tired justwrite

Stuck on the back of the bus, watching city lights turn to starlight that turns to me and asks just who do I think I am. I nod and smile, pretend I'm pretending I'm listening when the question marks really are tattoos on my earlobes, disrupting my frontal lobes that are so busy already, arranging and rearranging furniture, thinking it's so feng shui to spill water across the floor boards, set me on the bottom, set my free, like the piles of old books and their mold in a relationship that spews spores of commensalism, sucking words from deep within while half-broken spines hardly notice anything but the rings of coffee deep in the pages, the rings of ages, of years, deep in each tree trunk and each of my limbs, the ones who spell words when I tell them to draw pictures, but I can't blame their insensitivity because they have no ears to taste my voice, not eyes to read the ink spouting from my lips, nothing but fingers that could probe the insides if they wanted to but plant flower beds instead, heaping mounds over grains of life and wondering how the sun can float effortlessly through mud, tickle the skin on the bottom of my feet, move my hair from one side of the moon of my face to the other when there is a metal sky above me, an umbrella of stubborn metal sky that bends when I beg enough but never enough, not enough until I pray, but I only learned to prey, to crunch the individual between my teeth for the good of the population, telling the protesters to take their signs and saunter home--I've got a seed in each of my hands, mold growing across the front of my Bible--I've got it covered.

just now just write justwrite

Just write for a while, let ribbons of fire and steam pour from my eyes and spell the things I've seen, heard, built. There are splinters of ice in my fingertips that have been there so long they learned to read by the candlelight that spills from my mouth. At the beginning of time, there was no time, no human inventions of sand falling against glass, touching what it could be if it could only move fast enough, slow enough even, as the oyster shells run so long they crumble apart beneath the waves. I was dust once, lifting the sky with my infinite grains, laughing because your eyes can't travel everywhere at once, sobbing because it takes so many years to find gravity. The thin fingers of vines part the Earth, wrap their bony limbs around my sky and tell it there are only flat leaves in the trees, a circular orbit that breaks free at one end and sends the planets into freefall, glass beads from a string that's finally given up. Its sigh shook the walls of my bedroom, tied my ears in knots and caused the ice in my skin to almost lose its freeze, to halfway thaw and send tear-shaped puddles of motion to my floor, cause tides of emotion that are only tidal because the moon is always paying attention, paying lines of pearls to the men with their carts who pull lipstick from the veins of the sun to sell to other men, the faraway men who glance through me with glazed-over palms, the lines worn away by sand. I can tell the ice has taken over, and I wait for it to happen to me.

nightwrite

my culture melts
into yours, and I see
through the world as if it is a window, holding mist
against panes of glass. colors braid
themselves with the smell of
spices and a ripple on a pond;
the saffron falls asleep
on my tongue
and I know
it's time to count
the toes of the women dancing
circles around me,
to spread yards of silk on the dirt
and marvel at how soft the Earth can become, sit
by the fire and speak
of how all people
were woven from the same thread,
how we were a quilt
once but not we are just patches
mismatched on a vast bedspread.
Sometimes
I string myself back onto you, but
sometimes
we tear away from each other, a star
breaking into light, a daisy
ripping its petals open under the
angry sun.
Leaves fall from my eyes,
moss from my hair,
and I try
to remember where it all
began, forgetting
that I was so new
I didn't know how to see or hear, just to
feel.

nightwrite

Nothing but white noise
while I'm missing my blue noise,
my indigo and violet noise,
my red autumn leaf noise--
the crunch.
Like granola between my molars, like toothpaste
and nuclear waste recycled
into stylish lunchbags
while the ospreys bloat in the sun
and give birth to plastic figurines.

It's all hazy these days,
and I just remember
the mist hiding my eyes is
the spray of the ocean in the air is
the dew leaping from pebbles to your toes
while you search for color
amongst dead flowers
on a balcony somewhere
not so far.