friends with words

1. meg
light across the window falls
in slats on the remains of bedroom
eyes, the aphrodisiac of sleeplessness, the
rapture of midnights faced with valor,
inamorata, eyes reclosing and stamps
of kisses on collars, delicate in the
scrumptious cottonbomb bedding,
as the sun returns the sky its name
a parabola on our tongues

2. matt
saturday, a party looms, music
builds in the blood, mingles
with whiskey vapors out to every
limb and in a voice, an echo lost
to the full tipsy moon busting
through this unseen sky

3. jen
in every use there is a joy and
in every joy a green coastline jagged
where ground meets sky, where
tribes make chants, inspire
spirits to kneel, pick up where god
left handprints, hold up totems and
drop tears in the sand

4. jessie
cast back, the sky is just another
color of ocean, an organic chemical
compound for eyes to enjoy, for
outdoor wallpaper, vacuous weekend
hours simple, dressed in nouns

5. me
paper petals make feuilleton trajectories
through naked midnight meadows
where owls hunt silence, where bats map
transcendence in lowveld basins, echoprone
ewers that return the long rush of blood

how to

remember not to suffer a thousand weighted moments for ten of bliss; for real joy rises up from within you and cannot be bartered for nor won through coercion.
as romantic as you are, remember too not to suffocate nor to project any of your tactile visions on those you would presume to love. let them be, and they will let you be, so that you both may grow wise in the accrual of your own selves. you may be mirrors for each other and very little more; and when mirrors are brought close enough together they make infinite curving hallways. find a love that can walk you down that infinite hallway of you without anything but their own reflection as a map.

learn

remember when you are smallish that nothing actually exists as you perceive. remember that you are smallish and nonexistent too. the whole rhapsodic verse of this world you sense is just passing through you. a melodic interference of the tides, a moonlight that you mistake for something more real. take your life up about you and wrap it tight like the obis of japanese concubines. take the cues from gods long dead. from the minds that had the influential power to create them. someone imagined buddha and jesus so fervently that they created them out of the flesh of man. become a creation of your imagination that rivals them and includes them, precludes them, as they do each other.
go forth symphonic and rhapsodize the world as you see it through your eyes...eternally through your actions. treat people as they are. they truly are only what you are - unseeable. and if you think you are to see them, first learn to see yourself through those same eyes. otherwise, don’t presume to know. what you think of your gift of discernment is not as important as the gift given you of humanity. the wheel of life has brought you here to learn a lesson that it hasn’t necessarily given you the tools to apprehend.
it is up to you in your youthful folly to begin to understand and be ashamed of the silliness of your waste of moments. see through your own moments and disregard anyone else’s version if it is not in line with the (un)god you see in every breath to (par)take.

dissimilation

i would miss you if i weren't already caught up in some kind of amiss
and if i wrote to you, tonight it would rhyme. that sucks but it's beautiful
if only that meant something. it fucks me up that what i'm writing
could be sung.

i suppose that i am supposing. or cogito cogito ergo cogito sum...
a quote. meaning: i think i think therefore i think i am.
and yet...maybe i think too much and think i am something to be..,
thought about. but "i" come to realize that whenever i am lost,
whenever i am frustrated or disappointed; it is because i think...
that things should be other than they are.

well then, how am i to change things(?) perhaps by knowing. which is not
like thinking. i know in my bones that things about my behaviour need to change.
and the mirror of the people around me confirms it. but the change itself is
a downscaling. not an ascension to something that i can't be.

reader, i love you. because you are me. and if there is anything to love it is
me...which is you. if more needed to be said about the topic, i think they would
have discovered that about it 2000 years ago when it was being formulated.

and thank you. for loving [us] too.

mm

my love, my love whose voice is dusk sweeping up the ashes of day
who speaks in swerves and returns vertiginous covering her eyes with squints
my love, whose eyes are torpedoes churning the sea toward me
whose eyes are tropical squalls impending
my love whose neck is a bamboo temple, whose neck is an egyptian obelisk etched with runes of the future
my love whose feet carry an emperor, carry a galaxy, whose feet curve gently toward infinity like the face of the universe
my love whose navel is Aphrodite’s dimple
my love who careens through me on Icarus’s wings, comes close to my heat, a bat overhead swooping
who walks through me like novels, as through walls
my love whose breasts are heaps of cinnamon, warm loaves, painted urns, whose breasts are hieroglyphs of lock and key
my love whose hips beacon and repel: a lighthouse on a craggy shore, sirens singing arias
whose back is a row of pigeons aligned against the sky, whose back is an envelope opening to a love letter
my love whose arms twirl out song and spin like Sufis, enclose me and send me away to my own wishes
my love whose hands are branches tearing at the sky
my love whose wrists are sprigs of mint
whose brow unfurls at my caress, whose brow is a quilt when she cries

in America

boulder

this town
laid out before me
walking slowly down
its snow mantled
quiet, down its
damp asphalt losing
consonants for coffee
this city clothed old
in brick and stone
transitions to soft
bundled in scarves
toward christmas, breaths
plume, pick up “ahh”
sound hands in pockets
i stride streets past
frosted windows
past cafés, people
in patterned sweaters
inside speaking of other
people over piano music
this town reading
newspapers about itself
yesterday predicted snow
now flakes fall
catch in my hair, eyelashes
i go inside, listen to
door hinges, voices
murmur, espresso whir and
footsteps
cars lurch around billowing
rush from light to light
on wet black in this
city they’re hanging
wreaths and strings
of christmas bulbs bright
green, yellow high on brick
façades above storefronts
little boutiques where
dresses and jackets glitter
wet beach sand from
the windows