Aut-um-ism Evening

Slowly,
a collection of toys
forms at the bottom of the stairs
like almonds, uneaten
in the same bowl on the table

Red pies made redder
by his coveralls and white half-on
socks sticking out

She never asked why he was
but only why
he didn't turn on the light.

Le Matin II

Claustrophobic box of brain bursts showing

Zeus' sperm in fireworks of arrows - a perpetual disorder:

charge!

Picassian creativity en masse, 

serotonin 

siphons exponential rain bucket

of potential horses

l'idee n'est pas au contraire, mais il y a trop des idées d'organiser.

the starting gate opens, 

and then,

"Bang!"
A poem is written.

Le Matin

Claustrophobic box of brain bursts showing like
Zeus' sperm in fireworks of arrows - a perpetual disorder
Picassian creativity en masse, serotonin building up potential
energy like horses chomping at the starting gate
l'idee n'est pas au contras mais trop des idées d'organiser.

How We Die and Other Stories

Three breakfast burgers, savory with spinach, sit just heated on a plate
listening to the sounds of cats leaping and curling between window-screens
and lace kitchen curtains, excited by morning activities,
tease the huge steel stove dominating the
center of the kitchen of this 19th century cambridge apartment,
bellowing, “All those who see me must bow down in my presence.”
The man bustles around the beast and its captors, sink and refrigerator,
and pulling up his socks and picking up the nearest cat,
coo-ing “goodbye my love” into its white fur, presses kisses into their necks.

His mouth talks into his iphone, an extension of his soft-hands,  lingual, linguist telling it
in slow, over-anunciated English, “Gandmother died. I will be going to New York. Call me - if - you - want - to - take - the bus down - with me.”

Last night he told me about how things die. Grandmothers die when they stop drinking water, the way poets die with they stop drinking daydreams.

I smell the pungency of humidity and rush-morning cats, the sound of trucks waking and buses breaking, signaling it’s time for work- they, too, speak languages I never knew I wanted to know.

He raises his hand to his mouth and in his heart-rush pauses to think of what he’s forgotten - here he evokes the young Euryalus just fallen in battle, the blush of rose just passing from his cheeks- long lashes curled over his lids half closed in thought, black hair freshly showered and slicked back, beating body elegantly draped in mourning polo and dress pants.

I grab hold of his torso to remind him of his forget-thought, and he presses me closer. J’ai dit: “Vous avez une accent tres beau.” We converse in French, and I reveal to myself I’ve forgotten how we found ourselves here, in this kitchen asking about death and masala burgers, skirted men and how men become women, and things I didn’t know I learned. Today I told my mother how to come out of her skin and self-actualize.

“Tu me trouvez tres beau, plus fascinating et je te bewildered,” he said last week. Only later did I realize I should have been embarrassed 

The way a man discovers that his penis is the same size as his father’s; before then, one’s own feels like an orchid in a forest, carefully studied, mysteriously nourished.

A funeral awaits, Jewish grandmothers and rebellious cousins, too, but the only thing I remember is this: I found him in a forest. He smells of soap, pink lips and buddha brows. He’s inquisitive, open, honest and expressive, compassionate, deeply perceptive, and with raised hands tells me I can stay a few minutes after he leaves if I want to.

Pomegranate II

I sit on the floor of the eye, the lid wafting over my body,

forming a triangle with my toes, nails raised to my face,

stained, wet, posed before the cracked flesh of the fly-eye.

A single bulb illuminates the amber varnished pine panels, the eye-lid blinking.

And from where I sit on the floor, the fruit opens its mouth,

a mute chick's, brilliantly red, obsequious, begging naively for life. 

Outside, the eye lazily opens to reveal the fluorescent street lamp, so bright I can taste its photons, 

the metal head an ascerbic insect, narrow, lunging in its mechanical way for the catch, 

for cars that clog the freeway during January's rush hour, just a million salmon during mating season

swimming upstream hundreds of thousands of miles, the reasons for their costly migration still unknown by scientists. What the salmon don't know is that most of them will never make it home, and perhaps to the advantage of their species, so that their offspring can continue up the freeway to roar and thrash at the air,

buzzing with white yellow packets like a flower pollen distributed by bees,

or the spores of a puff fungi, kicked into the air in great flumes,

bearing light, sounds of bus brakes, funelled air, cigarette smoke,

and the narrative voices of hipsters.

