zTechnorati Profile

the city shuts its graffitied eyelids with a shudder, and sleeps the fitful sleep of one who is watched
this near the sun, there are no blinds thick enough, no curtains dark enough, to block the morning light

but for now, the streetlights that do work
illuminate men wearing bags, carrying bags, untieing and hoisting multitudes of plastic bags
their cats sit ladylike awaiting a turn at the heap

shadows under bridges hint of human forms
sidewalks trampled during the day are off limits
country people lurking in the dark
in a city they where they cannot sleep

I can't sleep either
you won't do what I want you to do
and I won't want what you want me to

Andean city, city 8,000 feet closer to the stars
facades only a mother could love
where the ironwork is delicate like her idolized hands
spared by the hands of a thousand wanderers
settling briefly to clean your sleepy homes
homes made by other women, homes not their own

how did your grandparents engage the world? was it art, poetry, wood? was it fishing in waters long since dried up? did they rock silently back and forth or tilt full blown, loud, brash? were they fixers, of men, of faucets? did they sweep stoops or just sit on them to watch sunsets peeking past crumbling midrise apartments? were they volunteers or conscripts? did they cook ambitious and disatrous meals with multiple courses, then leaves the dishes for the morning, or did they keep a maid to make them thick sandwiches on crusty bread? how did they address one another, do you know?

or is it lost, dust under the bed you once jumped on
dust in the basements where you were sent to play,
dust on the piano keys,
dust on your grandfather's hand when he reached for a hammer, said here
this is how you hold it
use its weight
do not test your strength on the wood
but use the nail to write your intention deep
dust gathered slow and unwilling
from the dirt waiting to be tossed
too late, too late
into the grave earth

National Envy

Rose thorns grown shallow in clumped dirt
bleeding hands full of pluck
greedy hands taking ten times what ours carry

at the national university
guerrilla graffiti adorns white slabs that only shelter
and Che gloats over us all

(when introduced, I say, I’m an imperialist yanqui – and where are you from?
oh, they say, disappointed, you’re not French.)

it’s dusk again
windows thrust open to greet the night blooms
sensual caballo blossoms open to pique the coming gloom
and national envy seeps in

No one is speaking my language
I’m talking talking talking to myself
No one is speaking my language
I listen but no words come out

No one is speaking my language
My language of stars and pink skies and blue nights
There’s a knock and I answer but wordless we just stare
The door closes, a point, a shard of colored glass
Because no one is speaking my language
And no one can

I could sit at this window forever
In my foreign interior land
In this country not so different from my own
My feelings just the same
My language just the same
Only different music pulses
Only different sizes to try on
The sounds are different but with the same no meaning days

No one here speaks my language
is better than
No one understands me
even though
we speak the same language

Here I can feel melancholy and blame it on the sky
Here I am the same
It’s only outside that’s constant change

apples

the intention like an apple held to tempt, before there were eyes like these
an idea blocking the passage of the world
endless ecstasy endless agony endless is our hope endless the spin

the apple grows with each caramel refined, and we call progress
by its righteous name
greed for movement, aquiring need

the apple sits, waits, lies
it is endlessly round, and red
stares back with our own gleam - why we gave it the world's weight too
the glinted sinking stone
our of joy, and our fear
that which we pretend not to taste

apple, the good doctor, the medicine before time, and after
Our time

Can the endless end, the soulless fill with soul, the breathless breathe?
can a new question come, unannounced, to await our knowing's growing?

Applesauce, cider, the thing or the marmelade
a fountain of nonsense leading back inside
up the tree and down the mountain to a lake
which neither you, nor I, can or will escape

Sitting

sitting, still and here with my grandma
learning to wait on the trickling words
small economies too complex for analysis

the smell of an old place
sudden screams just down the hall
(startling mostly in their lack of power to startle)
belie the soft light and flat screen tv, a Christmas relic
of a family that still visits nearly every day

I am visited instead by guilt
for living too far away
for the six months that have passed since
the last confession of my face before hers

the daily pound on an uncooperative body
and mind active but tiring – the two meeting less and less often

All of this makes me somehow whole –
not glad, not that,
as I hide tears from the night nurse – but full,

Our responsibilities to each other
sinking like mud into the chinks of weakness and pain
to flesh out the place our hearts reside.

public

looking for the public –
this eye in my chest that blinks and blinds –

Steps to a tower in Bogotá –
emblazoned with gold plates that warn, “ private property”
as a city tramps to the very top

