Month: August 2012

– EK Smith…

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I

The sun
cracked your blinds
in my absence
like a pistol shot
and light showered your shadow
with curses
no different than my coming.
In both our parting,
in our irretrievable going,
my sun sits, fraternal, impassive,
impaling all life
like my love,
on a tree cracked with ribs.
In this way, commissar, we
return our losses to the great void.
We, of all who are
all faceless in our unnaming,
a people of wind and air.
In this i make sense of
the tv and
the newspapers depart
disposable in our forgetting.
In this way my excesses are forgiven
and history buries the dead with the binding
of our tongues!
In all our melting absences
i have nailed this history to
the forest of our delusions.…

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There is nothing unusual about how we go at it. I’m up first. My morning cigarette. Up and turn the heater on. I hate the cold throughout the night. I hate sleeping in long sleeved shirts and trousers, but we cannot afford to run the machine for too long. I can stand winters here, though. They’re short. Quite. Then I’m back in bed, body cold from the air outside on the balcony. We don’t have an alarm. I just wake up. Sometimes she’s up in the middle of the night. Sometimes I am. A few times. Neither one of us can sleep properly. She’ll go read in the other room. I’ll just lay there on my back running conversations with deceased friends or family. Talking in fragments.…

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Anxiety announces itself with a desperate dog paddle
when there is no water in sight. Some alarm code pierces,
and creates a black hole in you, whooshing.
All those restless moments freeze you,
remembered in your limbs as reasons you should not,
dare not face a fall.

You know fear like a personal guide to pain who spins
out the complicated story
that sits on the edge of one truth.
But there are others.

Suppose that one day you try another ending
that is just a little experiment, a small kitten-like thing
that is curious, and tenacious.
Suppose that you can dance with this different ending,
and that a breathless swoop
reclaims you, a sudden unexpected tune
ends with the sound of feathers falling.

Just suppose.…

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Outer Borough

In Brooklyn, when night begins to fall, a cemetery silence invades the residential areas, punctuated by occasional passing automobiles, or by straggling fragments of a grey mass, three million strong. The more venal and corrupt sections of the main avenues, where night life runs riot until midnight or one a.m., offer dull movies, dingy pool rooms, streamlined bowling alleys and drab ice cream parlors. At one a.m. the night life dies of shame, for dreams have moldered here. Only De Kalb avenue struggles on to the hours near dawn. Rebellious spirits from neighborhoods dormant flock to the scrotum of Brooklyn, unable to resist the siren-call in the desperate search for willing female flesh, waiting to be fondled. …

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Poise

The looking glass asserts a dialogue
Comments silently on years of experience
Condensed minutae; photoshot segments of life
Selected from kaleidoscopic patterning
Layered memories like wafers
Tesselated; uppermost intensities of yesterday

A woman’s face appears in profile
Ingrained forehead, narrowed furrows
Shows up corrugated, reserved, self withheld
Disguised lines, hidden beneath lush Max Factor foundation
Revealing secretly lingering clingings to her youth
Eyes blink, flutter eyed
As she vainly endeavours
To renew her once admired appeal

Then she smooths her veined neck
And arranges her style
Important only to herself…

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yarn woven monkey

he weaved his way
for an artificial life
consisting of his
arms,
legs,
torso,
and head–
save for a plastic
face that smiled
a hangdog grin
that disturbed
the other
children
at show and tell

proudly crowned
in his red fez with
golden trimming,
his matching vest
revealing a chest
full of curled yarn–

the grin became
more ominous
over the years,
after several
exhalations of
marijuana
staring at
it in the dark
in college…

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