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.