The first chirp of the morning bird dawn
blows away the lost dreams through which
I wandered stolidly watching the wonders
and terrors of ideal worship and vampirous disease
culminate in questions asked of blank expressions
to uncover a well of deepest regret down which
tears fall from the head I plunge in to see gone
my only love in the dark [...]
Monthly Archives: March 2010
Dawn
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The Earth and the Sun
The sun had been the progenitor of the fruit of the womb of the earth; but one day it darkened inexplicably. A scowl supplanted its virile smile and like that it was gone.
The earth, who had to feed her children, labored at two parts at once, worked hard, exhausting herself to produce what should have [...]
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Memory
Recollections of blinking instances
of the mute presence of positions
the body has held and let go
like the hand releasing the space
that frees the dance to be improvised
and discoveries to be made as to
how it can be shaped open like
the surface of the sea to rains
teardrops that once kept inside
are reabsorbed into the blood
which as it streams [...]
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Error and Tenacity
We make it a matter of character
to stand by former beliefs,
the bases of our actions, and
the outcomes they engender
as if they were our children,
who we tell ourselves we love,
however bad they be, no matter
how mired in error their origins:
we must carry their existences
out as if they were our own.
The feature we would alter
to reflect back [...]
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Depression
I confine myself to a room and there my body writhes
through the hours as if it wants to rise up and run away
but every time it tries, a battering force quashes it down,
and I succumb willingly, hoping that in the place I am put
I might find another way out, but against a floor there is [...]
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The Basis of Poetry
Words are artificial inventions.
We need them because they are
the closest approximations, most
effortless gestures we have
to the sources from which spring
the thoughts that we are in
possession of verifiable secrets.
They fascinate us because
like music they are sounds
like smiles and tears they fade
and like striations they are written
records of what otherwise
would never have been known.
But words, we must [...]
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Finding My Self
In the house where I was born, live and expect to die
walls rise, at times slowly, with apparently careful planning,
at others, suddenly as in dreams, from which I wake
to find myself in a room I do not remember ever entering.
And walls fall by themselves after crumbling with decay
or are torn down by deafening hammers, whose [...]
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If
If you stay in one place, get to know the people there,
have a room to put your stuff without asking anybody,
the space to posit many orders of the things that make
reality move in circles, from the azure clarity of blue to
the tight inclusiveness of dark and being afraid to touch,
the discipline not to follow the [...]
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Contrasts in Light
The unbearably brilliant sunlight
ruthlessly hews the contours of stones
against the blue shadows that rever-
berate out the cold cores of blocks
to passage too heavy to shove away,
too hard to rest for very long;
horizontally inclined, the light peers over
a world that brims with variations
so slight, it would stop time to witness
the ubiquitous links binding the contrasts
of heaven [...]
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Youth, or Half the Moon
Half the moon hangs above
a tree at the edge of a pond,
pooled with recent rain waters:
its trunk shimmers like a mirage
with shallow surface undulations
proceeding at such a pace
as the sun when it seems
to stay put at its apex but speed
into and out of each horizon
as if it had some place to be -
to the stony [...]
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