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.'