the art of cliche(survivalism

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 21:39:23 GMT

the feel of yr hips
urgent on my palms
(electric pulse of history, pleasing)
now an apparition much like
the story alive in a
sigh; meeting eyes across a room
quickly diverted,
so easily turned.

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 04:47:26 GMT

sometimes new mexico calls me.

in auburn desert skins
claypainted hair
dust fingers,
she stands in her
naked feet & her
naked shoulders
meshed against
the naked
Infinite

her fevered reverie
laces outward, warping
the treeline which
drops from the horizon
barely before eyesight wilts

leaving only shifting winds,
the gap between madness
and rapture

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 04:07:06 GMT

baby JuneBoy
hangs from my
door frame

he has no face,
wears a watch

he sways in when
the heat lifts,
arms outstretched

he knows i won't forget

he knows,
i won't forget

Sat, 16 Jul 2005 00:20:37 GMT

the sleeping avenues roll by, complacent
unhurried in the languid
space where old
blue midnight tips his hat,
folds humbly
to a yawning skyline

my mind whirs on, gears
slipping past the empty
stops, benches yet unpeopled
with soggy expressions jingling
coat pocket change;
windshield wipers click,
blurring a.m. mist
and memory

she turns slightly, abating
restless muscles but
greedy for dreaming,
drapes a lazy arm over
the concave impression
where familiar breaths
used to fall

and is suddenly awake

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 03:24:48 GMT

dry, but i think there's something here, concept-wise.

how do i start to say this
to you

my heart wrings itself like
somebody's mother -
her hands wringing over
& over
a telephone
that is not

it is midnight and her
husband is asleep
no one will call,
she knows this

she is somebody's mother
(she knows this
as well)
but she waits, squeezing
her fingers against her palm,
feeling her cheek against a wall,
feeling its density,its particles
diffuse like long breaths through
his lips on the other side

they would shorten if it rang, but it won't
and she is thankful in the interim
for this secret

how do i start this unraveling
her history my history
(and your history?)
wound tight in coiled phone lines
or untouched notebooks,
stacked like cigarettes, maybe,
in someone's freezer, waiting
though they'll never hold a spark

that momentary glimpse of yourself,
smoke between your eyes
in paris
a phone call
a plane ticket
love letters you would have sent
if you could ever write them

your story progresses
it persists
ribbon type wound tight around
your fingertips, tapping
tapping
the morse code of your midnight

you'll be somebody's mother
some day

and i.

i won't translate the tension
of particles in a wall
how diffuse, how constant,
a secret ricochets
hands wring as they would
a heart dry of shame,
bouncing away
then back
again
always

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 06:51:38 GMT

There is this thought that comes to me in a language I can't understand. In fact, a language that has not been spoken, that perhaps is unique only to me, born in my gut, burrowing, tunneling through my veins to arrive - this day in my fingertips and others in my abdomen. The morse code of my biology, this pressure that sometimes drums against my body, telling the truth of history but, too, the truth of constancy.

You will die.

It's like maybe the death itself, the physical feat, is harbored somewhere slightly beneath my skin. A derailed train chugging around my hip flexors to skim so momentarily against my side, and I deflate with the weight of its someday cargo bearing down on me, perhaps, when I blink out. The trip never taken, me: not a passenger but a bystander whose place of arrival is the earth on which thousands more trains will host thousands more passengers delivering them to whichever path will end them.

My, yes, sighing side today says; death, earth, train, delivery. I am propelled by the sheer momentum of it, halted as well, however, by the improbability. The impossibility? I won't die. After all, I am just lying in bed, skimming the pages of a new book, and I am so new to the world still and time just stretches, stretches.

And there it is, mid-sentence. The dull gnaw of cancer between my shoulder blades like the seemingly gentle push of stranger on a sidewalk as summer sets in its tired purple way; it could be almost picturesque, the brush-by of girl/girl, girl/boy, boy/man, man/girl, destinies intertwining cosmically in the microcosmic sense. Romantic, indeed, until the push is a pressure and the pressure is steel and the purple is not so much lazy this summer but ominous, sneaking like a bruise, sneaky like the mouth of a pistol pressed into my back and I was only expecting a sunset hello. An uninvited plague to my senses, seeping shallowly, and it seems funny, in a way, that such a slow disease can make the otherwise drolling procession of time so completely, quickly gone.

Suspended in this stasis of sorts, where my future screams through my nerves, "everything ends, girl, everything," I think: begin, though the futility isn't lost on me. I think this morning, say, that a garden will be good. A flower behind my ear, a flower near my lover's cheek, a flower laid just so, just outside the bounds of my grave. To count my days in flowers, I think, well, that could be a good measure.

Though tomorrow, I realize, I will feel roots around my feet and think that a rolling boxcar will serve me well to outspeed the drone of days ticked down, dissipating, and so my body never hushes until, of course, it's silent.