It is here that I split the mottled red sack into pythagorean pieces, counting each one like months in a year, and allow the blood to pour into the blackened spaces of the floorboards and map out market patterns in a crooked line down my leg as my teeth eagerly

scrape, scoop reveal fish eggs and dreams, red eyes clinging to their sharp chiclets. It reminds me of the time I spoke too quickly for my boss. Her voice radiated tangency, filth, corruption and not-so-veiled guilt. 

Above me, the eyeball roll to reveal only white,

and by body revels in its apathy.

House Visit

Translucent purple plastic:
the lens of toddlers and the bucket
for daffodils, patiently waiting to be coddled
by a the green thumb
nursed by the uv lighting and minerals
washed abay by tooting and tottering
delivery trucks, smugly blowing smog through
19th century window-panes and mauve turrets
in raspberry sorbet and chocolate fresco:

a tiramisu of colonial brick and neo-gothic dwellings
suitable for hobbits- or humans
libraries and as large and alive as some
brains, seen through the yellow lamp-lit
windows- partially obscured in in ivy and shrubs
and always instilling a kind of longing for the sweet comforts of
home and hearth.

A Newton Fair in 2008 Featuring An Popular Klezmer Band

liquid violins and wooden chocolate
trellises hang from smoked oak apples-
the black, pouting eyes of children
caked in smirking satisfaction, their
smirks washed in charred ash and
remnants of alabaster fluff as
crickets and crocodiles zag and jig,
sway and rock to to the sounds

of the klezmer bands knees
knocking clapboard laughs from
striped cats' teeth and merry-go-round's squeals,
crying, "crit-creee, crit-creeee, crit-creeee,"
to the rhythm of  the kelzmer band's knees,
slap-slapitying the shiny sueded soles of their
worn dancing shoes to old women's flit-me-free curls
and cider jug belly laughs all the way
down to split-pee crick and egglestown spires,

bending two whole
rakes in half and two whole snakes into coils
along which the carpenter ant shimmies
to the tune of two-and-ten ton jimmies
right past the garden of scientists in the courtyard washing
"O's" and 15-foot spheres in a cemetery of sculpture
long since discarded by university students
for playing cards, posterity, reality, and milk teeth

traded for bigger game: giraffes, lunging
antelopes, wiggling banana slugs and
yawning carnivorous bog plants,
teeth gently closing over themselves
to the clash bang sounds of the great brass
klezmer musicians on Fair Day

Upon Sitting Down to Write and Observing a Lemon

lemon pilatory skin
a solitary torpedo of organic flesh against
inorganic composite burnished maple table top
an elemental, prized possession
of breathing carbon primary conglomerate
reminds me of my essential, self-confirming
membership to the carbon tree

touching its undulating, grandmotherly flesh
to my nose produced memories of the
produce isle of the grocery store,
the metal handles of grocery carts
and in the gleaming, over-waxed white floors

a false sense of security in fluorescent lighting
the same that instills anxiety in new hospital patients
and order to chemical laboratories
while illuminating the post-modernist corridors
of subways and the miniature text of my
law school casebooks- still ponderously shaping
the bookshelves into magnifying glass
curves for future inspection

a reminder
of self-engendered identity and
subconscious and conscious reminders
of what is left undone- a sink full of dishes
under a full moon- the reason they don't go out
with Wednesdays trash,
and the white light splayed, evenly
over all

Upon eating a Pomegranate in January on the floor, directly after a long day of work

Blood, child of my arm,

coaxes crocuses from my thumbs

and forefingers to greet the white

winter light that falls on to the pillars of cold practicum.

She knows not what she opens, red life

seeps into the quick of her thumbs and draws a map

of celebratory streams over her wrists, Solomon at the slaughter

of the lamb, torn between serving God and protecting

the flesh of his body, his son.

This geographic topography in relief

to the rest of her life draws points to form a path

to the pool in which fish do not swim, nor birds bathe,

but coaxes orchids and bug-eating plants to do what they cannot:

coax life from sandy shoals, shaded forest floors, and renewing swamps.

Bare thighs and toes exposed reap the benefit of these maps.

