Javanese Meditation

I have never faced 90 mile per hour winds
to feel the leaves flick my skin.
I've never stepped in a rain puddle and learned it is shin-deep.
I have never laid in my bed – one leg under the sheet
and the other so the fan's air grazes up my thigh;
sprawled across the kitchen floor and measured my shame
to begin with a heart beat and end with the next;
laid on a yellowed comforter with my toes in the tears
and smelled my niece in the seams.

I have yet to sit crisscrossapplesauce and listen
for the walls to tell me about international politics.
I haven't grinned an insomniac chuckle, and I haven't
gone to my desk and recorded everything in a second's
notebook. Penciling what I remember and knowing
that a quarter of it is lie.

I have not tried to remember anything.
The split thread I keep trying to shove through the eye
and pinch on the other side. Fingers never close enough
to grasp the passive hair and my slightest breath
always able to blow it away. Tongue out and against my upper lip
until I can feel my teeth through it– drying from exposure
and still drooling. The thread, wet from my spit, slacks
and I can't try again.

Walk Through the Open Door

The stairwell smells of varnish
and the doorknob sticky with paint.
People were here: their sneeze and ache
residue fogs the air. For a moment, we live here
– making our way through their
living room and dust-covered master room.

Running our hands against bare
walls. Dropping hair strands in empty sinks.
Camels mix with cowboys and track
shoes with stilettos. Thoughts of pancakes and compassion
and car wrecks and permission filter, push away
the previous thoughts settled in the molding.
Layer them with the respons-
ibility to carry pain.

We walk out the way we came
because it's easiest. I can't speak quietly
when I'm cold. Before, we whispered non-secrets
into the carpet fibers for someone to hear.
Face pushed against the floor.

Together, We (second draft)

Know the breeze on oily skin.
Salt your eyes. Listen to seeds
push from the soil.
Live with the pollen. Stand
in the coals – peel dead
from your feet and elbows and hands;
or dust a path for our children to meet;
but leaves but glow but the instinct to fall.
Touch my hair – tangle your hands in the naps.
Say, “Lo siento, 'speranza, y yo.”

Biennial Bears Fruits (second draft)

Murray and Etheline: grafted
together and they throw out the life
that soaks in my hair
and beads on her neck.

Murray and Etheline:
orange flared trumpets feed the flies
and bees that she bleeds
when she bleeds and bruises when she bruises.

'Urray and Metheline rally for the sun
as much as the shade. They barter
for water, drink it
in their roots and spit it in our books.
The sent a letter to our house
and addressed it to me.

Endearment,
Give us your happys and sads
and include us in your talks.
If we can do more.
'Cause we don't give
enough of what we should
but want to die
as if we did.

Murray and Etheline: afraid
that the spider
barreling through the rain drops
knows what they bear. Keep still
when the sun and moon sound them.
Sit at our table and choose to keep
the secrets
the Fates commanded -

the heart and soul I gave them
to spare us.

Addressed to Maya Regarding Last Week

1.

Hmm and hmm and hmm

the birds and insects hum and stutter

now like children, and contain your crisis.

Live on drink and cigarettes like others

live on family and porcelain.

Eleven hugs a day means you're loved.

2.

You should have been earlier in my life.

Sequined capes and feather boas,

we will leave and you will wander

in paisley-printed cracked-wheat fields.

As much as I can change it, I will

help you.

3.

I can't hear

the sweat hiss on your skin

when you step in the embers and snuff out

fourteen years. Our daily-dailies

and sand and gravel and I

will help you.

4.

The whistle was too high to register.

The moment: a spotlight

on transgression, a cross-culture analysis.

I'm regretful, and it's on the hill

and setting over.

Strike, Strike, Strike!

Admit that it would be better,
a-okay to summit, summit,
summit our faults with the lamp on and the window
closed.

Tint in the light and shade in the dark.

Defeat the bleak with cigarette smoke.
Spiral into my hair, tentacle disease.
Prepare the weeds to contain and ease
up rusted metal and the black-turn-green
markings on flesh and skin.
Next to a-okay, beside the magazines

and behind the dictionary.
Strike the gavel and strike the faded-yellow pages.
Strike the marble with palms open, drunken on spirit.
Everyone can follow the horror of knowing
life and children will be a-okay.

I Just Wanna Know Where I am

I'm coffee ground black.
You're walking

Away.

I'm in with
The tweed and gum wrappers.
You's walkin' away.

I'm happy like heart-shaped sprinkles,

I'm whipped cream
white.

Ya'll 're walkin' away.

And you're leaving me between
The cushions with the g.i.
Joe arms and peanut
Skins.

You all are walking
Away.

But You're Only Twenty-Seven!

The soft of your blankets

rubs wrong –

the scratch of the wool and blend

of rayon.

Rubs the trees

from their hold

in their earth. Breaks roots.

Breaks, rots

in the trash in the mold.

Hold the fabric to my face,

and it scratches

like bad associations of my

father's father.

Where he came from doesn't

matter as it breaks my skin and we

can't see the tears and

sores.

