2D Glasses

Someone had gotten there before me
and left their mark.
Her skin, owned not worn,
projects a burlesque outline
not unlike
the others,
Shelby like a hurricane
descended
with an awkward sign
that said
“First of the night”
and to those who
would label
me as virtuous as
Armstrong or Polo
I can only say
that unexplored lands
have never been
so beneficial –
so human.
So intimate.
The barren topography
of a Winnipeg winter
replaced by the subtly
of sin
and the artificial openness
paid for by capitalism.
A man shouldn’t laugh
at this
person –
stripped as she was –
but one couldn’t
ignore the juxtaposition.
The interplay
of nineties music
and my hands being
overly forward.
She asked why I took my glasses
off.
“To see you”
So it is. That the eyes see
but the body knows.

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Personifications

Birds sing, brooks babble, and trees sway
while the ax chops.
Hunks of tree flesh dance in a slight wind
and stick to the dewy bark
of a thing called man.

Sticky sweet blood runs.

Somewhere a blinking monitor
remembers the key strokes
regarding Marxists capitol
and Foucaultian power.
These heavens bear down on the man.
A sun too bright, a salvation too far removed.

A double helix composed of turned pages.

The forest howls at the loss of a friend,
a child, a mother, a brother, a life extinguished.
Here in the pulsing womb of creation
all falls silent when the slight wind dies.
The clockwork devil, unlike fire and trembling earth,
pauses to adore work and creation
before eloping with the corpse.

Imagine, now the future.

The thing called man and wife adoring
their things called son and daughter,
who like hurricanes blow aimlessly around
the cabin the thing called man built for them.
Unlike fire and trembling earth,
they pause to adore work and creation.
Not unlike bird, or brook, or tree
but for the ax hanging over the fire place.

 

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Un-Skinny Dipping

Her whiteness, illuminated by a motion sensor light
stood out in the darkness
with all the fragility of a lighting bolt in the sky.
Fit among the stars and moon
if not fit among the beach by day
she pined for the cold embrace
and weightlessness of water.
Unpreparedness, if not several champagne flutes,
had delivered the opportunity
to escape the buzzing well-lit hive
carved into the cliff and the ability to
shorten a quick expanding bucket list.
She lingered on the ebbing proscenium
with a spot light at her back.

The fabric of the loudness that kept her away,
the crudeness that undermined expectations,
and the tight fitting pomposity she knowingly confused for confidence
are shed and casting shadows on her footprints.
Finally alone, she doesn’t see me.
Tucked in the folds of her dress, the shadows on the beach,
the overlapping waves silently applauding
as she, the thunder, breaks
the rolling foamy waves
with a joyous jump.

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The Watched Pot

More love is made in the kitchen
than in the bedroom.
If one cleans dishes
the other should dry.
If the other stirs,
the one should
cup her womb and spice her neck
with soundless words.

The sweat of summer
will not stop the baking of bread
or the dance of narrow
avoidance which
reminds you of distance
and proximity. The thirstier
the better the wine tastes.
Desire is a fulfilling of that
space between moving hips.

The other does not paint her face there.
The one does not own there.
All of it merely is.
An is that waits to boil.

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The Eye of Power

It was never a question of existence
I had seen it, it had seen me,
but could I ever posses it?

On the table an unblinking
half of grapefruit looked
like a New England February day
off from school – the decaying slopes
having been deemed too
slippery to drive.
Such weather my father adored
to test in a 2 ton all-steel American
built sled with “Dodge” embossed
on the front. I still associate
bench seats with thrilling
force and the smell of cigars
with men.

His breakfast, like that old royal Dodge,
was a Frankenstein’s monster of reanimated
scraps of other meals slapped into
the body of a bagel to achieve the look
the texture
the feel
Of something, God knows what, that pleased him.

This was for him – running yokes making fingers greasy
and a hot coffee.
It would remain wholly unconnected to the rest of his acts
as a gift bestowed upon him by an ignorance untested.

His morning shower is my crisp clean moment
to delicately crack the surface.

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Seasoned Cast Iron

Every drink
from sip to gulp
became so contrary
to what she wanted
she wondered if she
was actually running
away.

You see that
the bartender
pointed to her
in a place at a bar
in another world.
That’s who you are.

A definition that is
constantly running.
Giving more that it
actually has.
Room temperature.
Lifetime.
Moneys worth.

She looks pretty,
let me buy her a drink.

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Pierced

In that moment she was sin
that appeared fallen
due to her juxtaposition.
As a child she wanted
to wear glasses –
then took mine off.
“I don’t want to scratch them”
Morgana the butterfly
that flapped her wings and the ground
perched in that brief moment
on top of me.
The dividers rose like
a confessional.
Perhaps I reminded her of herself.
Two thin silver bands
hung like bull rings
but felt like smoke circles
against my face.
She who named herself
after books she read
in the hopes of becoming myopic.
It was all too much
for me. So I laughed.
We laughed.
She had moved here from California
for her mother.
So when she is healed, I will never see her again.

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Diagnosis

She was too old for everything
but this.
Her round form pleasantly
occupying that grey space
between lists of things to do
and things left undone.
She had always been a mother
it seemed,
but not grand, not yet, not in the end.

She was not young enough
for anything else
but filling a church
with people that bracketed her
like a hug.
Always a competitor,
she always had to be first
quipped her older sister.
The congregation laughed
for what seemed like the first time.

And in the back
the monster on my shoulders
compresses facts
into a history
rather than tragedy.
I feel only my heavy, fleshy body
rather than the damned river
of emotions.
These things, once part of me,
have been labeled symptoms now –
so the word possibility is removed
of its youth and grows into manhood.

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Akutaq

She stood black
a letter pressed
against the sky
ink growing old.
The eye struggles
to pronounce her
standing against –
breathing in the cold.

Light hangs from her
flesh on bones
icicles on the house
pauses in the air
as the collective
finds failure in their mouths
smooth as ice cream –
they exist as a pair.

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Prosody

Weight
the enemy of flight –
but from her mouth
that dense milieu
is fog that light
cannot penetrate
but flesh can part.
Eyes are the slave to hands,
art the envy of might
and when she speaks
she calls your heart to
take up arms
against your sight;
A lie so beautiful
it flaws the truth,
and turns the day
to night.

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