Poemunity — your poem community

From the beginning, the egg cradled in pebbles, The drive thick with fledglings, to the known last Riot of the senses, is only a short pass. Earth to be forked over is more patient, Bird hungers more, flower dies sooner. But if not grasped grows quickly, silently. We are restless, not remembering much. The pain is slow, original as laughter, Reaching for all of it, hardly aware, Beginning again and feeling for its terrain. We were often told and still we would not listen, And closing fingers, those accomplices, Took comfort from a lie. From lap to grass Whining, motionless on the lowest branch Above the pine needles, climbing the heather: We did not listen. It hid there still to find. Much since was hard to get, later displeased, Nursing an ordinary complaint or waiting For a reiterated brilliance, Growing in ignorance, too near to see. Now in the suburbs windows are on fire, Pale globes quiver on their dusty strings And afternoons disperse with mirth of gnome, The rigid stabbed flamingo pink in the trees, Split to the touch and walking by the pool. Now life jerking in its sustained coda Constricts its furniture and its events. The frowning bus disappears down the hill Or slides before the window with its bored Passengers staring unashamedly in. Now above the trees the ice-cream’s bare Electric tongue stammers its recitation. Children run out in the dumb-bell cul-de-sac To their cold delight, skipping between the turds Of long-dead dogs, coiled thickly on the stone. The children learn so quickly. The house stirs. Swallows leave earlier, apples to be pressed. Half the sky burns: the other half is dark. Hair pushing slowly out, generations Surrounding us with wonder, theirs and ours. Nothing to give, nothing has been learnt. The past simply denies the urge for a truce, Creeping into the egg. When it is time We can appoint a committee for the feasts, And for next year’s feasts, and the year after. Locks stick, glass metamorphosed In leafy caryatids of summer where Heat packs the panes and fingers tremble in Tobacco pockets, a tomato sniffed, Its greenish acid bloom and tiny hairs. The pain stirs again like a new life To be unravelled. It had to come to this. The body is nothing, the body thinks nothing, The short senses grubbing on their sticks Feel nothing, the forgotten carioca. A line moves to the finger end, and curls, Head fallen in helplessness. The wails Of children break behind the woven fences, Those minted faces tar beyond our sight. The gates shut: a parade of Japanese flags. And alive on the porch the councillor lowers his pipe, Comes down from the dunes a bathroom Arab Firing off caps, or crouched over shells Gathered in sodden pumps, the soprano waitress Bringing hot tea across the evening sand. The nights come in slowly. Behind a half-curtain The impossible is completed. A single lamp Weighs down its ornaments in pools of light. Shadows crawl over the crater, roped To the terrain’s recoil, roped to the pit.

Teach me a fruit of  your country I asked and so you dipped into a shop and in your hand held me a thick yellow pinecone no knife between us you put it to your teeth sideways like a bird and bit and peeled away the fleshy scales or were they petals crisp white at the core peppered with black seeds sweet and light like a cold cloud like some exotic sherbet carried hand over hand from a mountaintop by a relay of runners straightway to the Inca’s high table we sat on metal chairs still pebbled with rain the seat of my pants damp we passed it back and forth no matter how carefully we could not help spilling the juice making our cheeks sticky our fingers getting sticky our fingers no not even once touching

We go on and we tremble. God says we can screw now. God says to give up all your lovers, Time to die. When I was younger I drove a Lincoln. God said to trade it in. A tad lovely, then, and terrible, And sick of my own kind, I wanted to become a woman. I wanted to wash the feet of other women In public, I wanted his eyes On me, olives on the ground. I gave you my hand, Now I go around with my sleeve Tucked in my coat. I climb no trees, touch One breast at a time, Hold no hands myself. I go on and I tremble With your back in my blood, The clap my mother left me. With me no more, and now, And forever, and even always The dust of my feet In the desert I give you stranger my sign, My peace, But God you remember You fucked me out of my hand.

