescent
and ribs showing
the boots that slipped on our skunky tongue feet
seal skin
the feel of the
rubber knobs
press into soil
our duffle bags
smelled like road kill
splattered red over
luminous white
line of wet road


the sweat
made our noses
pink buds
and my curly sea hair
blowing upward smoke
feel tight T-shirt
twisiting against
my side
the short orange cones
glowing houses
under the crucifix
field lights
like planet arm
silent
the legs moving oil rigs
silent
the trees bending over
over the fence
silent
the huff
from our lung,
silver fog
silent
our ponytails.

the sweat
in the cold
8 o’clock
nothing left
but gasps &
the slap of the crumbly rubber ball
against thigh
made the skin
go red
bumpy
and sting
among
the frost

love story

The breath is part outside part inside, but she vows to return again and again (she is a rainchild). She ebbs if you are a shriveled fold of yourself and she will live in between swollen teeth and muscle. Or she will plume from parietal to phalange with her wind cleaner. This is the only loyalty in the world worth writing about—breath and her defiance of architecture. 

i have a good man

*

I have a good man inside this tulip. He is slender like a wolf is slender. He’s got that crust she loves—the way horse likes her brush. He is a brave-heart gypsy with enough teeth for two men. But he is not brazen. He is not cruel. In his dirty white shirt, this man is slower than the corn; carrying no burden. 

naked at sea

we bear at the shore
like monks our muscles
and bones

lubricated           our fat
our gestures
naked at seaedge

we are saying
it's useless      
for armor against this blue


                                           (our hair     our skeletons
                                            we tuck them
                                            in our cities)


but at the ocean
we humiliate ourselves in front of god
walk into doubt       sheathed with salt     glass church

we surrender because we know this deep   will drown our children  erode the ground beneath us  show us flight  show us anchor  dissolve our lies  burry our laws   and make us fossils.

guilt grave

we say or do things that are so wrong that there is nothing to forgive. we both know that no confession will dull its scream. you can only surrender to its monster. there is no sun big enough to evaporate the wicked sounds or seconds. there is no sea fresh enough to hide its smell. instead we bet on our death, gulp down the soot and let our organs go black. sometimes there is no way to turn garbage into another thing, and all we can do is pray while we dig it’s grave; bury it in our cherry blood and wait for time to turn it small.

i am staring at our garden from our tea table and it has occurred to me that my love for you is a tomato

that poor little thing was born a carnal globe
little green translucent fetus, a
glossy fish egg out in the world without a scrap of armor

not knowing the world is a war
it grew like that half shell nest
which sits like a feather between two cracker twigs

my love was unashamed, glowing
from its marble brain

--

then its skin thickened around its bleedy fruit
and it woke up to what it could lose

it rubied from embarrassment

over its wealth, the gold in its heart grew deeper and darker and sweeter.

--

then soft again
the skin wrinkly around its throbbing feeling

everything sagging with its full stomached happiness

kissing

Kissing is entirely a mystical thing, I can hear the ancients from their hairy backed plains howling through the portals which branches through my throat and ends were the tongue and lip meet. And I can imagine no sacrifice igniting more agony and euphoria than our touching cracked mouths to heal the fault line of the cosmos; its the way to know god and what slaves we are to her.

beast light

*

I wonder how much of me is beast and how much of me is good. Right now I understand what kind of wicked animal light is, spreading across everything it can and I am so electric with sin that my hands will turn to photons if you bring your fingertip near their outlines. If you touch me I will rupture into millions like the late sun on our river.

vocal chords

today one of my friends, while walking down the brisk streets of the city, said, Indian accents are like  little drums. I eavesdropped on the men crossing the street and agreed, Then I pondered if all of us have a miniature instrument sewn into our vocal chords; I'm sure I've heard a flute, and a violin come streaming through someone's teeth like a musician practicing with the window open.

