1
“Let us build a friendship” She stated.
“Nothing more.
“We will never have any memory of dying.”
Then she slithered away into the wanting parking lot,
nestled within the city’s gut.
A generous light,
splinters its way through the foliage of the buildings
and blesses the multi-colored flowers,
scattered impulsively about the cracks,
amongst the broken bottles crumbled cellophane wrappers
and crushed aluminum cans.
However, the earth remains silent,
as I pick a flower from her sanctified lips.
I touch her and she quivers.
My hunger seems so blatant.
my stomache makes such obvious sounds,
the texture of my words, such obvious Enunciations.
When she exited the room,
closing the door behind her, I could not help but watch
with the yearning to partake of the Tree of life.
I can say. I have suffered things in the Street,
spread myself, and turned over whole lives,
changing skins, names, beliefs and license plates;
regardless, it was I, who walked this way.
No one else forced me into the ashes.
It was something I had to do;
something I needed to find.
I must face the consequences for doing such.
I can say I lost my heart, piece by piece,
giving too much to loves
residing within the dark crevices of the cities’ walls.
Or was it not enough?
Regardless,
the want to pick ‘em up and glue ‘em back together,
is not here.
I have gotten used to that harsher terrain
where no one wants to love.
By giving no answers,
One can say “I didn’t understand.”
Yet where does that get us?
A little farther from the Great Mystery?
A little farther from love?
I could say that I walked those streets,
without seeing, without feeling, without longing,
but I would be lying,
for, I am of man.
I watched every time she walked.
I could feel those firm potter’s hands
grip my neck
her fingers press light steady circular patterns
and knead themselves down my spine
and farther . . .
It’s strange, perverse
it’s as if, it is something my body craves, needs
I cannot deny it.
Maybe, it is not a woman I want;
but all women;
and, I hunt for them in those around me,
one by one.
Ask me where I have been, and I will tell you;
however, ask me where I am going,
I could impart nothing.
I only know of the thorn’s language,
and the taste of Red Chilean wine in a flat bottom bottle.
Regardless,
the tracks I have left behind will be hard to follow.
My heels leave barely a trace imprinted in the concrete,
they will disappear with the walking of the wind;
as the day’s newspaper circulates the night air.
You will not be able to find me.
You will not know me by my tracks,
but only by the skins and tears I have shed
2
I have paid dearly for learning how to die;
so much so, I want to live.
But having seen death,
can one truly be alive?
Can one continue, knowing that the outcome is for not?
Is that what the prophets mean by the Great Mystery?
Perhaps our natural weakness is suspicion and anxiousness.
Our only strength, hope.
“Here’s my place.” I declare.
Strip myself.
Lie face down into the earth.
I use a piece of paper to keep the ants from nesting in my nose.
But it seems, this course of inaction was but an experience,
not the prevailing wind.
I am not the ground, dirt, nor rock,
which is to be tread upon;
however, I do know how it feels.
Though realizing it is not my path.
I stand up, brush the dirt off,
and announce, as I walk out into the world. “I am free.”
“Free from what?” the wind gustily inquires,
blowing the ashes of my own destruction into my face,
reminding me: what I am, and what I have let myself become.
My ash-filled eyes
bleed forth such an unboundable light.
My tears act as prisms to show me rainbows:
The dreams that fade as I wake.
But how can I hold on to those patterns and shapes,
the images of my life?
Blinded by my own darkness and desires
I crawled about the ground;
buzzards began to circumvent me,
while they waited for the immanent death;
However, by my thickening want to live,
or by destiny itself,
I killed those buzzards one at a time
with word and bite;
I plucked the feathers off each
to construct a pair of wings for myself.
When I finished, I spread those buzzard feathered wings.
The wind gripped me and hoisted me up into the sky,
elevating me above man, and his seven deadly sins.
For a moment, I almost believed.
However, I got so close to the sun;
its heat caused the feathers to combust.
Gravity did the rest.