Cheeks, chin, tongue, lips teeth revel in the bitter-sweet chocolate live-giving blood:

Texhotohuitil, a child after gorging on the Sardinian festival of meat.

Tongue, throat, belly still tingling with the vulnerability of those

round red beads whose heads break while fore-fingers and thumb

delightfully crack open the delicate red skin: a pig-skin football of antioxidants,

an offering to the deity, to the future, to hope-

Its cracking, effusive and plentiful juices, a tight unfolding of the biological creatures without voices,

who elicit their receptiveness to pollination in the smooth unfolding

of stamen and petals, often bringing their own richness of color and pattern: albino,

burgundy, violet: streaks, spots, blotches.

She readies these with her fingers

and forms points of contact with brandied wood slats:

cold feet and pomegranate juice pools,

where touch fulfills our symbiotic and essential connection with the external world;
and espouses, most clearly, what it is to be human.

Gay Marriage Day in San Francisco or The Socially Unaccepted Persona

Fiesty monkey day
driving into this bare sanctum
Lies plaintively at the sky
a prison s/he's convinced
s/he created, so fights, fights, fights
against the being
s/he thought was hers/his.

On Writing Friday's Poem

skin tingles, my toes curl, adrenaline sends
churlish waves through my intestines
seltzer of coconut water and ice
Friday the cool popsicle tongue
wearing a yellow banana

she is panting in my living room
and outside the weather is stunningly beautiful.

Pomegranate

It's been night for hours, the eye swallowing in the flourescent street lamp,
which it's draped with her lid and peers down into the crowded city street,
spies the freeway on the left where cars and trucks roar and thrash at the air,
buzzing with white yellow photons like a flower's pollen disturbed by bees,
or the spores of a puff fungi, kicked into the air in great flumes,
bearing light, sounds of bus brakes, funelled air, cigarette smoke,
and the narrative voices of hipsters.

I sit on the floor of the eye, the lid wafting over my body,
forming a triangle with my toes, nails raised to my face,
stained, wet, posed before the cracked flesh of the fly-eye.
A single bulb illuminates the amber varnished pine panels, the eye-lid blinking.
And from where I sit on the floor, the fruit opens its mouth,
a mute chick's, brilliantly red, obsequious.

I split the mottled red crust into pythagorean pieces.
It's blood pours into the blackened spaces of the floorboards,
draws a crooked line down my leg, as my teeth eagerly
scrape and scoop out its fish eggs. My mouth radiates tangency, filth, corruption.

Above me, the eyeballs roll to reveal only white,
and by body revels in the sensory presence.

St. Basil's Cathedral

She crawls through vines
to realize electric orange nails are growing
where there should be flower buds, the sepals and stamen are
dewey, naked eyeballs, the whites predominante, the corneas ebony,
blue, hazel, ruby, saphire, carnation, and so on, bedecked with cowls
of studded jewels, reflecting light admist the masses of silvwhispering to each other
and where there should be leaves, toungues, pink and tiny,
like those of babies, grow next to dog-like ones, wet, dropping,
like an unfurled roll of toiletpaper and trailing enough drool
to water the entire garden. As it were, where drops of it fell
into the cool black dirt, newborn ferns open their mouths and caw for food .

Above her, through the luscious lenghts of aloe-like vines,
she observes the sky embroiled in pink, purple above St. Basil's Cathedral.
A dozeon or so puffs like frosting on cupcakes, adorn the towers in great luscious
swirls of buttercream and creamcheese whips, lavishly colored in blold twists
of green and white stripes, gold candy pears, pink and purple diamonds,
green and gold food-color over harded hot chocolate,
halves of chocolate disks and candied fruit slices in lime, orange, lemon, and cherry.

She skirts out of the tangle of animae vegetation and discovers her body is coveredin some smooth, cool, snakelike guise from head to toe, accentuating her bodily curves and giving off a lime electric green color that reflects light from portions that happen to be in direct contact with the sky's light. In it she feels light and bouncy. She is so enamored of her new costume that she bounces right into a galloping entourage of knighted men of swords and metal-tipped spears on well-groomed steeds. Several flags whipped in the wind, indicating an alliance with the Russian Emporer, Peter the Great.

