D.E.

February 28, 2014

D.E.

“...This research was carried out on D.E. who was born in 1954. In 1970 he was involved in a motor-scooter accident. A bilateral carotid angiogram...revealed almost total occlusion of the left internal carotid artery... His speech output consists primarily of 3-4 words arranged in simple syntactic structures... He is currently employed as a store keeper...”

His name might be David, or Donald,

or Daniel. He might have blond hair

or brown, blue eyes or green. He is currently

employed as a store keeper.

At sixteen I still held my first kiss as precious,

I daydreamed about what I might want to study in college,

and I began to learn how to put words together in just the right way

in an attempt to form something beautiful.

He speaks softly, maybe with a self-conscious smile.

He is currently employed as a store keeper.

Birdsong

September 30, 2012

Birdsong

I open my window to let in the morning.

Beyond the sill, the birds bring on daylight, their wings

shining in the sunrise. Sparrows here, sparrows there,

flying in flocks with such mathematical grace, such

lovely arithmetic: tessellating in mid-

air, geometric shapes.Their pitched sounds follow them,

too musical to be language, too deliberate

to be song. What instinct could be so intricate?

One small winged thing lands delicately in front

of me, tilts its head, and chirps. Surprised, I reply,

but my concave mouth is shaped wrong, and the air ca-

tches on my teeth. I blink. The sparrow calls again.

My voice searches for sounds as sweet, but suddenly

I am tone-deaf against such perfect pitch. I try

to mimic in english, then spanish, maybe some

mandarin, but I can’t seem to get the notes right,

throat too complex to sing as purely as pan pipes,

too old to learn these melodic oscillations.

Little bird, little bird, perched on my window: as

you twitter and trill, what riddles do you tell, with

your ambisyllabic sonorants? What sonnets

do you spout, with their jumps, leaps, and resolutions?

Brown bird, you take off and familiarity

dissolves like a fog clearing; each wingbeat reveals

a glittering, alien scene,

                                        a strange new sun

rising on a foreign country, a foreign world.

Somniloquy

September 7, 2012

Somniloquy

i.

My head still rests

on your chest, and I think

you’ve fallen into sleep.

I can hear very clearly

each breath you take;

the movement of air

creates a slow, deep resonance

in your lungs and in my ear.

The sound is low and grumbling:

a thunder reluctant to cross the gray

cloudy sky, sad to signal

the impending autumn.

The slight rain, though, is cool against

late summer’s heat – quick

and cold, its song

awakens the skin, and I can

feel

       each

               drop.

ii.

A murmur escapes your lips.

it’s just a whisper, but suddenly

I am filled with a longing to know

what you’re saying, what secrets

or lists you’re reciting from.

I want to understand your idiolect,

write definitions for your personal lexicon,

transcribe the orthographical patterns

of your sleepy speech.  I could map out

the acoustics of every apical consonant,

the irish fricatives and african clicks –

sounds all strung together, or perhaps

clipped short by your teeth.

I want to imitate your fine-print

tonal shifts until I’m tongue-tied.

I want to decipher this rhapsody

of vibrations in the air,

interpret this revue of breath

shaped by your throat and your mouth.

You mumble on for a bit, and then

you’re quiet again, breathing in

and out,

low and deep.

I’m left with a moment of wonder:

a strange and lovely sensation,

like a small glimpse

of pages filled

with someone else’s words.

iii.

The smooth, even cadence

of your heartbeat, at least

seems to say love you,

love you,

love you,

and maybe this is only me hoping,

but I don’t think that’s sleep

talking.

better than bitter

December 7, 2011

better than bitter

hissing, spitting, the wind takes my hair in fingers

that are like yours except much, much more

harsh.  damn.  I took a walk to clear my head, but

all I can think about is you, you, you, and how I’m going to have to write

some really bad poetry.  these trite phrases keep beating

in my head like the ticking of clocks, a metronome to my own

insomnia – I hammer the same old words into place,

trying to find the right angles, like leaves against the wind

in a storm, but somehow everything comes out in a snowy

slush.  I miss your run-on sentences, your definitions

of words that don’t exist.  I want to say something

that’s as lovely as you are, something as real as rays of moonlight

spilling out onto wet asphalt.  I want to write

things that are barebacked and blackened

like church steeples and treble clefs.  but now,

I am famine-struck, and

    red as hunger.

paper dreams

March 4, 2011

paper dreams

when I think of what might become of us later, my mouth takes on the ashtray taste of probability, a dark coffee that sweetens slightly at the thought of you, staining and becoming the gold rings that sometimes appear in your blue eyes, as bright as the sun that shone above us ages ago when we laid on our stomachs in soft grass, with friends, laughing, not knowing what was in store for us in the future, just like

I don’t know now.

my words, they live in the palaces I built for them in the rich deserts of my imagination, with the air stirring around them filled with the scents of spices; in skyscrapers I constructed among the vivid city streets of my past, all thronged with pigeons and raw beauty; on midnight lakes under the golden august moons of my memory, the seagulls nesting quietly on the shore; but my words, the poor orphans, will never know

who their author is. 

we are swept inexorably onward by some dark, ancient wind, caught at the moment in the slow death throes of snow and ice; as this bitter breeze bites at my back and at my heels, I begin to shiver from damp and cold, from longing and regret, but then, as always, you, with your isinglass gaze and lion’s heart, remind me of cherry stems and seashells and pennies face-up.  you hold me close and reassure me,

summer will change that, too.

my wish for you

March 14, 2011

my wish for you

when you are this little and

cannot yet write, that you

discover beauties of sight

and sound

in language:

that you

delight in the complex burbles

and splashes of water flowing and

falling, the shivering of trees

in the wind,

the strange

curves of letters

printed on paper, painted on walls,

and the smooth, soft sounds of

the whispered words, “I love you.”

as you sprout up

and learn how

if you move

your hand just

like that, you

can make a line

that looks like

this, that the

words will one

day come bursting

out, pushing their

way from your

heart, through your pen, and as the sentences

come scribbling across your page, beautifully

misspelled, some beaten and chewed like your

favorite building blocks or barbie dolls, that you

will recognize them as raw and rare and precious. 