Christ bore what suffering he could and died a young man, but you waited years to learn how to heal. Only when you could did you touch the man whose body blistered for yours. You posted him no news for sixteen terms, then just a signed graduation notice. The letter he wrote that week asked only, Now that your books are closed, can boys come in? At your wedding, you buried the woman you thought you knew inside a stranger’s name. This is how you found yourself: thirty-three, nursing a son. Soon there was another. Your mind had already begun to walk. But you were a mother. Those cribs held you.

April 1915 I walked in loamy Wessex lanes, afar From rail-track and from highway, and I heard In field and farmstead many an ancient word Of local lineage like 'Thu bist,' 'Er war,' 'Ich woll', 'Er sholl', and by-talk similar, Nigh as they speak who in this month's moon gird At England's very loins, thereunto spurred By gangs whose glory threats and slaughters are. Then seemed a Heart crying: 'Whosoever they be At root and bottom of this, who flung this flame Between kin folk kin tongued even as are we, 'Sinister, ugly, lurid, be their fame; May their familiars grow to shun their name, And their brood perish everlastingly.'

1. Pity the bathtub that belongs to the queen its feet Are bronze casts of the former queen’s feet its sheen A sign of fretting is that an inferior stone shows through Where the marble is worn away with industrious Polishing the tub does not take long it is tiny some say Because the queen does not want room for splashing The maid thinks otherwise she knows the king Does not grip the queen nightly in his arms there are Others the queen does not have lovers she obeys Her mother once told her your ancestry is your only Support

Pity the beautiful, the dolls, and the dishes, the babes with big daddies granting their wishes. Pity the pretty boys, the hunks, and Apollos, the golden lads whom success always follows. The hotties, the knock-outs, the tens out of ten, the drop-dead gorgeous, the great leading men. Pity the faded, the bloated, the blowsy, the paunchy Adonis whose luck’s gone lousy. Pity the gods, no longer divine. Pity the night the stars lose their shine.

They amputated Your thighs off my hips. As far as I'm concerned They are all surgeons. All of them. They dismantle us Each from the other. As far as I'm concerned They are all engineers. All of them. A pity. We were such a good And loving invention. An aeroplane made from a man and wife. Wings and everything. We hovered a little above the earth. We even flew a little.

One granite ridge A tree, would be enough Or even a rock, a small creek, A bark shred in a pool. Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted Tough trees crammed In thin stone fractures A huge moon on it all, is too much. The mind wanders. A million Summers, night air still and the rocks Warm.   Sky over endless mountains. All the junk that goes with being human Drops away, hard rock wavers Even the heavy present seems to fail This bubble of a heart. Words and books Like a small creek off a high ledge Gone in the dry air. A clear, attentive mind Has no meaning but that Which sees is truly seen. No one loves rock, yet we are here. Night chills. A flick In the moonlight Slips into Juniper shadow: Back there unseen Cold proud eyes Of Cougar or Coyote Watch me rise and go.

Placa/Rollcall, 1980, by Charles “Chaz” Bojórquez If the city was a body, graffiti would tell us where it hurts. — Charles “Chaz” Bojórquez And this block would shout, “Nos diste un chingaso , cabrón. Mira esta cara rota, these baton-cracked ribs, this black and blue street dizzy con gente: blades, kiki, larry, snow, enrique, connie, 
elton, king, david, kelly, jeff, ratón, chaz , los de aquí, los de abajo. This roll call won’t be silenced, not by glock, not by chokehold. This is our temple of runes, our tomb — its glyphic curve and flow, calligraphic code writ acrylic. This, our relic, our scroll unrolled in catacombs, our flecks of subtext still buzzing después de que vayamos con La Pelona. ¡ qué lucha, loco ! Ven, baile con nosotros to the aerosol’s maraca y hiss, al punk en español’s furious sweat. Hang your head out the window y dale un grito tan lleno de duende that it cracks the pavement, summons our dead to dinner. Turn the tonal kaleidoscope. Then pause, catch your breath, so you don’t miss the illegible moment where all the mystery lives. There, de-cypher that!”