Cease to maim

We have stopped
speaking in knives.

Afraid no longer
of mines still buried
in the ruined city
of our affections.

Seasons

Goodbye...

When you walk away too fast

I am transported to a time when

my life knew of only two seasons:

Winter and Fall

when tragedy hung loosely around the edges of things.

Yet there is a stillness:

my mind is filled with quiet

distilled night terrors subdued into

ominous dream sequences

where Beethoven played in the background.

The next time you walk away too fast

I will push the oxygen in my lungs

to exhale the petty worries of yesterday.

I will stand still and smile...

See you tomorrow.

Mayakovsky

Stumbled upon Frank O'Hara and thought, "Hoom. This guy loves like everything and nothing in his works." A writer and a curator (cool!), his tone is both casual and spontaneous, which I think very few poets have mastered. Us, writers, we take life and a lot of things (even the small stuff) seriously to a fault. It's hard to find works that simply simplify and yet unfailingly move still.

Been reading a lot --- Yeats, the guy mentioned above, some local bloggers/poets --- and just started doodling some (this is what I call my imitation of art; I don't think I'm any good but I've managed to produce decent sumthin' sumthins').

I have a theory --- If you really are good at what you do (writing, et.al), you wouldn't need all the shit that comes with life and love to produce something decent. Nor do you have to keep fucking things up on purpose to experience exquisite sorrow as fuel to regurgitate a few heartfelt verses. Here's a thought: Just keep doing what you do.

So, in the spirit of self-preservation and enjoying every millisecond of my Days Have Finally Gotten Better With You Know Who You Are aka V (See subtlety isn't one of my strong points. #SMH), I will keep writing, churning out prose, poetry, prosaic on various topics regardless of how I'm feeling at the moment. Understand: Writing is hugely personal and you guessed it, meanings are in people. Also, I will keep doodling and will undertake that something ambitious soon and by that I mean something that's 24x30 and will find itself vulnerable to the world in a semi-corner office.

In the meantime, enjoy Mayakovsky ---

1

My heart’s aflutter!

I am standing in the bath tub

crying. Mother, mother

who am I? If he

will just come back once

and kiss me on the face

his coarse hair brush

my temple, it’s throbbing!

then I can put on my clothes

I guess, and walk the streets.

2

I love you. I love you,

but I’m turning to my verses

and my heart is closing

like a fist.

Words! be

sick as I am sick, swoon,

roll back your eyes, a pool,

and I’ll stare down

at my wounded beauty

which at best is only a talent

for poetry.

Cannot please, cannot charm or win

what a poet!

and the clear water is thick

with bloody blows on its head.

I embrace a cloud,

but when I soared

it rained.

3

That’s funny! there’s blood on my chest

oh yes, I’ve been carrying bricks

what a funny place to rupture!

and now it is raining on the ailanthus

as I step out onto the window ledge

the tracks below me are smoky and

glistening with a passion for running

I leap into the leaves, green like the sea

4

Now I am quietly waiting for

the catastrophe of my personality

to seem beautiful again,

and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and

brown and white in trees,

snows and skies of laughter

always diminishing, less funny

not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of

the year, what does he think of

that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,

perhaps I am myself again.

Frank O’Hara, “Mayakovsky” from Meditations in an Emergency.

You no longer

Doodles in between editing jobs.
Because I will take on something ambitious soon.

You are no longer you.
Each time evolving, morphing.
No one thing. Nothing.

Gone

Gone are the days when I ---

a. unwittingly

b. consciously

c. was made to

d. made my self

e. a combination of each and all of the above

feel like a ---

a. Jonathan Safran Foer paragraph

“I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my outsides.' 'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?' 'I don't know. I'm only me.' 'Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.' 'But it's worse for me.' 'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.' 'Probably. But it really is worse for me.” ~ Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

b. David Levithan definition

depleted, adj.: There is a difference between feeling empty and feeling emptied. There is loss from the losing, not the not having.

No longer crippled by blindness, defined as another bout of disappearances; sad songs you can't help but listen to over and over again such as that melody playing in the background when she receded into the loam; being the only one awake when everything ends; and What? What? Where? Where? said the mouse as it flew across the screen in search of you.

Words that come to mind when I think of you: redundant, beautiful, smoke, mess. To hold and to let go. Truth: Despite everything, I enjoyed having you around. Still do. Motley. We are quite something. Whether to laugh or cry or both, I don't know. Har dee har har.

Memorabilia left in the wake of another ending: a note from a distant country kept too pristine, an empty bottle of wine, cigarette lighters (there are two, you lost two -- perhaps, pun intended), the bones of a poem that will not see the light, a translation lost in definition, the weight of a shrug, and the sound of a body forced to forget.

Willingly. Leave me alone with my oxymorons.

Let her sleep

Water slips through the slits of her fingers as she keeps

her gaze to the vastness of sky; she wonders how 

she dreams and in what color --- cerulean, sienna,

or that plain block of brown --- do they come in, her dreams.

Or maybe she slumbers in silence, void of images, a blank slate

which clamors to be filled, splattered with paint: a splash of red

for passion, a smear of carnation, signaling a silent, burning love

she longs to send her. So she whispers to the night, willing the wind

to carry her words to where she sleeps, dreaming in snippets --- a fingertip tracing

the outline of a scar from when she once tried and failed, a hesitant echo,

silence golden and yet wishing to be taken back with the words 

I love you, darling. And somehow, that is all that matters; her resting,

caught in slumber for when she awakens so it begins. Again.

Yen

I need to come up
with new words to describe you
my darling, my little delicacy ---
this is what I call hunger, desire. The strange need
to rip you apart with my bare hands.

I imagine how you would tear: shining, shimmering
invisible threads holding my human[e}ity together.
Resplendent like the sun -- you are enticing -- existing
to feed a hungry, pernicious creature like me.

How I long for you, my sweet.
Your eyes are pearls and how you smell like a December dawn.
Cold and crisp , alchemizing to warm and comforting
under my nimble fingers.

And yet, you remain remotely beautiful
within some surreptitious corner ---
Oh, sweetheart! How you forsake me:
keeping yourself hidden, tucked in some distant creation.

Strangely feeding my hunger, the yearning
making my blood boil. No words to describe
desire or how you make me feel at three in the morning:
when in need, I taste you and have you move against me.


---
In pursuit of abundance in writing.