It's not refreshing!

assuredly, i say to you

assuredly,
i say to you: as long
as it doesn't hurt
anybody.

my tired feet

I can't sleep
unless i run my fingers
between my toes - each space
given equal attention. Count
out the seconds. Derive the time
of day multiplied by the amount
of steps taken in relation
to my foot size in centi
meters divided by the amount of times
I cried
to the average temperature
over a 12 hour period
centigrade.

It's half-past midnight in Warsaw
and I rub between my thumb and pointer toes
four and a quarter times. Sigh one last time, and fall asleep.

Mmmm, I sure love those lily padshhh!

eat thoshe
funereal flowersh.
purple velvetsh and yellow feltsh.

Narshishush, with heaving shouldersh,
cry and draw me water.
get drunk on yourshelf and don't
hurt them none

when it ain't meant for them.
shower and bashk where you ish not
meant for the shun.

lily padsh and showy shnow.
love them more than thoshe.

the sun provides

The sun weighs on the baby

blue pool. White edges on the positive-spaced

mermaids and mermen

and negative-spaced generic fish shapes. Once live

creatures now subject to entropy – they disintegrate in light.

The sun cracks the plastic where it hits

the longest and most often - in the morning

and after-later-noon: expands and contracts irregularly.

The pool lays lop-sided in the bed

with the corrugated base,

rests in the indentation and settles on the wheel hub. It bends

on the bottom edge and blends

into the encrusted dirt and debris and dead.

There was a puddle from rains – a puddle that leaves

edges of brown and white. Sediment marks

the evaporation on the rusted rouge resting

place in the truck bed and in the pool bed.

The sun trembles on the glassy water left from the rains -

jostles, then shimmies, then trembles.

Light pushes through the fragile, thin pool

edges and eats through the relenting water.

i saw a little girl

instantly, i love this little girl a billion and a half times more than she will ever love me or anyone else, probably.

She approaches in a pink shirt with white text sprawled across the front. Her hair is parted sloppy almost down the middle - the wind crossed and tangled it.

Laceless yellow shoes.

She steps in front of me and orders a cold coffee drink that only a child could want and her voice is gruff - slightly gravelly and deep for her small body.

Brown shorts.

Her head: not sized to her frame - bigger than it should be; and her eyes: light brown and golden - looks up to me and into my own brown-green eyes.

Everything that makes me want her to write about touching the setting sun and painting the pink clouds with a boar-hair brush against the baby boy blue.
Everything that makes me want to speak with her and never at her; mention finches and the flames they swallow and jesus and the fire he breathes in the same sentence.

man: wire frames and pencil mustache

Seedy girls in suburban pink
throw a grin to pale him.

Balding head and dragging feet,
they are his assailants.

In some time, he sees they're weak –
this one, sees the pavement.

Holds his breath, grits his teeth.
He will not let them claim him.

Losing My Hedge

1.

The first and second time,

the wind blew and your hair

wandered into your mouth.

Those times, all things

considered, the sun was still

warm, and you, ready to pounce

who and what, not me.

Third time: sat across from me,

a little to the left, back

hunched, almost a crouch,

spoke curses and ill;

left a sweet taste in my mouth.

2.

We are the sick ones;

pebbles on our tongues and guns

under their chins, darling.

We are the predators;

forcing the blessings and favors

to save us from them, darling.

Write us in the books

among the saviors and crooks

because they are the ill ones, darling.

biennial bears fruits

Murray and Etheline: growing
up the walls and throwing out
the life, dear love, that soaks in my
hair and beads on your neck.

Murray and Etheline: growing
orange flared trumpets, feed the flies
and bees – lies
and creeds – that, dear friend, you bleed
when you bleed and bruise
when you bruise.

'Urray and Metheline rally for the sun
as much as the shade. They barter
for water, drink it
in their souls and spit it
in our books.

Dear loves, hold us in your happys and sads
and include us
in your talks, 'cause we give not enough
of what we should
but want to die
as if we did.

Murray and Etheline: afraid
that the spider
barreling through the rain
drops will learn that they know. Keep still
when the sun and moon sound them. Sit
at our table, dear, and choose to keep
the secrets
the Fates commanded –

the heart and soul we gave them
to keep from each other.

patterns in sign language

Take the flowers the ground
gives you.

Little girl says thank you
to the dirt – gestures with her hand
from her mouth. Twice.

She throws kisses –
fingers from her lips then tosses them
into the breeze – goes wherever
the breeze takes them.

She gathers the pinks and petals in her arms
against her kid belly and

it's like a fever: warmth
behind my eyes and in my chest
well to tears in the ducts
grows to weak in my joints and itch
in my ears that can be fixed by numbing but is still
sensation and sensation's

absence.
The fever won't be gone because I want to feel it because it's a feeling because I feel it because I caught both unintended kisses because I saw them because I felt them.

It patterns like the kisses children blow
without mean to, like the deafness and fever
that grow because they started
for reasons less magical than the lies,

like flowers grow and little girls pick them.

this is it