3/22/12

Warmth


This is the story of our youth, written like cracks in the tile that lines the shower.
Don't worry, my dear, don't fret.  These things will hold themselves together.
The season changed from winter to spring in an odd transition that saw all of the cold feeling that I harbored go unrequited.  How could I write great poetry if snow becomes a memory?  White, wet, cold...that is all I remember.  I have photographs though that make me think, perhaps, that there is a beauty in the desolation.  Maybe there are portents in the way the wind moves great clouds of tree pollen through the city, coating everything in a hue that evokes vomit.

There was no way I would be able to dress for occasions anymore.  It is impossible to be fashionable in sweat.  We were doing so well in our coats.

Here now was a girl...a girl because being a girl implies innocence and don't we all wish we were...
Here she is and here we are, beneath an oddly warm sky that beckons interaction.
How long have I known you?  A long time.  A long time. 
God have mercy on everyone, and maybe a little more on me.
The story of our youth is like the cracks in the pavement.  When the road is cool--though it is seldom so--it contracts and pulls within itself as if to indicate that insulation is the whole of being.  Yet, as the sun lingers...heat.  Heat.  Now that same space is expanding in an angry way that ruptures and breaks.  This is the nature of roads.  This is the nature of hearts.






3/15/12

Old Testament Vernacular


There is a magic in the way a people, a place can translate into a sound.  A music that itself embodies its creators so fully that it takes on a new life, like a child born.  I have watched the face of a woman sing with the same unconditional love for her song that radiates from a mother's eyes when she cradles her newborn; warm and fragile and everything we believe when we first hear the word promise.

Sometimes in smoky dens.  The night is lighter outside than where we sit, huddled around a small table within a crowd that shapes like water to its barriers.  The band had yet to play and it was then you called her a Philistine after you had read the words gouged into the black paint of the wall--
Too much sex, too little Jesus.

I held my own thoughts close, because here was a place to marvel.  To listen.  Nothing about our years was a comfort.  Even the little slips of paper that you would drunkenly pass to me from your fortune cookies seemed to mock us.  How could they believe in Ghosts but not in God?  You'd shake a finger at nothing that would unconsciously follow the beat of the bass...the blood in my capillaries...
'The living haunt us.' 

The last thing I hoped for was a dance lesson on a spring night.  Corporal movements lit by bonfire.  Here I stretch out my hand to take yours and we smile.  What happens next will be the contract, and someday when it is cold you will lean up to whisper in my ear...
'This was your promise to me.'  
Then, we will live in each other's eyes, and move, and move, and burn.