A violet orchid in the botanical gardens whose scent teases –
cannot be captured

Honeysuckle vines carefully tilted and turned
that lilt from a neighbor’s wall of bricks –
eight feet with festive colored glass glaring, aching, from its rim –

what is public in any of this?
in the hand that shoots
unthinkingly, from her waist to steady the stumble of another

in the approving glance of a man etched with years,
still welcome for its open gaze

in the heart, (product of a black science fiction writer’s pen)
that leaks, chary and charred, with every tear the world lets fall
to the earth –

what is public in all of this
or – what is not?

redeem this poem

waiting in the rain
for redemption
still, the sky will not empty itself
and we go on
redemption tarries,
looks out the window,
and decides to stay home.

today it rains, same as yesterday,
only lonelier.

Be drawn into someone else’s arms
Dive further into the muck
in this rainy season

Hope for landslides to cover scars of roads past,
lovers’ leaps -- all we've got.

our times

a sepia-toned montage suspended in midair
no amount of tv movies or made to order documentaries
will erase the immediateness: the

smell taste feel

grit-encrusted nostrils
dusty tongues, babbling loosed of meaning, bits of sky crumbling
into upturned mouths

the street swallows, and the burning bitter ash
crumbled down throats
carrying unblessed belief
unrelieved by red cross water

Soon it appears:
desire will go homeless, irony become a dirty word

Skin still intact on the lucky ones

Mimeographed dots of black
and white

on the unlucky.

Entitlement Men

Saccharine tropical music
Puts me in danger of writing more bad poetry

Full moon on the island means
Good luck in the ocean’s warm embrace

A short walk on grainy streets
Takes me to the 24 hour farmacia
Where I pause in aisles watching bleary tourists
On the isla del encanto to buy witty T-shirts
aloe to soothe days of heat too deep,
Nights throbbing, muggy, and prone to burn.

Men of entitlement
Complain gently to the concierge
Grow more insistent, make one last try for the ocean view
A high-class vista to raise the quality of their wives

They grow sullen and tricky when refused.

post-election depression

On losing, when t.v. proclaims a winner
and your people are let down

It rains all day -- just a mean, sorry, spiteful drizzle
and your wife’s fortune is left paltry and dry,
Her saucy humor fades and one whole day is a grimace,
mouth full of old cigarettes and stale mixed nuts.

Your long, dour face glowed from my screen
I read your name:
Africans, Veterans, Unions and Teachers wanted you
but would go home unsatiated, left with the wanting
taste of it on these lips

Under all our skin we felt pricks of early goosebumps;
still, you rose not

Rappers banged harsh words against your opponent
Spectors of youth strode,
half-somnulent,
past white obstacles in the videos.

When the lasting barriers have always worn black robes
Sheathed in precendent, cloaked in midnight decrees.
They’re still hiding behind the sheets,
and we’ve yet to awake.

our Saturday afternoon crane

we were on our last hill when we saw him, perched atop a Georgia pine

legs staggered, he seemed to turn and stare at us
from that height
the hush that fell froze limbs and minutes passed in which
I’m not sure we breathed

what we felt that day remains dear and true
still, I wouldn’t mind seeing our crane again
wouldn’t mind hearing you say again,
I’m yours for always.

Tonight your voice flutters softly in my ear
strumming that guitar and softly singing
this time just for me

This missing you rends even the warmest lamplit night
and try as I might to patch it up with pink moons and chocolate bars,
it will not mend and lingers,
waiting and still, like me for you

Waiting - I never could stand still -
twitch and hop from leg to leg with our crane,
in the Saturday deepening day's light
Solid on one leg, like me for you

Central Library, New York

Women everywhere are applying lipstick
surreptitiously, as if their hands had just glided up on their own,
fluttering shades of mauve and chartreuse onto casual mouths

Gilded ceiling and marble floors
shiny with the dull glow of thousands of footsteps marking the same paces,
stopping suddenly in front of the same forgotten volume

Precisely every three minutes a man to my right
lowers his book slightly to glance over my work
as he stands up, a note flutters to the table:

Take nothing
Leave it all

Watches and umbrellas find their rightful owners
This day, too, will return in time

there was no before

Two years old:
there was no before
and no one else can know this

underneath the table I spot
a wad of gum my brother stuck there
two years old and there was no before

there was no before
the tiles always speckled, cool and rough under my cheek
the soft thud of mother, discussing,
I was not supposed to hear
Neither began nor ended

not even on this day,
when I no longer and shoved, all lovingly
into the garage,
where the noises sounded more like muffled late night tv
and less like home

there was no before –
the touch always bruised
mother’s eyes always pleaded like that
try to understand, no one else can
there was no before.

