Ash sky
wet glass
rain
spectacled face
sits at the
window on a
cappucino
grey faces
pass
count off
I could do without
one two
weather
awaker
colors in
boots
deep runs
water around
a girl in the street
stands in a puddle
winds
stronger storm
crystal sheen
slate street
silent
he plays with words
he sins
he plays with smoke
she loves me
I love her not
trees have meant
everything about love
since that day with the
blossoms took us a picture
&fixed our hearts
the color of May
the tree's white blood
each blossom drip
the grieving that is love
each one
a letting go
a taking part
& poetry
the cameraman's trick
Alice's room. Loft and
bellow of smoke and
sound. Woven density
weightlessness of each
ashen fiber crossing
musical line clothes
us in eachother. We
enter and for a moment
our souls are stitched
together, rhythm and
breathing, we have
become one organism
As our sprits respire
make that grey dance
around us and ask us
if we really know where
the body stops and
the world begins
But against all of that
something so humble,
grounded with no
aspirations to that
kind of knowing: a rug
Born as some modest
brown its true color
comes from its worn
years
patiently waiting
as our lofted selves
return to meet the
earth
catching the smells of
ourselves, particles
woven into its piles
the rug is just a body
essence is the lived life
the honest stitching of
each new love into the heart.
The smoke whirling in your pipe
is a text that travels through you
and as we hum and pass
piece and tangle our mass
about the center of Alice's room
I'm taken to the fine line
pencil tipping
the smouldering incense stick
It rises, ash clean
marks the air above
emberheart delicate dust
but at a height, it
breaks
turbulance pulls everyway and
our clean thin charcoal stroke
yields to the infinite
smothering air, everdancing
The charcoal stain of that
first smoke is the
boldness of Name
certainty as we speak and
place each word
as the pencil takes the page
but behind each curve and
line lies an empty magic
concealed, blotted over
As the smoke rises and is
washed away
Name is lost
scattered to a wind the
idea is formless
from Formlessness every
Name was born.
Pulling from all space
drawn from air's ritual
dance
a Name is chosen as each
scent of ash returns
turbid cloud collects
density, darkness
the charcoal stain of that
first smoke is a
stroke on a page
Your body --- how you write
Architecture, Ideas: the Imagination in which reside all things lives in the body. And so you describe the cosmos of a cafe, a chamber (of smoke) and these things are as alive as we are, as embodied.
But I feel so divorced from that part of myself. Decapitated, in a way, except the head is what I've kept. You could think it a luxury, to go through the world with so little attention payed to how others see me. And I have bragged! of whole days spent with not even a glance given to my face in a mirror.
Alice talks about how grounding it is, to know that our minds are fused to our bodies. That even the loftiest thoughts can be made to come to Earth. And then she speaks of a kind of consciousness that radiates in all our limbs, a kind of truest thought, honest thought.
I suppose I have been there, but only as I have been intoxicated, by rage and love even. But for that intoxication I never take notice, that my whole aparatus has come together at once; I do not see it until it is over.
on the beach
ambersmog blanketing the sky
petrol platforms sleeping
on the edge of the Earth
jeweled like gods in
Sapphire and all the rest
Grit and grey haze
brief nakedness
where we live
everstill as an engraving
It all seems so unfair, the way I could draw the curves of my first love but not my own face. A menace, I capture from women their bodies, keep them. Maybe they know this and that is the exchange. Do they have me? There again I am oblivious. Oh, what would be right?
I must know my body. I must think with it, wield it, undermine this tyranny of mind. How else could I be fair?
And when I read you, how you live the world with your whole being. I go back to my old poems, how little of touch, of taste is there. I play only with the academic senses; I live. How absurd! How much more there is to have, to soak in through my skin!
The way you write, everything is alive. Everything is in us, and we are alive. That world.
Some softness
warm essence
taste and the
rasp rustling of your
cotton thigh upon my
ear
we met as
strangers in
California night
crisp air
still smoke
we danced
earlier I sold you
San Francisco misty
glow and placid
Berkeley air
I wore music like
my second skin
hoping to seep past
some topographic
truth of your image
But now I wait
tepid careful
geometry of your
body
studying your
silhouette
relief in
orange
lampglow
for a
sign you will
speak with
moistmouth and the
curve of your
back
Your fingers
words within my
hair
I will watch as
bluenight and
windowbreeze
spin earth
as you
tell me your
story then
disappear
beyond the
mountains
The hallway fluoresced
along its whole sterile length.