Fall Metonymy

Bicycles, bastions, and battalions of paperclips. My head is a maze of metal and free-standing filo gunk. Alter arbitrary endings find us jaunting along the rifts of Mars for evidence of seashells, aliens, and microcosmic galaxies the size and shape of glass playing marbles, silty-sanded seawater blue in Florida's early June. Contrary to popular opinion, the masses have been realigned to find solace and slipsipious paramour along the shores of Eriadmoore beach. It is evident that even the apples on the fall trees speak of the summers spent growing, the microcosmic mosses of warm, moist fall afternoons, and the lighter, more delicate touch of sunshine that warms everything just enough, so that dew-cuffed courduroys and flannel shirts rolledup to the elbows promote a soft, just-warm feeling of red check and sweet green hay-grass partially cut to make way for paths between the fruit trees, carotid arthritic branches beckoning play and a climb to the top for the largest, most red apples. Fall is filled with anticipation of apple pies, rich oranges, blues and bumpy knuckle-knocked gourds rolling between haystacks and slow, rickety hayrides over mud-dusted dirt roads. Along the way, we spy orchards, netted blueberry gardens, rabbit holes, and miles of raspberry bushes, buzzing over with bumblebees and waxy-green folliage, chest-high and aligned in rolling road-rut patterns, and when perceived from afar, tastes like the quilt of my grandmother's summer parties and homemade apple pie. We roll home, full with the sugary-sweetness of caramel-nut apples and too many apple bites of braeburns, gala, and granny smith, to where hot tapioca fills the cavities of my mind, the egg whites just folded in and burning my mouth, my grandmother's, my mother's, and my own comfort food. Poets, scientists apple gatherers and literati collect on sunny late-afternoon orchard hills and look down on the September forests, green and lightly watercolored in reds, oranges, and yellows. The just-turning of the season not seen from gray-brown city streets and glowing radio towers comes into full bloom, a tempting scent, a black and white photograph of micological identification and sweet hay-grass apples, youthful profiles photographed on the hill, on ladders, baskets too full, the pickers too excited with the antiquated, intellectually quirky experience of gathering one's own fruits. The micology overflows the amateur literati, psychology, botanist, sustainable-scientist, biological programming, poets, and from this grows literature, twine-bound chapbooks, and a story read aloud on the banks of the dirt road beneath the pensive leaves falling to the sharp scent of detrital autumn: all that remains of the group on the banks, bags of apples in hand and time to pass.

72 Hours in New York: Welcome to The L.E.S.

Suspender-hinged hipster madness. On every block, the unconventional is the conventional. Forty's curl-cut poof men's hair, swirl of soft-serve ice cream. Slender body in mustard yellow over-sized wide-leg pants and matching suspenders over a white undershirt, leavs out toward us from the bar, a cigarette in one hand, a hand on the doorpost of the one-hundred year-old building. He gazes at us in invitation, his eyes, wide, brown relaxed. New york is fast. It's midnight and hundreds of people are walking to their party, bar, and dance destinations. Girls in groups and pretty summer dresses, short and flirty, one-piece sheer jumpsuits, sheer lace over underwear and theater make-up seduces scurtive glance from girls and guys alike. One-thousand chili-pepper lights hang from an Indian restaurant, lighting it up like an shrine or the palace of the gods, such that looking in feels warm, inviting. To enter is to lie in a red tent on a hot sunny afternoon, the red light a slew of platic coated chemical primary colors, filtering in to create a warm, surreal, unearthly existence shielded from the outside world. Here, in New York, businesses must out-compete their competitors. Being one of seven Indian restaurants on the block does not help business, on the a-typical American block where more businesses spring up in the fertile soil of New York's newly gentrified lower-east side, presenting more business and services than there are diners and shoppers. Bars come and go within months, independent restaurants and businesses stay afloat awhile, then die out quickly. The ones that survive do it best, producing some of the most unique and delightful products and services in the country. Butter Lane specializes in rich, buttery cupcakes, frostings in a a variety of lemon, hazelnut, mocha, caramel walnut, vanilla and chocolate on your choice of chocolate, vanilla, or banana nut cake. I got the lemon-frosted vanilla cupcake. It was so rich and sweet. Its homemade perfection is undeniable. Across the street, the used bookstore sells thousands of titles a basement store no bigger than my bedroom, in a rectangular shape, the Lower East side has transformed the blank, even ugly forms of tenement houses and transformed them into million-dollar suites and some of the catchiest, most culturally ingenious restaurants, shops, businesses, bars, and nightlife hot-spots in America, so recently gentrified that gentrification is at once the appropriate word, and not. Garbarge litters the street the night before trash pickup day, sending visitors and residents the welcoming stench of raw garbage, girls in nightlife mini-dresses, arm in arm with ladies and men, step carefully over the soggy white bags in their silver stilettoes, the thin city trees giddy with colored lights and the anticipation of the evening, hot and broiling, oil left too long on the pan, and leaping at the taste of water. Ready, willing, able. The city reaches out, bites, looking for and creating energy: the men are light, sultry humid, and alarmingly awake. I outline my torso in nylon spandex of rubber-glove tightness and he in a shirt of tooth-bleach white linen to join a tipping point on the cusp of cultural greatness: the young, educated hipster subculture newly erupting from the vestiges of deep-seated immigrant culture and (literally) overnight forming a newly marbled cultural, entreprenurial, and creative upheaval of old immigrant and new immigrant, gaudily frosted with academic wealth within New York's Lower East Side. Welcome to Katz's diner.

