Click To Listen: "I'm No Adder"
http://www.zshare.net/audio/79488934cd1c1a3c/
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I never did the math: I am no "adder".
Numbers float past my peripheral, get lost in my outer space. I get confused and lose the meaning of them-- "Can you add the tax to that??"-- No, I never did the math.
Unfortunately, that means I may have been tricked more than a few, strayed askew in the exchanging of currencies.... but I'm none the wiser, and I didn't lose a wink of sleep, more involved in my harems of dreams to notice. Too involved with the color of the sea in them, and that magic chair I keep riding above the clouds, over tiny houses lit up like sequins....above the town in which i grew up.
I am a citizen of that world, I live and am alive there.
Three years ago, when we met, I started to ponder more about the meaning of numbers-- our love was Pi r2. Two halves of a pear were more than just mere fruit, and math became a town, a new route on which we could meet. At first we were two, our lives overlapping like exquisite geometrical patterns-- we were one, and much later less than half of me was standing.
But
that's an equation to leave on the hem of a future night, over an undrunk bottle of wine, when I can better laugh about it all. Long division retold and re-entwined over the long nights that I have passed. A quarter here and there, and there, and there is a whole lot farther from the place I wanted to be.
And, such is love for us dreamfolk.
2 teaspoons of sugar in my tea, 1 cold night, and 20 lines of poetry equals but one fraction of the metaphors I will give to your body in my lifetime. Who enjoys infinity, really?
This morning I awoke with the webs of dreamworld stuck to my eyes, an entire microcosm concocted in this calculator of tissue and muscle matter. And I realized that a love of numbers just does not add up. There is no ratio or guage that can-- or cannot-- reingage regrets, or control. There is no scale for a world that works in mauves.
No tools to disect the inertia of falling in, or out of love.
In a world of letters and words, I try to take comfort. I give postcard reflections and descriptions of the places I've been, though I'd be lying if I said that it was easy. I don't always love poetry.
And thus, I don't do the math.
I never have.
I don't add up the things you've subtracted from my heart, or density you vaccumed from bones in my body. But I do remember those dreams.
And
though half of this bed remains at zero, dispersing it's negative space, and though the palms are now detached, leaving only my own five fingers,
At least I can dream my way out.
I can dream my own way out.
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Click To Listen: "Old Winds"
http://www.zshare.net/audio/7948981624d7406a/
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yes
i enjoy the power struggle
when i'm half-undressed
twilit stress
and tiny entwined leaves of our flesh
tattoos all stripped off
and washed away inside sheets
i've kissed cheeks
in vast canola fields and back seats--
so many lovers i've seen pass.
a stones throw from streets to glass, passed
adult-sized notes in highschool geography
class
i find the dance so fascinating--
all germs and mouths and dreams just ossilating
in
canyons of nickel-loves
(we are convinced should be degrading)
but inside i feel the steps are slowly changing.
the dance of lip-bit love all rearranging.
not so strangely i guard my moon when
i see it fading.
frayed 'round edges from summer frictions reckless staining.
lovers; wear your hearts like children.
the thrill bargains between soul-building and quiet clinic killings.
yes,
bodies are made finely for fulfilling.
but used like water glasses
incessantly spilling.
o, milky-eyed dears beware:
like you, i've played unfair
i don't care's swapping seats like musical chairs
except,
i lost a fairy.
for days, these insides were swearing
wearing but guilty gowns and a hot
summer despairing.
my body is a museum of these breif loves
gut-filled gifts to strangers
inviting surgical gloves
so
lovers feed your love like your children.
for each each fancied fuck
fucked up enough to pull
gold fillings
it is the season for drilling.
and now it's hard to find these old winds fulfilling.
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Click To Listen: "Stay, Stay"
http://www.zshare.net/audio/79490069b7f5e0d8/
How many times in our lives have we heard the word "stay":
When our friends or family members are slipping on into death, we say "stay with me",
When we are making an exit, a crystal opportunity shines and beacons "stay, stay".
We are halfway out the door of a lovers house, and they beg us with oceans in their eyes
and they say
"please, stay, stay".
But in these moments we are always staying-- our touches and words stay in peoples minds, our pictures stay, our experiences always staying in some place
that we are not.
A bit of us stays everywhere, like little ghosts.
We can wear the coats of our forefathers on the shores of the ocean.
So
It is easier to not stay.
To turn to that lover and simply say "no, I will not"
once we become the everywhere.
We can let death take away our mothers on sparrows wings
We can leave behind the things we know, building birdhouses for the words "stay" and "go".
I will stay with you
I am staying here
I am going there, too.
Spirits wander, holding hands with the objects we see and those we can see no more.
We migrate over seas and land masses on a vast pilgrimage to the future
and pay homage to the past.
I
stay
with everything.
I
will carry pounds of you
around with me on this earth, until I am no more--
When I become bits of people who have not yet arrived,
and my ideas become seedlings in the minds of artists
a thousand years in the future.
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Click To Listen: "Honey in the Hives"
http://www.zshare.net/audio/79490409fa651d61/
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I am a compass:
Ever-stretching, a complex network of circles, like cities on the map—though the kind that cannot be seen in dreams, slid onto delicate fingers, nor visited. I left my heart hibernating in the north, behind that big tree where I’ve not brought a soul. In the rings of the birch, I wrote symphonies for that set of hands I seek—not yet alive, but near. Flowers, freckles, toes— the way hair grows on beards. I no longer fear it.
My tune is humble and unrequited, a silent bidding that explodes into the night like sirens from this tiny room; big city, wide map, black cats and magic hats.
Hidden deep as honey in the hive, my surrender survives on the labor of my patient buzzing.
And so:
I cannot give this jeweled thing away like baked goods, this bead of golden sap we drink in tea without a passing thought about from whence it came, and without these thoughts as justice to its light
It’s a shame.
So, not tonight, that thing does not roll in the hay. I’ll stay, but not sleep here.
My love is like that ship, slipping through the currents, sliding narrowly through chasms of storms that unleash banquets of rainsongs and refused advances. It is as simple as the taste of apple on the lips, the way light licks glass—it’s the joyful crass songs of my neighbor's children.
I’ll ride in the front seat, but I won’t take the keys.
No, I cannot yet give this jeweled thing away.