I could hear a distant steely buzz
Sharee's shoes tapping tile
as we filed along this
bureaucratic afterthought.
There was jazz in this basement
college boys at their best
classmate Joe Escobar on at ten.
Not that we cared.
We wore whiskey on our breath
we made sure we were late.
As that buzz grew warmer
I became cool blue
dancing all the moves
I learned in the book.
Music school means you can
count the bars and get
awfully mad when the
sax misses the changes
& knowing the heroes
from Louis to J.C...
You've probably
been to Harlem once.
Joe wasn't so bad as he
tried to translate that
obsidian sound
He knows those ivories like his
own pale fingers and he
speaks that ebony language
like a native boy.
If that sax would have
soloed along with the
changes, I'd have clapped
when I knew that I should
Just like white Joe
I've studied the classics
and learned how to
make them my own.
And if anyone's jazzy
it's rad Sharee. They're
rusty brown and mean.
But that space didn't
have no room for my friend
Those phosphorescent
bodies were packed up to the
door in a coolly lit
worship of style.
Whose Jazz sounds here? Is it mine,
brought out of the books, bought
with my college degree?
Do I know the whole story?
Know all the rules?
Those kids didn't even
know when to clap but they still
lined up to take communion.
They didn't even ask.
But that Jazz wasn't Sharee's
that's for sure
they didn't play for her kind
She melted into the wall
small shadow, piece of night.
We left early to beat the crowd.
Afterwards, when we
sat by the creek
on a wooden bench
softened by night
she confided: "we
were the brownest
people in the room"
I thought: "me?
I'm flattered to
be on your team"
Guitar case
sits on the
sidewalk.
Homeboy enters.
Homeboy paces
up and down
a sidewalk.
He sits
upon it before
lighting a cigarette.
Sad. dejected.
He smokes
half of it.
Extinguishes it
on his shoe.
Stands up.
Picks up the
guitar and
leaves.
I ran away from Berkeley
for the first time in four
years, to see the seasons
slip.
The solstice sunk in
Washington. The district's stately
marble brazen, blind beneath
the highest sun, turned hearthstone
wombwarmth of the stillest
night.
The easy slip of hours
with the cheapest beer. Turned
moon turned moon to harvest
moon; us cradled in the
truckbed hiding bottles from
the ire of Waleed's pious
father.
Autumn now in Paris &
the first chimney coughs
The first night in Ba Tre's
apartment: finally alone. I
let the windowwings fly
in and leave the shutters wide.
I bow my breast over the rail
to keep the cigarette smoke out &
count the windows of the
building across Rue Legendre.
The glitter of the spitoon
street, its monochrome tobacco
lanterns drag me back to
Berkeley and that starless
sky: the first fuck I cared not
call love.
Nicole & her Newport
lips daring me to drink
party, noise & sex & shame
Her menthol kiss and vomit
Berkeley and her endless
Fall, every evening mist
The slimmest bed
scratchpaper walls
How with her frame fixed
in my fold, I felt still
but sole
I ran away from Berkeley
to let the leaves break loose.
Autumn now in Paris
The trees unstitch their signatures
The season now for sorting &
discerning what to keep
10/26/16
The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air --- The edge
cuts without cutting
meets --- nothing --- renews
itself in metal or porcelain ---
whither ? It ends ---
But if it ends
the start is begun
so that to engage roses
becomes a geometry ---
Sharper, neater, more cutting
figured in majolica
the broken plate
glazed with a rose
Somewhere the senses
makes copper roses
steel roses ---
The rose carried weight of love
but love is at an end --- of roses
If it is at the edge of the
petal that love waits
Crisp, worked to defeat
laboredness --- fragile
plucked, moist, half-raised
cold, precise, touching
What
The place between the petal's
edge and the
From the petal's edge a line starts
that being of steel
infinitely fine, infinitely
rigid penetrates
the Milky Way
without contact --- lifiting
from it neither hanging
nor pushing ---
The fragility of the flower
unbruised
penetrates spaces