there is no after, not yet anyway.
this is all anti history
seeding a lifetime of re-creation,
of a non-story
this is not front page news

moats and moors and ordinary walls
all proportional
to the stories behind the doors

doors shut so tightly, that to open them requires
the force behind the world to rupture
and open at its seams,
the prehistoric code forgotten, or destroyed

buildings don’t kill people, I’m told
the loss of the code does

there was no before

the fear, it came with us.

roadside attractions

falling in the gardens into massive silence
quietening the city's clamor and clang
fountains a public cleansing
while just beyond the shirtsleeved men
play at being fathers, at seeding young things,
we guard our children from the fall

shutting mouths in the garden
the relation between parts
what the professor calls, in a tsunami of synonyms,

Harmony
Symmetry
Proportion

All Elements of Beauty

but beauty bores me
its plastic face all one for one
perky and perfectly dead

what enchants, what siren calls
not - dash your vessel, you mad thing -
no! dash instead, notion of this self in your hand -
whole and apart - brush quickly the shards
gather and hold them

the fault lines reveal
what is real

no, beauty is a roadside attraction
rickety buses choose this spot to bust a tire
and careen narrowly onto the road sideburns
they require that each stand be examined closely,
til the elements break down too, and
drop to the earth from the perfect height
shatter
each piece liberated into wholeness

lights in the classroom flicker
and fail

mj

we can’t even get michael jackson back
strange that such a bleak landscape, billie jean and not my son,
seem so innocent now,
after the near-fall.

the rakish lift of one sleeve – what did it mean?
a time when style was everything
and a homeless man required only the celebrity touch
to change rags for a white tuxedo
gold teeth for a golden watch

and we all knew - you wanted to move like him too

today we lust for apocalypse
no use pretending
dance towards it, in control, with moves.

one day, if the end does not near,
hearts will explode all over the same bleak backdrop
and we all thought he was the one

like every song

this song, like every song
pretending to heal heartsickness or salve souls
is really about
what happens when sleep does not come.

We kill the world with our pleasures.
I who have seen only reproductions,
sad shadows of endless fear and pain and human hurt,
wonder nonetheless

at shopping malls, art buyers, social drinkers talking politics
(for what is politics but polite war
not so polite for all that)

here,

while there
dismembered parts, buyers of death,
dusty paths bare but for the mechanics of blood diamonds,
supermarkets not even a useful dream

wishing to be above the fray, I sit silent,
a part of it all

Killed for a song

Lounès Matoub

Killed for a song
homage to its power

every mythology has its version of
You shall die but yet live
history does not linger on you
but begins with your ending

Berber carpets, Berber struggle
a place where folk singers still expose freedom’s beat

cars and lipsticks will just have to sell themselves

Friday night in the city too busy

My phoenix, lit dusky pink and grey blue;
she is wiser than her short days,
and dirtier.

It is Friday night but none know it

Steel grins over the city
slabs of paved meals
grab at shoe rubber

What is there to love about a place?

I try to hold it in front of me
but the concrete cracks too quickly
to reveal an ache below

In a contested park
bushes rise and fall with forbidden sleep

Dense southern air
adding weight to dreams

Woodruff Park sags into the twilit night,
one checker remaining
of the day’s heat and loss.

Teeth

la sonrisa de un niño
en el parque Santander
haciendo intentar volar a las palomas

se rie y hasta los ladrillos del museo de oro
deslustran

se rie
y las bocas de los lismoneros
llenan de dientes

After

After

The fruits of loneliness -
not all bitter pears plucked from accidental trees -

No, some inhabit storms
drown in spots unimagined,
harbingers of equally strange joy

the plane stays blessedly aloft
and I return to my seat
gritty pearls of pear skin
still on these lips

lines on the earth

Latitudes and longitudes – I never could get them straight

Turns out they were curves,
running lightly cross the globe’s spine
The names of places whispered in her ear –
she giggles – who knew Atlas would be such a tender lover?

Latitudes and longitudes, never could keep them straight
the will to twist too strong
Havana, Sept-Illes, the Greeks had it all wrong
Earth climbs on her own two feet,
and Atlas just strolls along.

From his pockets bursts a bit of peach fuzz
he bites, and lets a sweet drop fall
from his fingers
to her cheek

As her neck arches to him, half the world falls asleep
the other half she wakes with a soft moan