diet of snow

From now on I will only eat snow.  I want my heart to turn to liquid and sharp like ice-melt. Its not that I want to hide from what I feel, on the contrary: I want my heart to step for once out of its warm bath, and into the Atlantic. I want this heart of mine to go skinnydipping on winters night, and feel its teeth jet into its brain, feel every pore grow a needle, so that for a moment it looks like a frozen porcupine. This diet, will clean by its frost, all of the doubt that lays like soot in my gizzards, white feathers will wash the sulfur and brick. Nothing will be left behind. Every organ will be abandoned, the windows banging in the wind. 

genes of sunlight

Lawrence Ferlinghetti said that poets and painters were "the bearers of light". Somehow I can’t give up the hunch in my festering city of blood. It's telling me that our genes are made of light, that we can be traced right back to the sun, each one of us an ancestor of her luminous glitter. It’s no wonder we have such trouble keeping our feet on the ground—we were made to perforate through fence slats and summer leaves the way water pierces, but without it's blue weight.

they have a natural fling about them

these joyous ropes they call bodies
and at the same time are so vulnerable... so unabashedly wounded

I am learning how to forgive and how to exalt by watching them

how    their    forgiveness is not held in the hands. instead it blows across the face and washes the brain clean of all memory

it's in their total lack of gracefulness, it's their raw untethered bodies with arms and legs each having their own agenda. when they move it's like watching a village grow around four different religions.  and its out of these same spineless wigglers that the source of tenderness is sleeping. their tender spots lay open like meat waiting on a sill, exposed, getting warm and rancid. the sun razoring into their hope; burning up their logic, and all the while the glass of their minds stays open. its this wideness of their bodies that keeps them believing in more         consequently dissolving the concept of limitations.

when they run, their tongues hang out and flip to stick on the sides of their dewey faces. when they run and they are equal parts celebratory and terror. the sight is enough to raise the hairs on your arms up in gratitude.  to know that humans can fill up in that way, allowing the flood of feelings to mix and combust and then pour freely through the teeth and the eyes--it somehow makes all of this living worth it.

b * o * d * y

I will sew our bodies into this truth. It will have the force of our collective lungs, be able to suck in islands and highways on its inhale. It will blow over all of our steroid-walled hearts like they were rice-paper. This truth that will hold seventy billion pints of blood in its beliefs in its thoughts--enough to feed all our hungry babies.  And I will stitch us all in with the undulated string of the double helix. to do this, I will have to shrink my hands until they are plankton or the whale’s baleen that violins them.

*

What if our lives could be cut open by taking a knife to them. Our skin, this thin membrane of cells and fur is such a precarious thing, and yet it holds in our secrets our intestines all of our pain twisted up into train tracks. If we cut ourselves we bleed, we remember again how futile it is to march on for happiness. What if we could do the same to our jobs or our customs, just cut them open and humiliate them.

*

For example, what is after sea. What comes after the copious blue? The blue that licks us clean with its wash, its salt, it’s full spiny breath? What comes after it has decided to leave? Will we learn to let red dust or oil clean off our old habits?

*

I wish our bodies were like the bodies of words—their bodies are ships with hard exteriors but clear clean accessibility. You can stick your hand down a word’s tidy throat and pluck some of her memory or even place an old keepsake inside her stomach. Our bodies are like a stirred up bay after rain, the movement, the waviness of them keeps them from ever giving much shelter to another. We cannot be stuffed the way a word can be stuffed. We cannot bunker the way we do in our earth’s caves.  If I could I would stretch my mouth and windpipe, clean up the luke slime (which makes the body such an unpleasant hotel) and let you take or leave a gift.

if i must

i will live with this smartalec jawbone, with these electric cells, these gaudy little limbs, this spinning liver. these orfices like stubborn kings. with this leaking sweat, this ego and magic, phemur soliders counting how much milage is left. with these eyes that take in transparent thought and turns it into the stink stew of worry and religion. with this snapping fish brain opening and closing like a duck's quacking sending messages to these weary gentleman nerves, punching holes into reality like a man walking into the ocean--first shallow and then the deep with its dark stain.