I plummeted,
and realized, in trying to be free,
I was only attempting to jump while already falling.
I plunged into the ocean.
Submerged within the womb,
I siphoned fluids through my stomache.
What can I say without wanting to touch the Earth
with my hands and lips,
to taste her soil across my tongue?
I have been in the water so long,
that I have become a prune.
My fingers are no longer plains;
but deep valleys cross their width.
3
The river is constant
always flowing in a circle
not as the snake which in the end eats itself,
that is death.
No, that of the sun and the bear,
false deaths and resurrections.
the longings of the ways of skin,
to suckle the water and honey of life;
the surge of my body buried into hers,
flexing ambiguous staggering perfection,
Drenched in my own natural waters,
I come of age.
A little late it may seem.
A secret reserve gave it back to me.
A blue bitter song, I learned so long ago,
Unmoved by itself,
helps me recall my unique disclosure,
which pulsed through my veins
as I stood naked before her,
presumptuously barking out words
and sentences with my guttural rasp.
& She, walked around like a holocaust,
no tangible discretion
nor flimsy consistency.
“What are you really saying?” She probes.
Her eyes were unbreakable,
and her voice,
with words cooked low in the heat of her rage,
began to elevate about the room.
No, I have not forgot it, that wet leprous kiss;
then suddenly seeing the fallen face of an angel
peer angrily through the window,
as my hand reached up to unsnap the clip.
Nor can I deny the want to do it again.
I guess, there was a desire for every woman;
I wonder if these things were that well hidden.
Can I look at a woman and not want?
but that is the man,
the spirit wants something different.
How can I satisfy both?
Can it be found in one woman?
4
What would it profit you?
a contemptible tower to remake you
causing a volcano to grow from the pressure within,
pushing outward,
creating life,
and there forth, completely changing yours.
Regardless, I can not say she was undesirable;
I saw her come out of the water;
the naked concaves of her form
moistened by the residue of water.
Her hair glistened from the lumination of the moon.
The hands within cannot move,
welded to the soul of the earth.
The fingers extended rooting into the sanctified surface,
bringing all things to their proper end and beginning:
the amalgamation of words and dreams.
5
The book streams down the mountain,
breaks upon the rocks,
sentences splinter,
syllables mist the air.
I didn’t know at first where to start,
as I stumbled and fell along the path;
but then I found ‘em,
all of my feelings,
all of my memories
all that I am…mingled together,
living in the pools and small ponds
developed along the banks by fallen trees.
As the fragmented sentences sedimented to the bottom,
something breeds in the muck,
swimming about the memory banks.
I don’t know if they have existed like that for years,
or just evolved over the last few hours.
I dipped my cupped hands into the pool,
and touched the memories to my lips;
the cool moistness was enough to quench my thirst;
regardless, I drank all that I could swallow.
My innermost life rushes louder, teeming over the rocks.
The volumes scatter the mucky floor.
The stones wake
and all start conversing at once,
of lands and roads traveled,
of paintings, songs, and poems,
of memories,
of women found and lost,
of the spirit.
The spirit,
that is what has been forgotten.
To master the parts of speech we call spirit,
one must dedicate a life.
6
A few like to read about memories.
Why should I need a book to live these words,
resting your naked delicate body in these lines?
A few like to watch visions on TV. and movie screen.
What do I need with film?
For eyes only see. They do not feel.
Nor taste the meanings, desires,
and the soul of the water.
It is all concealed under the layers of product.
I rise and dive into the pond.
The words engulf me.
There are many voices, whispering.
A dark humming pulls me down the tar river.
I can only ask for friendship and understanding,
for you to touch the water with your hands,
and not branch away in a different direction during the darkness.
Within the day, I can go alone,
for the warmth of the sun comforts me.
I see nothing but.
7
In my hunger agitated state,
I perched myself on the barstool,
looking for parallels and analogies
in the paradoxical state of the directions
which I have put myself.
