polyamorous hindu

you can fall in love a million times in the eyes of your wife
let them seep into her skin and in to her hair
whisper and scream through her toes like
a bluster of buds in the spring
the spit of its wind
let them grow children out of her mouth
all men all women embraced in the dream
there they are always clean always lost in their hope
brighter than a coin at the bottom of pail
brighter than a cow feasting in her pasture
i hold all men and all women there in the dream
and my blood turns to juiced stars
a saltless ocean
my heart is no longer a deadly purple thing
but a bird made of jasmines

first pantoum ever..

Everything holds like salt
The day is sour and dry
But our night is peeled and grainy
We are each other’s island

The day is sour and dry
And the children are getting wild
But our night is peeled and grainy
even the houses are still dark

And the children are getting wild
But our night is peeled and grainy
even the houses are still dark
Everything holds like salt

footnotes

It started when I began to light candles.

I knew that their light was too familiar.

The flame seemed ancient but also my child.

I was told a story about medieval sage.

Isaac Luria has traced the lineage of the flame.

I imagine him trying to sew each weary candle into the sun.

How many individual flames are in the sun?

Sometimes I can feel other lives through my own.

Sometimes I know there has never been any other.

How can I be we and also I at the same time?

Whose flame is this that I remember?

Why is this heat sometimes covered in shadow?

Who is making this shade?

The world is at once burning and freezing.

The world is floating in space.

Where does space come from?

Who has been carved?

Then your town was radioed in.

Your rural town with its apples.

Your rural town with its clean skin.

I could hear you like I could hear the flame.

You sometimes were the living cells.

And sang together from one throat.

But you also sometimes were banished from each other.

You sometimes were lost in your freedom.

I heard your children laughing.

I heard your fathers breaking.

I could see your town sparkling.

You are wolves and you are the rain.

You are tiny and you are insufferable.

You are somewhere where America is good.

And I have fallen in love with you.

Because you are far away.

Because you are embedded into me.

Like a blade.

As the sun is warming us with its infinite knives.

The sun is a stomach which is fed by us.

I hear you now when I sing for my bread.

When I light candles now I am embracing you.

This light is broken

This light is in us all

We must keep sewing

We must keep sewing

We must keep sewing

truth about bodies

"we let ourselves know that our bodies are made up of water

but we cannot let ourselves let go of the body completely”--Goethe

body               not a capsule

bones mess of blood & meat are not strung         not weaved

     

we are

a river has no geography too thin too moveable for mapping

flip our minds into our knees into our wings

                                                     
                                                                            liquid     s p i n d l e s

we have grown gnarled feet from nightmares

have imagine      clay       rock       iron        skulls




                                                              what we have is a body of wet wind

jellyfish are white

I am often told that I remind people of jellyfish because I float I am deadly brainless throatless voiceless I can burn scars into your memory like a whip on fire personally jellyfish remind me of cooked onions gummy see through things and i imagine the whole ocean smelling like a kitchen

carving and poetry

I always feel a little self-conscious about this blog's title, you know, because it's a little ( a lotta little) cutesy. When I started this blog-- which is the mark of me beginning my journey as a poet (yes I think 'poet' is an action and not an inherent trait; it's a verb not an adjective) I thought that I was 'carving' words; like in wood; like in lovers carving their names in an oak tree. If that were the case, this blog title really would have been embarassing because it wouldn't have said anything true about what poetry is. It wouldn't have said much really.

But now I'm going claim subconscious knowledge as my wild card, and say that I must have known deep somewhere that 'carving' meant more than wood and words. Poetry--I am learning--is about vision into what is impossible. It's about believing in alchemy. And let me tell you something-- neither of those things are either easy or pleasant. In order to truly believe in something impossible, you have to sacrifice something for it. You have to leave something of yourself in it's name, otherwise you could take back your word, and have it go unnoticed. You could slink away, unharmed--nothing at stake. No, believing in the impossible is about investing yourself in a high risk. There are so many things that are risky about poetry: trying to explain or capture or create what cannot be explained, captured, or created/ doing something that your history doesn't understand/ allowing for questions, for shadows, for breath that could take down your house with one whip.

And so, in order to believe in the risk you are taking when you are writing/doing poetry, when you are PAINFULLY morphing into a    p   o   e    t     you have to leave a little of yourself on the altar in order for it to work.

carving poetry isn't about carving words out of anything... it's about carving myself out of me, so that I can believe in what poetry does.  Let it be known to those of you thinking about making this journey too: Each time you go to make poetry, you are carving yourself right out of yourself, until there is nothing left to carve and you are poetry itself.

white as a house

I dream that I am a house the floorboards ribs windows ears where daylight never stops and the children inside me are always sleeping our voice is breathing inside their bunny lungs

Sublime

What can be more sublime than the lime sun filtered through the skin of spring leaf?

interviews with white cont...

the eye was flat but gelatinous like a coin that had been skinned the outside was rubbery calmed  salty dead on the wet deck spray coming up from the moving water was threatened by the hemorrhage of cranberry red and blue