  

as you continue

to grow and

mature, learning

so many incredible

things, open

to what the world

has to show you,

that your words

will grow as you

do, becoming

as resplendent as

rainbows reflecting

off of ocean spray, as wild as running wolves,

each with its own spirited pulse, as magnificent

as the constellations shining above us all, and as

glorious as the sparkling waltz of the northern lights.

and as you live to be older, as you

become weary with a life of creation

and artistry, that you find the time

to rest, but

still to write;

that the words

you craft gain wisdom as you do,

taking on a more thoughtful tone,

but retaining their beauty and life;

that they

comfort

you and care

for you, remaining faithful companions

until your last days; that they might become

more pensive, but never lose their wonder.

Alalia syllabaris

December 15, 2010

won 2nd place in 2011 Sokol High School Literary Awards

Alalia syllabaris

I am

thick-lipped,

tongue-tied,

the words in my mouth

glass marbles that I

cannot spit out. 

If only these ideas

could articulate themselves,

clipped and clean and clear

like harpsichord staccato,

clockwork clicking,

or horses’ hooves

on cobblestone.

My language

would be as precise

as the lunar curves

of an eclipse,

lovelier than ice sculptures

carved and shaped

into masterpieces.

But my phrases slur,

like rain stammering, stammering

on roofs, streets, oceans,

making meaningless messes

of my simple thoughts.

Try as I might to master

the slick, quick turnarounds,

the sharp resolve of each word,

my sentences inevitably become

myopic, impressionist,

finger-painted interpretations

of the sentiments

I cannot communicate.

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June 26, 2010
January 3, 2013

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I’m walking down the road when something hits me

like a bird that’s just been shot: paper,

unlined, with the edges and corners curled

by a long-gone downpour.

“. . .offset by dizzy days, bare bones, and swollen ankles?” 

the words are scars burnt into the butterfly-wing pages.

I wonder who would want such a brazen brand,

and also why this darkness won’t leave my head. 

it’s because I woke up

before the sun rose this morning. 

the darkness, that is. 

“. . .mobius strips and blackbirds won’t hold you until the end. . .”

oh, lies are always more convincing

when they’re in the form of words. 

words have a rhythm to them

that tugs your tongue in time

whether you want it to or not.

it’s charming, really.

an impulse compels me to tie the pages up into nothing more

than illiterate paper cranes, but I tell myself that no one likes pigeons;

they’re all looking for doves, doves, doves. 

“. . .tomorrow doesn’t have to seem so far away. . .”

the clammy wind catches the paper and I let it fly off

without a goodbye. I keep it in the corner of my gaze,

though whether it is a tiger or something less

dangerous, I cannot be sure. 

as it goes, it dances like a drunken sort of kite,

or maybe a snake. 

still, the mechanical fabrications all typed

out on that paper linger unbidden

in the recesses of my most dimwitted hallucinations. 

“. . .give us all you have and we’ll give you everything you want. . .”

an unwanted rain tap tap taps on the blacktop

as I finally make my way home.

I keep thinking, hey, that’s sort of catchy. 

Skyes, Blu

April 14, 2010

Skyes, Blu

Blu Skyes never cared to be known. 

My name should be Icarus, she said, tripping her pen onto the sidewalk below.  She leapt down from the tree at a height that would have made most people’s bones rattle in their skin. 

I stepped lightly to the ground from the bottommost branch.  “What do you mean?” 

He was such a failure, she replied. 

I wanted to tell her, “You’re no failure,” but all I said was, “I have to go.” 

Blu would have drowned the kittens of the Cheshire cat not because they would’ve died anyway, but because she would have been jealous. 

She and I were in some garden when she said, Reach me a rose, will you?  Their stems remind me of love and The Great Gatsby. 

“We all live in somebody’s future, Blu,” I told her. 

But I worry about the ones whose pasts we have already abused.   

If you were glass or if you were stone, Blu would rub you smooth, and you would shine.  Me, she never touched. 

The train lumbered along like some subterranean beast as we waited to cross the tracks. 

False face must hide what the false heart doth know, she quoted.  That’s Shakespeare.

I wanted to ask, “What have you done that you need to hide?” but I could only nod and add, “Macbeth.” 

What happened to those blueberry eyes, Blu Skyes?  That raspberry smile?  Did your faith take them with her when she left?  Or was it just a matter of time?

She skipped stones in the brook as I sat and watched.  Far too similar are kites and cranes.  Far too different are birds and planes. 

If I had had the courage, I would have demanded, “Tell me what you mean!  I may not understand, but at least I can try.”  Instead, “Who came up with that one?”

For once, her eyes were not wasps, but water. Her voice was not ruthless, but soft, soft, soft. I did.  

It was a sea that threatened her.  I had always stood with her, always ankle deep, but always behind her, and she would never know. 

I pictured us tightrope-walking along the thin line of our hopes in the dying sunlight.  If I ever glanced down, Blu would whisper, Don’t look at it too long, or you’ll realize it doesn’t exist.

If I were brave, I would have dared those spider-web dreams to disappear.  If I were brave, I would have pieced us back together if we fell.  If I were brave, I would have spoken up whenever I had had something to say.  If I were brave, I would have done what Daedalus never could.

I would have saved us both.