Metallic nails with flecks of green, metallic eyes pierce me, crystallize my insides, and — ping–pong–ping — your light reflects through me. Then the warmth dissolving my chest until — what’s this? — flowers pouring out onto my embrace until through my arms they burst and a river of flowers floods over my dam hands.
Year: 2011
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Incidental Scratches
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What would I do if my blues weren’t beautiful?
Kiss Hand
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With every chisel, freedom. Within my text, a poem.
Om
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I’m in a classroom. A black woman talks with another couple of black people.
Then she asks me “if you could be a black person, would you be one?”
I fluster at this question and say… well I’m not a black person, so I can’t be one.
Class is about to start.
There is a pool table with some brown plastic eggs and some white plastic eggs; they are all separated in half; I quickly go about matching the halves with there appropriately colored other half and put them all in the pool pockets.
A lady professor is about to lecture.
Brown and White
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Alone at night, past the nadir, after the blood–boiling hour, when through tripping through the webs of the world, I wonder why I’m up. Then, as if nudged from dreaming, it occurs to me: the lilt of the nightingale gently reaches me; that living sparkling in the dead of dark chirping the light–hearted pronouncement of its being — safe to speak
Annunciation
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I’m in some very cool, futuristic building. It’s spacious but there is that funny feeling of wealth and possession that makes me feel like I don’t belong. The man who owns it is a silver-haired old, fit guy with loads of confidence.
Everyone, including a lot of my family, are gathered around. A large chocolate chip cookie is being manufactured in a materialization device.
This is a futuristic device about 20 feet in diameter — that’s how big the cookie is. The spacious room, then, is about 50 feet in diameter with chairs for all to sit and watch the materialization. There is a nice architecture to the place: there aren’t doors, just a curving high ceiling to softly delineate hints of large rooms.
The cookie feels like it’s my cookie… that is, everyone is interested and taking part in its observation of the manufacturing and they are welcome to eat it, still, it’s being made for me and according to my specifications; this is despite the fact that I’m in a strange building, a lot of people are a captive audience, and, though I’m proud of feeling the cookie is proper, I don’t myself like the cookie: I’m not happy with it.
Now we, most of us, informally, of each our own will, move to another room, just checking out the place. Here, another broad manufacturing table is replicating an entire neighborhood. This is the rich, silver-haired, pompous man’s creation. Ugg, it’s really mostly a golf course with some houses around the edge’s of it. That’s not good for a real neighborhood… that’s not a real neighborhood. Wait. It’s missing a path from a house to one part of the course in real life. I wonder if it can be added on: that would be my path.
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The dance in us celebrates persistent beings who perform forms we love.
Notes on a Spring Day
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I don't know how to break this to you: you have a heart… some sweet swelling; then, catastrophe — all the blood squeezed out till one wonders will it ever flow again, those milk and honey days? Like days and seasons throbbing with two reasons: one in upkeep, the other open to arcs replete with sun and rain, cold and heat.
Condition
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I live up near the Canadian border. I’m standing in a large line for something like a bus. There is a couple of people next to me speaking French. The woman talks to the black man. She’s in line for a Canadian passport. Then she talks of a special passport for a small region of Canada called the island of Good, though it’s just a region. The passport declares she has the rights of a citizen when shopping in that region. This island has this special passport for economic reasons. It’s mutually beneficial: it’s good for their economy and it provides foreigners who work in the vicinity access to goods that might be otherwise hard to come by. I make a mental note to apply for to those two passports.
Passport to the Island of Good
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You’re going to make a father out of me: first snake I’ve held; first baby I’ve cared for. I place my hand into your cage; you sniff and avoid when it’s obvious to me you should glide right on. Only after both of my hands have lain on either side of you and you’ve tucked yourself into a ball, head resting on curls, do I realize I must pick you up directly. You don’t snap when I pinch; then it’s hand over hand over hand: non–stop. On the table, in the sun, you stretch out into a new world. You don’t know and there’s no way for me to tell you: it’s small. Just one big circle as far as the eye can see: only, snakes are blind. You’re so young; you need this experience to learn to move, to understand your body. You head straight for the edge; it’s instinctual or inevitable. And there’s my hand. It’s such a long drop; I don’t want you bruised or dead. So, here’s my hand. And you comprehend. And, though it’s not the best new place to go, perhaps it’s the only place you know. And, back on the table you go and straight to the edge. I blame the small circle you’re in; and, a hand I extend. And you still search for ground. I pull up a chair, in case you want to leave. Do you dare? You sense something underneath; though it be further than you’re long, you hover down till — plump — you fall belly to the sun. You twine between the slats till, like water, you find that sinking leg and dive down — despite its sheer plastic, crimp on it with your pinky–full stomach until — plop — again. Back to the circle and its edge you go. This time, no hands, though. We are both learning about falling here. Now, I see you can smell the ground — or its absence — and I let you dip as far off the edge as you dare; head and belly drip with just your scales left to grip and that fine sense of gravity, refined from your last fall, saves you or perhaps this is normal activity with which I’ve just been meddling? Now, you gracefully circle and dip along the edge without fear to slip; just desperate for some place wherewith to get down. I guess I’ve learned my lesson, now, knowing, as I take you in my hand, we needn’t go hand over hand over hand. And I need not worry about your leaning on me while upon my hand you circle ’round. to curl into a peaceful perch — until you sniff deeper ground.
Tough Love
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