As iron sharpens iron.
It’s raining cats and dogs.
A stitch in time saves nine.
As iron cats and dogs.
It’s raining time saves nine.
A stitch in sharpens iron.
As iron cats and time.
It’s raining time a stitch.
A stitch in sharpens cats and dogs.
As raining time a stich.
It’s raining stitch and dogs.
A stitch cats time dogs iron and..
Crumble overbaked bricks
thrust into the nether between
two towers of unfathomable heights.
Once solid; sublimated into a cloud
a shower of sprinkling dust
upon the unfathomable heights
descending.
Into the nether,
thrust tenderskin hands and feet
and also toenails and hair
and teeth.
In the dim lit nights;
in the early dawn;
the distance is infinitesimal
and still unbridgeable.
Explore each brick
in the infinite wall
one will be loose.
The mortar will crumble to dust beneath your fingernails
and you will crawl through.
Into the black;
into the nether;
into the void.
Like I stepped into my skin. Naked before, I half moment behind, straining to hear the rhythm, ear pressed into a rotted rubber tire, squeezing every nerve to recognize the mechanical assurance, the maternal heartbeat of the machine, the clock ticking quietly buried beneath banana peals, teeth worn bone steel axles, disconnected eye socket tin arrow gauges measuring death pointing earthward, kneeling atop the mile high waste mountain junkyard.
Now, threads of everything, visible like the edge of a cloud, sparkling like Easter tinsel wrapping, connecting, but never binding each egg with the next. Discovered, nestled in a patch of tall grass, beneath the drain pipe, brushing aside the crisp autumn leaves with a Thanksgiving palette, the realization that I had already been aware, had found before finding, before searching. Known without knowing, without knowledge. Cradled where my brow meets, a quiet sound, like exhalation. The future draws us onward just as the past pushes from behind. Strapped between these two cords we find ourselves in the present moment. Yet, what is it but a measure of our experience quantified, manifested as a drop squeezed from a syringe pulled from a reservoir? All things have already been done. Only yet to be experienced. These streets, these people, they are not new to me, nor I to them.
I hear someone say once again:
You remind me of someone... I just can’t think of who.
This clock is not real, nor is this junkyard.
We were Irish the night we danced straight till morning, the water and whiskey pouring from our veins, soaking our polyester and cotton. All the hopeful glances from all the pretty girls were locked away perhaps for other hopeful boys and as dawn approached, we keyless, ventured out into the nights, leaving behind the thumping and jumping the sitting and swallowing, spitting and vomiting. not for an hour, not till the buses brought in the early morning commuters, the daily churchgoers, did we at last forsake our search for shelter and curl up on wooden benches for a moment to rest our eyes. our feet. our heads. Our false accents faded with our failure. The birth of morning light invaded like fire ants in the cracks of our dried out skulls. And the cool morning cried cold tears upon our weary fetal bodies.
We at last despaired. And caught the first train home.
Night rambled into day between
billiard balls and
unmarked footsteps leading me
to the passage home while the sun, warm
and dry,
spread its invasive fingers across the empty asphalt beetle paths
colliding with benches and blades of grass throwing
shadows at precarious
angles lighting the mountain
tops on fire was a slow motion spectacle I watched
eyes both opened and
closed
hypnotized by the gentle to and fro of a
swing and a breeze and
with me there
in
the mystical minute
three high school girls
unexpecting to find company
at this hour
smoking forbidden cigarettes and
awake to be awake far from
their empty beds.
The coolest discopunk dance party in Korea.
The floors and walls pulsated through the darkness
with green and pink.
Glistening with sweat,
bodies leapt, finding solidarity in a
chaos
lassoed by a beat
so deep
it crashed like thunder-waves on the tshirts and
hanging lips and shut eyelids
and dripping hair clinging
to the necks
of the coolest kids in Seoul.
And the flailing arms tried to free themselves
of the burden of purpose and choice
and mind.