A Midsummer's Night Dream

Stage fright fascination impulse-roused into hand-grasp whipped on stange, some strawberry and whip-creamed nose-licking, whip you into shape spontonaeity, and above the lights in disco-ball palette of pink and green, and blue and silver throwing light and and giddiness into corners and revealing young Titanya in her butterflies and shiny purple hot shorts, and the fairies in their grease-chested face-painted dnacing exuberance. From the stage we dance, legs flying, shoulders and hips and hands shimmying, his hand motions forcing me into multiple vertical arabesques of compounded electric energy. The short glove-fitted dress hand-steps to the beat in furious energy, a blender of eyes and excitment, our eyes repeatedly engaging, we ramp up the speed, mere seconds in, the attendees wide-eyed and alert to the peacock pair violently, dynamically dominating the closing moment of the show, the music still playing as loudly and guadily as at the finale. Cracked sidewalks, flour-less chocolate cakes and karaoke binges, we twist and turn to 70's tuns and oldies hits, the fondness throwing us into flashback singing, each echoing the other in a chaotic harmonium: an aesthetic energy of the heart in which he initiates my top-spinning paripatitic tornado across the length of the stage, a stage performance of unparalleled tango-turn exuberance, when he leaps to the other end of the Midsummer night and from standing position, dives into the fifth dimension of my heart. Disco-ball darting about, his hands a-flame and hotter eyes, from position on his dance-floor stained knees, his dream-held eyes elicit my attention, and I am nothing but slightly stunned and obsequiously delighted. My arms find the space of time continuous, unerring and profoundly vast. His flagrant flattering nods to arms encircling my head in horchata, Mexican tortilla warmth and snapshot of shyness, the tea half-spilled in a return to Tityanya-shaped lust, toes respond to the beat of his hand pressure-points, endlessly revolving from his fingertips as I am improvisationally dipped backwards by him into the fish-eye lense of glitzy spectator-coated performance.

Mid-Summer Morning: Ninety Degrees

Woke morning bath. Awash in wet water I wake in morning waterfall with wisteria dew. Sweet crystalline dawn drives bugs and bees to bed and leaves the morning to readers and parapatetic sleepers. Thick pages moist with steamy humidity, a basin of gelatin resin, just rising into rain, creepers slide gracefully beneath paving stones and second story 19th century palm-wide white-washed window frames. The silence broken by voices, clear and animated from somewhere among the multitudinous abodes outside the nearly floor-to-ceiling wire window screen, my back resting against the sticker-covered, soft, oak-varnished hardwood bedframe from someone's childhood era, the furniture passed down and shared, furnishing countless bedrooms before mine. Furniture I collected, was given from friends and the kind castoffs of departing students and other transient Brighton tenants. The dark brown vanished bureau carefully decorated with a metallic dinosaur sticker from 1989. The white light turns a soft, buttery yellow through the Venetian blinds, and I am aware of my body upon waking, that it is still wet, soaking, actually, just as much or more than the night before when I went to bed in my underwear with the subconscious expectation that it would be cool but not cold by morning, my damp skin dry and relieved from the moist cheesecloth of sunlit air moisture- at least 100 percent humidity. The sheets crinkle and past to my damp curls, white thights, arms shiny with perspiration. I revel in the embrace, the realization that this morning, this experience is mine and no one elses, a moment to be savored as one that does not happen often. Subconsciously, it is a moment for celebration. I reach over and open a new book, the story crisp, tantalizing, and utterly, profoundly unattainable in the capriciousness of its language and brings and unutterable pleasure to the perspiring peach flesh, whose each hair captures the moisture as shiny dewpoints on a hyperbolic curve. The torpid pastel-colored atmosphere is a body-temperature bath for the lungs. An iced lemonade flips a cat on its back, lands paws up in my head: a brain freeze of slinky-stepping awareness. The below-freezing temperatures of the liquid respond as pain within my mouth. I am consciously, pleasurably, aware. My bicycle-body glides cleanly through the outside air, the coolness of her body like just stepping into a seventy-two degree swimming pool in soft, medical gauzed morning. The crisp air rubs sleep from her eyes. She reminds me that I possess l'experience, and I know that I live just for these moments.