this time

for a long time tragedy was wrapped up in the dehydrated skin of my childhood
as all children who shed their first bag of skin I thought it was forever
I'd have to be naked

as I get older things get easier
again; a returning
even the hard is easier
I am still terrified (so terrified, each strand of my fur has grown a spine)
but i am not terrified of terror anymore

I know there is a skin underneath this one:
hanging on by a corner like a baby tooth

somehow I know that the alchemy
of returning to a place where I know who i am
I know how to rest; a place disappeared
is possible

somehow I know I will grow back the feet
that stood without worry or doubt
I know I will grow back the hands that held paint brushes, cupped bath water
except this time I know where home is

from Nicaragua

Yesterday we walked the triumphant 500 meters to the next beach over from the taco shop, where the green and pink plastic chairs are warped from melting under tropical sun. Where bad commercial reggae is pouring out in concrete gravel from the small blown out amp, which is semi-buried in sand. Past the taco shop where the gringos are woofing down the over-priced fish tacos in their newly  bubblegum skin-suits. The plastic tables they sit at are littered with brown beer bottles and constellations of cilantro-flecked tomato and onion bits.


We walked past the local boys playing soccer on the pebbled beach, past the textured elbows of the tide pools (hundred thousand barnacle graves crunching under our sandals), past the sounds of tourists and tourism. The sight of the cove was born head first, so that its face was pressed up against us as soon as we turned the corner of the cliff. Trees grow out of the sand, their hips tucked underground like a magic trick. We settled under one, thinly leafed, aching for water--laid out our cheap colorful towels under the meager square of shade.


Mariah hangs up our packs and our shirts on a naked branch, digs our blue water bottle into the sand between our towels, and then falls asleep instantly. Her hands spread softly across her long stomach, her wet hair drying in tight salty curls. I watch her, read a page of my best seller, stare out at the blue curling over itself on the shore, and then watch her some more. When she wakes up, she immediately checks to see if she needs more sunscreen.  She sits up and I notice a place where she has missed applying her first coat, because she has a new perfectly shaped cherry wing coming out of her harp bowed scapula. Without thinking, I run my forefinger through its delicate feathers and say ' you grew a pink wing in your sleep.'

The Tallest Man On Earth - Thrown Right At Me (Live In Joburg)

secret projects

I have so many secret projects that I don't share with you on here because I want you to see them in print. I want you to hold these worlds in between thumb and forefinger. But I've decided to let these words dissolve into the ether and pile up in your stomach like dust.

take these dusty words, and know that i am writing so many of them!

secret project 1:


TENDER:


 A double narrative of my time spent as a volunteer in hospice, and my journey to understanding how much i love women.

Today we knew each other. He is starting to trust my stranger’s face because I can repeat back to him the moments of his life. I will do this every time I visit now. I know he wants to die remembering that he has a son that also shares his father’s name. I smile at him while I reconstruct his timeline, and he sighs deeply—instinctively I take a deep breath too. He says in his brutal voice, a carcass of a voice, “ That        was        beau ti ful” My breath? My breath is beautiful? I take another breath, and this time I relish in it; I close my eyes. He nods and says “ E ven     bet ter.”

In the beginning, when we first were roommates, when we first starting calling each other best friends, it was hard to say goodnight. At the end of the day when she would have to make the long trip up the stairs to her room—the room so high above mine, it seemed to be balancing on the full moon—it was too much. Instead, we turned off the lights in the living room, or in my room, and let the purple of the night dye our faces. We wrestled out the sticks of our loneliness that were heaped inside us. We pressed our faces into each other until we left red marks. I held her hair in handfuls. I held her by her waist. When we slept, I wrapped her so tightly I grew new muscles over night. I let my breath be open on her back.

secret project 2:

PHOTOEMS 365

strangers and friends are sending me their black and white photos. I am writing poems to them.

when he was young his body liquid, it spread out wherever there was space. No sensation was too sandpapery to keep his loosely screwed limbs tucked in. He was like an animal unabashed—ignorant. That’s why him and Bif befriended each other; everything could be understood in a shoulder’s yawn, the peninsula of a knee.