Pray, what this peculiar feeling,
ol’ Jack came forth springing.
His jolly head, bobbing out a box
when the lid was raised, when lifted.
But am I a box?
Or oh dear, frogs, a hundred of them
in their green suits of a skin, leaping.
If I’ve since been a pond, I must be a pond.
Why something here goes hop, hop, hopping.
So the sentiments,
they fall like the tears
of a wax candle,
pooling to a lumpy mass
around the feet
and when all is spent
I can only pray,
you have been warmed,
lighted and lit.
It is like a seed the earth fostered
in its belly. It is like a child
a mother nursed. Its tiny hand
cling to the pink of her thumb,
its mouth sucks the nutrients
from her breast.
This is the partition. We own
what our flesh had nourished
and bore. And as I sit here, cradling
this love like a fragile newborn in my arms,
I call it mine, but it is yours.
Lover, where have they gone,
all the pretty, winged ones?
Why they don’t take a peak
through the glass, while I fuss
over the vase filled with water
to its neck, arranging the flowers
you gave, cut out from fabric?
I have asked you almost the same
question the day we went to sea,
inside a boat, rowing with an oar,
“Where are the fishes?”
You said, “Cast the rod the other side,
there is fish to be caught.”
The bait hit sand, we never left shore.
So the seasons shaved its crown,
so an ax fell and chopped it down.
So the tree, while it stood,
it was fertile. It was sawed for wood.
So it was alive then, now it’s dead,
not much of a fortune to pine, to wed,
but this fallen thing, I’d envy its luck -
the bed, nightly, is touching your back.
Or the cotton, how its white heads would nod
at the sun, in a field before it was spun,
woven into fabric - for the linen, the shirt
that runs along your skin, clings now at your neck.
My dear, no matter how short
a moment is against a lifetime,
as quick as a pulse’s beat,
as brief as shy lovers kissed
under the moonlight on their
quivering knees, a moment
is a fraction of a lifetime
that is irrevocable and did exist.
Remember:
1. Writing is (sometimes) grueling because it demands you feel, and not all feelings are great.
2. You can’t bleed without lacerating skin or picking on scabs.
3. Here’s a pen, jab it into your chest.
Easy to forget those
who you know so little
of, a face is just a face
whose name some days
eludes the tongue
but difficult, so difficult
to forget that who
you’ve known so well,
in their absence
you are reminded (of them)
by things, sound, or smell.
What are you love, the stones
I pocketed along the way
that dragged my hips down,
I struggled with each step
and down soon the river
where these stones shall fulfill
the prophecy of my defeat,
sinking, sinking
with the stones in my pocket
this is my suicide, others
prefer the loud bang of a bullet.
And perhaps we should be
no more than the fictitious characters
of a story written by a playwright
from the bygone century
when romance springs forth
his thumb, his lips, as the salient water
from the fount of the Bellagio,
for how we ruin ourselves in every plot
twist we write, how we make
poor storytellers of an otherwise,
would have been fantastic narration.
Happiness is sunbeams,
dancing, somersaulting
from leaf to leaf,
to the green, green blade
of grass lifting its head, waving.
But the trouble is this,
there are sunbeams only half the day
and the night have twelve knives
for every hour the sun is away.
What was I, a boulder, a rock
atop a hill, impervious and stiff,
against the cold, against the heat,
a sun’s glare could not slice it.
And you were what, the temblor,
a quake running far beneath
the soil that hugs the dead, funds
the living, even a rock is moved by it.
