Positions

This is where I learn to live -we all live.
Right here, tenderly in the width of our hands.
Pre-prints moving us the length of crooked thumbs,
Indicating our short and severe primordial lives.
Maybe elsewhere, behind knees we find our beginning.
-If it is kissed just so, we will unlock the mystery
of our collective and bent history.

This is where we create and dissolve. We all.
Within thighs, the art of this world is lost somehow.
There is quickness, a sudden Supernova.
Then there are other positions,
in which we point our determined bodies.
Time is plenty for stars to be born and to die;
we have only the brief moment to do the same.

This is where we learn to die, involved lips;
in our hanging mouths we trace Aquilla
with stupid tongues speaking less than courageous promises.
Perhaps we all will be cup bearers during the Sleeping Time,
Dark Star moments, when we are fragile positions in the night sky.
-Pin points for future lovers.

. . .

This is a familiar story about life. This is not about exceptional talents or passions, for I believe one can find that in almost everyone, myself included. Instead, this is about exceptional difficulties or ridiculous challenges, such as a father’s death. But, perhaps none of this matters; nothing as simple as death should matter. After all, it is as apparent as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.


Father, you are such a distant memory. Yet, nothing can solace the profound heartache of my forgetting you, often. And if often is not enough, then what absolute time can I offer. -It is not your long life I celebrate, but the death of you that raises new possibilities. Such as, a child’s soft face or the flower’s occasion in a winter’s reprieve.

And, now, I know what it is to feel alone. And I know what it is to think of you, alone. -Are soft faces or open flowers keeping you busy . . .

And, are there ever times when you forget me, often?

I watch over a house of men

I watch over a house of men. These are not ordinary men. These are men whose dreams are forgotten on us all.

What do they dream about, these roosted men? Perhaps, through their faltered language they insist on quiet and pervasive dreams. Yet, their phonology and semantics fail me. For the life of me, for their life, I want to understand.

Perhaps, one remembers a picture of his mother as a child, “Big, Big woman –little, little girl. Where have you been?”
- - -

When I’m asleep, I may dream of a girl with long brown hair. Do I sleep on it by mistake? What is her name? Will the name precede mine one day? And so forth. Sometimes, these are the things I dream of when asleep in the house of extraordinary men.

You will grow old. You will be forgotten.

This is mine to tell: when I’m old, I will be forgotten.

- - -

My name is not important. It hasn’t been since the Romantics. Besides, this is about you and not me. –Once, you had luxurious hair and you had love. You had a pink face, like the pink on a Valentine’s Day card.

But there are fleeting things you did in youth; such as, kiss your high school sweetheart on her deceitful lips, fall drunkenly into a stranger’s bed, or remain deep in a woman long after she abandoned you. These are the things that you did in youth, which make you old.

However, the sadness of life is there can be no sadness. In the hopes and expectations of childhood, you never had examples of love. From the beginning it was only "you shall age" and "you will experience sickness" –perhaps some sort of death. And this is all so Buddhist to you, when you just wanted to be Christian, (I agree, but this story is about you and not about me).

There is love. There is fear.

There is love. There is fear. Each of its own and loneliness will absolutely ensue. Combine the two and it will lead to disaster. Such as: girls love their hair, their faces, which will launch a thousand ships, they wash their bodies in bubblegum perfumes for: (the boys that fear their father, and maybe other boys, and perhaps the strength of a girl who becomes a woman) eternal offspring.
- - -
A woman traces lines of black around her eyes. This is seduction. There is a sanguine red color to the fullness of her lips. She sprays orange perfume on her hair. Blonde, brown, black; it does not matter. There is want within the mouth reflected in the mirror.

She leaves to meet the man. When the man sees her, he will fear her.
- - -
The boy will fear her; his father has told him to conquer her. She is submissive, father said. But the boy will see her strategic smile. He will see the shadowed, cunning eyes. The hair fixed like a helmet polished to an angelic sheen. Is this the second and last coming? What light brigade?

He fears his father more and takes her. Ad majorem dei gloriam, he whispers.