I began to bleed from these self inflicted wounds.
This is when she came with bow taut and loaded.
Quiver, full of arrows.
Her determined lips taken together
manifest themselves,
adjoining mine one above, the other below.
“Can you guess why I die from love,”
the huntress quizzes me.
“My petals curling as the water in the vase evaporates?”
“What does it matter with us?
Our memory only retains the first rush of the flood,
and the last moment of the receding water.”
“A thousand murders in a single hour,
and you feel it has no concern.”
A temporary connection,
I turned her away;
saying, I had to leave;
and leave I did.
I felt like a heel,
as she tried to arouse me into staying.
To obtain a correct and permanent connection.
It’s not like I didn’t warn her.
I had no heart for all this.
It was her, not I, who made all the moves
I just wanted to remain in my state of unconsciousness.
Seldom does the mind during the hunt
succeed in grasping and remembering
something of what was felt at the moment of ecstasy.
Oh, yes I loved,
with all the passion I could muster up.
But there was one problem,
Huntress, you never really had me,
like all the other men you have hunted,
and taken to your bed.
Accidental or temporary,
I cannot conceive even a shadow of love.
Nothing can be attained in my sleep.
My reality mixed with illusions.
Any attempt to awaken me,
will only attain a partial breath and banal love.
8
To be dead is the hardest,
the saddest of all states.
To be dead
is to be without love,
without attachments,
habits, tastes, desires, angers,
convictions,
without thoughts,
without feelings.
To be dead,
is to have no one to hold you,
no one to push you away.
To be dead,
is to be drenched in mud
hurling yourself into grief.
To be dead,
unable and unwilling to bind back your fear,
A bare volcanic island quarreling with the sea.
The intersection of the known and unknown,
of being and nonbeing;
something begins only where nothing ends.
To be dead is the hardest.
9
It would’ve been easier to have kicked it off,
when it slithered around the ankle.
However, I had not;
it ascended higher to coil about my neck,
tightening, choking.
The snake’s rat favored breath confessed on my face.
Her forked tongue, shaking at me,
pronounced such multi-dimensional words.
Then she simply denied them,
as though they had never stood up to voice their meaning.
Loitering in the liver,
I had condemned myself to a hell of truths
weaved before and then blanketed over me.
Fact will remain unintelligible until clothed in fiction.
The snake dislocated her jaw
and began to consume me.
The more I struggled
the tighter I became lodged in her grip;
until I rested within her belly.
As my eyes adjusted to the darkness,
I groped into my bag of Lockless Keys,
unlocked her stomache
and strolled out into a massive ribbed cage.
Dark bug-eyed beasts gawked at me.
Comatosed, with remote controls in hand,
they sat in their neon green theater seats,
which outline the cage.
I laugh.
With a single word, love,
paranoia deploys itself across the room.
During the commotion
I slipped out through the entrance.
Life is what it is about.
Dancing on the waves under delirious skies,
I want no truck with death.
It is already here,
there is no need to give it anymore energy
nor help.
No option surpasses this.
The nerves reconstruct themselves
and the tide rises.
The things in which I had been ready to sacrifice my life,
now appear ridiculous,
meaningless and unworthy off my attention.
As their enormous swamps ferment,
I eat snake tonight.
My fags sink deep into her eye sockets.
I spit out images,
filling the moonlit night with howls and songs.
10
The gates of the world open,
and the light illuminates the black tar river.
Pepper lips, rolling tongues,
the smell of her soft pale freckled fragrance
still lingering upon my hands and fingertips.
There is a moan which echoes in my ears,
resembling a song still on the tip of my tongue,
yet I can’t recall the words,
as I climb upon the boat.
The stench of the river saturates everything.
Good enough.
I no longer grieve.
I no longer feel.
I know the needs of the body,
but I rarely let them be fulfilled.
I shackle myself to a rock,
and strive to be a slave to these shores;
regardless, the waters rise and wash me away.
Smyon-Pa 