H-bomb

Lewis told her very young sister that he had planted a bomb inside her stomach at breakfast and if she talked it would explode. This was after a lengthy summer day where she would not keep shut. Lisa stayed quiet the whole day but nobody talked to her. Mom and dad went on about the neighbor’s yelling across the grass and letting the dog bark at their dog and their children running about naked once, and then the stuff about engineering and electricity and her mother’s students. Nothing about what she was doing at school or what rocks she found in the grass (she imagined that if all the rocks on earth were collected and then put together, they’d form one massive jigsaw puzzle. The final picture would be monstrous, and depict something divine, or even terrifying). After dinner mom and dad lounged in the living room watching TV: a football game. She felt so angry, her stomach was like a brewing volcano, her head nearly steaming. Intent on getting back at them, she creeped downstairs, and hid behind the couch. At the commercial break (for Budweiser beer), she crawled over the couch, jumped onto the cushions and bellowed “boom!” Mother was on top of faher mashing her hips into him. For the moment before her surprised they had been on top of one another, his legs embracing her torso, one pajama leg lay folded upon itself, revealing the curly hairs up to his large foot, while his right hand hugged her breast. They were quickly apart, her mother cried “what is it?” and faher just sttared, sweat on his forehead, waiting for an answer. “I scared you two?” Lisa could only think to ask. “Yes, of course you did; my heart’s beating like a crazy person.” Mother clutched at her chest, almost where his hand was earlier. Lisa ran back upstairs. She jumped on her bed, laughing. What a victory! She’d frightened the bosses, the two tyrants, very well terrorized them! She was a bomb. A human bomb, an h-bomb, and it made her so happy she could dance on the ceiling.

Titanya

Tall boots, glittery chest, long black curly locks, coy mask, and most prominately of all, two glittering butterflies erect on her nipples, large pink, purple and gold gems, superbly placed over her white, larger than palm-sized breasts, two soft, full, pert-doves, alert, and ready for flight. The shadows of her breasts enhanced by the colored lights and overall dimness of the dance hall, casting a softer, cleaner, more mysterious hue over her turtle doves. She screams as her white-netted thighs are captured by two male-fairies, naked except for flash boots and glittery shorts or loin-cloths. In triangle-lift her thigh-high boots point and shine in violent anger- a fairy girl teassed and stolen by her love-potioned captors. Upon the matter black platform, among a shower of colorful metallic pieces, she teases, pounces, attracts a hummingbird to the violently Italian red fluted crocosmia with her delicate butterflies, so sweetly aligned on porcelain-white skin and long, dark chocolate curls all a-flutter and bouncing about wildly as she gaspls, opens her red-lipped mouth and yells out in surprise within their strong grip. Glitter pours down her thrust-chest, her arms wide, taught, grasping in their palms. Glossy boot toes forward, they throw her into the proffered arms of the Vinnies, spinning her into a disco-dancing toss-up between their afros and flared brown polyester suits. Fairies scoop up potions, solaciously delivering them to their precious flutter-busted female chanteuse, poetess of song and dance. Roses bitten in between pearly teeth, flung out to stage, to audience: at last fully in the dreamy embrace of their lusty love charms, the glitter fairy vixen demands her lovers.