Slave now to the free world of sound,
yet chained to the earth by immobile coil.
Everyone with eyes shut tight (not by eyelids, but
by the love of music and poison and motion)
lest vision, physical and deceiving, reminded them that
all the rose pedal painted and shellfish glistening eyes were on them,
turned into princess and maniac,
beautiful and surreal.
Instantaneous like burning gasoline
consumed in the sound.
Dying little candle.
Huff of wind.
Gone.
Extinguished before i could
even see the beauty you illuminated.
when will i learn to love you
little candle?
so brief as you are.
i can't... i can't see.
always looking behind me to catch what i missed.
and what i'm missing is you.
always flickering out.
puff.
white smoke clouds my eyes.
now here you are again,
relit a thousand times a second.
will i see you, little candle,
before you die?
i will never see your brothers and sisters again.
though i have evidence of their brief existences.
they make me melancholy,
and glad,
these notebooks of the past. these
digital corpses frozen and waiting till
science and sleep reignite that spark of life
in my dreams.
the children all die
before i learn their names. just a flash
of their faces emblazened on my brain.
when i lay down to sleep and close my eyes,
in the moment before i enter a dream,
i see their images on the backs of my eyelids.
all their features refined and details filled in.
everything missing and unnoticed is replaced
with the shape of beauty and
perfection and
wonder.
i smile the day's last smile
and peer into the little white lights
overcome with old memories and
forgetting all the things
i'm forgetting to see.
DON’T:
“Naivety, my sweet mistress, do not leave me now.”
He stuck his finger with his quill and wrote in haste on parchment paper, I'd rather face the world's brutalities than taste her tender lips. I'd rather live a hundred years alone, than feel her sweet caress. Then he lit a match and held the finger of a flame beneath the scribbled note. Watched the finger tickle the page and the paper shiver with laughter. Watched them play, till all was dust, a comedic mess of carbon. Lest he find one day those hasty words and recall his mistress’ infidelity. He longed for her return.
So unexpected. That the pavement, the alternating red and grey squares, would smile at me so. That the devious downtown streets would lead me wandering blind into a forgotten friend. That oblivion all encompassing would inspire creation; and noise, music. That from the chaos, beauty would emerge. Like flowers sprouting from barren concrete.
That life would converege here, as if by design. Lines intersecting and weaving a stronger fabric. I’m coming to believe more in fate and less in reason. For there is no absolute knowledge by reason or otherwise; there is only doing and experiencing. We’re like fish in water. If we wait and ponder, we will suffocate and die.
Pressed into my skin
an embossed impression.
Once was a foot,
now there is nothing,
but a footprint
and the reflection of light
in other people's faces.
Making eye's burn
and salt water flow.
His image is triggered by this motion:
leaning hard into my podium
to make a point,
elbows arched high.
Head down like a pouncing feline.
Voice modulating.
Face animated.
As I differentiate between prepositions of place
(at, on, or in),
I'm watching him lecture,
It's Tuesday night,
And I'm not sure if I want to be there,
so I sit in the back of the room,
comfortable in my wayward faith back there against the wall,
And somehow this big tall man he comforts me,
his faith, it comforts me,
his voice, it comforts me,
(I can feel his love still and it comforts me)
I'm afraid to greet him because I'm not what I could be,
and I know he'll see that,
still I go to hear him speak,
I sit in the back and
I hear his voice boom,
"This is what we believe: there is no one so bad that he is beyond the reaches of God's grace, and there is no one so good that he does not stand in need of God's grace."
And when he's done,
I slip out without saying a word.
This memory should pitter out,
like a species dying out,
or a letter hidden in a box beneath your bed,
mixed with a hundred other letters, the contents of each
a mystery.
Slowly growing damp and moldy, and one day discarded.
But now we must find the letter and carry it
in our pocket.
For once a shadow,
now it is everything
that is left.
Pressed into my skin
an embossed impression
once was a man
now there is nothing
but a memory, slowly,
slowly
fading away.
