Thursday, December 24, 2009

ode (to gabrielle)

O poor soul! Soon,
I must make a choice to explore
either your soft face, to delve
into the ultimate meaningfulness of our love, or
I may jettison myself far
out among the stars to try and grasp something larger
than ourselves and our often-petty
circular loving.
Which shall I choose?

Do I care to explore that bond
which once held us close like refugees, that union
against the common enemy that was ourselves,
against the greying New York City
streets that birthed us?
Shall I return to myself, childlike, curled
on the bathroom floor, sobbing at your holy feet
as I professed my desire, singular and dawning:
to become
like you
to be
merged in some greater entity than my lonely self
and to probe the darkest recesses of your lovely flesh.
I cried, drugged and bewildered on the bathmat
and grasped your cold knees,
terrified by the immediacy of my nothingness.

You were all I knew,
brilliant orange,
taurean mistress, keeper
of my heart and of all the wisdom in this
damn world of plastic, gutter
trash and the sighs of the lonely.
I felt for you, blindly
begging in the darkness to be born,
knowing that myself would only be consummated
if I could consume you with kisses.
I loved the moon because I orbited you, o earth
grounding of my adolescent childhood
dictator of my self
mother of my desire to be alone,
but not lonely.
It was your pain that made me-
it was the pangs of your heart that forced me into being.

And now I choose, returning:
do I explore my motherland once more?
Or do I use that chemical otherness to dance
in realms known, but not felt
the paradox:
felt but not known.
When I rise, will it be to greet the dawn of myself
or of us? How can
I reconcile you with my vision of the cosmos, how can
I both love you and that which appears
to frighten you most?
You shy away from causality,
from the consequence of you,
while I go running, furiously in search of life,
poignantly striving for meaning.
I often find it in myself
and once I found it in your breath,
your breasts,
but now I no longer see you as that fractaling spiral
as that exploding pattern, that flower--

I see you grey-faced from 2 am
I see you digging inside yourself
hiding from the luminescent spheres that guide us all
blocking them out with fistfuls
of dank self-reproach,
covering your face with fear
that seeps under your fingernails like moist, black earth.
I want to tell you all of this, but I am afraid
of your seal-brown eyes-- I am terrified
that they will look at me with confusion
and an intense not-knowing.

I realize now that although you birthed me,
you are not my mother -- I am.
This makes me realize that I do not know you
and my stomach aches as I remember you
crying to me, in fear of my rejection.

(Sometimes)

I do not want you to love me because you never used to
and I would rather not know your soul.
If I did, my heart would be torn open,
a whirling galaxy of lust and pain,
a frightened and awful miasma of otherness.
I would have to realize that I have been lying
to you, to myself
to the entire world.

(Sometimes)

I wish that I still loved you as I had loved you-
now I see that you are broken, not holy
and I feel seismic, waves of fear.
You emanate an uncertainty I can hardly fathom, and I feel you
like a black hole, like the center of a galaxy.

Perhaps you are the singularity
and I, the world.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

sad poem

As I trace these swirling lines
out of the elegiac palms of my black hands
I feel myself being lifted
out of the ground by my roots, plucked
bare and writhing from the shivering soil
to twist gray-faced and wizened like a breach birth
hanging from the palms of your blank,
white hands. And as my
poisoned roots swell around my heart
I twist and curl tighter
trying to avoid your murderous hands
trying to enshrine myself
nymphlike in a cave of bark
squinting my eyes against the the needle rays
of the eclipse that is rolling across your
beautiful eyes, and slowly hiding
your once-beautiful gaze.

And from this height you drop me
a wan and helpless teardrop
an acorn from the mighty oak
of your barren hostility. I know
this is not you, o towering
one, o sterile mask. You look
at me like I am a dead thing
(and maybe I am)
and I cling to you with my poisoned roots,
crying for fear
that both of us will die.

Paradoxically, I will always remember you as you now
hold me: a small child
wrapped in bark, trying
desperately to protect against the harsh
winds that blow outside the boundaries of love, a selfmade
papoose, raising hands to protect against the harsh
blinding sliver, the eclipse's knife edge,
that pale sickle that acts
as a solitary and pathetic tribute,
the surrendering flag of all we used to know
and now still hold, dear.