jars

Empty jars of jam serve as reminders
sitting in the fridge on the door
taking up space that might otherwise
be alloted for more usable items.
They have dates and locations etched into them.
I can open them and smell the past.
I can hold them in my hands and feel the curve of time.
The lids are sticky.
Sometimes I wonder if I should be keeping them.

The chili plants in the garden want harvesting.
I saw them this morning from my balcony
pointing red fingers in all directions.
Maybe I should make them into jam.
The only drawback is that chilies
never did understand cherries,
and the last thing I want is to
create strife in the jam community,

the little city of glass,
skyscrapers full of sugary lips
sculpted with steel spoons
awaiting demolition papers.

They stay, preserved and cool,
strangers to fresher neighbors.
They are the kinds of things at which
chilies are prone to scoff,
their ragamuffin ways dissenting
to fruits more demure.

I cannot choose between them,
but my fridge is running out of space,
and the chilies will rot and die,
fall and become coated in the evidence of snails.
No one likes to be crawled over.
So, I must put away the jars.
Should I rinse them and box them
and stick them in the attic,
or let bygones be bygones
and rely on memories to see me through
the winter months?

For a fun story about my life go to http://pinatstorytime.blogspot.com

time to think about my face

thoughts on sneezing
Words that spatter the page
in a spiraling spread of wetness
and clinging mucus dotted with
the grime of a city barely known,
the sum of a day's experience
stuck and tangled in the body's
expulsion of matter,
yellows and greens and liquid
compelled outwards,
dots of dirt and smog,
caught trying to get in but
swayed by defences,
natural and unavoidable,
protecting delicate tissues with hair and mess,
an organ like no other,
unassuming in appearance,
and universal in function,
it is something little thought of
and integral to standard,
the net in which harms are caught,
but can't catch everything and

sometimes the mouth compensates
for what the nose cannot stop.



chewing
The whistle of a saw wakes me early as the sun shoots its way
through the gaps in the temple.
Feel the need to grind things between my teeth,
like nuts or seeds or rocks,
or to chew bones,
or the blade of that saw,
or bite on pens and plastic bottle caps.
Sometime just to hold something there,
marinating in saliva between tongue and jaw,
to hold something inside and know its textures,
reveling in the way it pushes
my tongue around itself.
I opened my mouth and let you in.
I tucked you in my cheek,
and like a drug or hydrating salts
you seeped into my blood.
It will be seven years before I am myself again.

defence

fencing
Pulling strands of taffy from my mouth,
candied liniments soaking the tedium
out of knocking phrases,
casting rhythms into wooden stays.
I saw you watching.
Your figure cut in four,
face divided and blocked
by flaking shades of decay.
I saw you, but kept pulling anyway.
Your face arched and bit at
the corners, spitting aged sawdust
and gnarling soft cheeks to get through.
The frame stayed.
I saw you, but you didn't know.
I kept pulling.
I needed the sugar.


inked
etched out in the black of India ink
shaded with lithographer's strokes
scraped into relief
the sigh of clarity,
a great shove to externalize
the deep gouges made
intentional, and offered at the time
the grace of creamy stone.

these lines hold the black of India ink
sucking chemical color to the
scrapes, a sweet relief,
a balm of blood to wet
the wounds seep down, internalize
the deep gouges made
improbable, and wanted at the time
the grace of creamy stone.

cold as soap and pliable,
irreparable, beautiful, stained
with the black of India ink.




Bangkok March
Swift impatience waits round quivery little corners,
the edge of overly bright shores and quiet city nights.
Such a trip to stumble about these raven blocks,
syncopated stepping to keep up
with misheard rhythms in your voice.
The very timbre of my marimba ribcage
fortells tales told true and without words.
Only a weight follows such a song,
heavy limitless mirrors to light a deepening
corridor from one continent to another.
Listening too carefully to capture the signature
that is only common time,
waitless I proceed
stepping with care to my own vessels,
and keeping quiet
heed the chimes and gongs counting out
the days in their weighty brass calls,
simply, indicate hours between breaths.
Go. Misery wants no company here;
she is busy with others.
Stamp out with calloused soles the heart of you,
as feet spiral inward making a carven table
of sands newly whetted
by this salty rising tide.


water babies
January holds no reflection so we wander in
spring and fall,
know the depths where we find comfort
in the floating and pushing against the body,
joints heaving among denser stuff than we.
Tastes of allspice and ginger, rooted things,
chamomile and sage and fresh salt weeds,
companions in the days and winter nights
when we are locked out of the mud.
We who love the fog and rain,
the constant kiss of change.

homecoming

Let's...
...say an adeventure, a pitchy task to chew,
wandering side wise and grounding glass underfoot,
like a corriander seed wedged between my molars,
not discomfiting yet to all else it lends its taste,
chomp on the hull and it squirms,
betrays its presence,
not an unwelcome addition.


Homecoming
Accented with pink sticky legs akimbo,
flexed at an obtuse angle,
limbs and back exhale
riveted to attention and pressing,
but craning resisits, insisting that
nodding is just too much work.
Focusing out of the question,
bad news tumbles weedy and thorough,
snapping undergrowth and herbs,
careens without navigator
listing badly left on crumpled ribs,
ballasts sucking at waxy air.
Malplaced intuition is proven
as the mast, sinister,
indicates the point of rotation.




May
Little licking eyelids creased in alcoholic stupor
draw polka dots around a brown halo
showing through a layer of white ginger
crystalized with age and care,
mitigate unwavering signals
stolid and not quite salient,
immutable in course,
drinkable straight but not easily
digestable in the time of one day,
this fibrous libidinous being
so soon stolen by an empty cask,
pupils reflecting a pink dawn
that finds the fruit sellers
solidly planted yet again.

red traverses hanoi

In a city welded from the scraps of dismembered societies,
I have seen a girl with
hair the color of a corvette before a storm,
marching between grafted pillars,
concrete and bamboo,
that flexible distant cousin of construction;
she smiled in her heart,
and I could see from across the intersection
her waving scarlet,
screaming fertility,
the belly stretched forth hard and white
from between subdued cotton folds,
a footnote to that riotous projection.
Vivid steam raised a swath from her shoulders,
muting all surrounding color so that
She
reigned all perception;
the flage above her match the proclamation,
heralding independance deep and bleeding,
tugging at the wind,
declaring loud five-pointed victory,
and angry at being contained between four flat corners.
Her banner says life,
her place says breathing
the gory dust of thousands,
moving to an anthem old as pulse,
missing that elderly falter entirely,
no longer lost in death,
but wet with tinctured new,
mincing up that sidewalk,
heatwaves parting as for Moses.
I could almost hear her pace,
a freedom cry,
the melody remembered in the DNA of mothers,
she radiated song,
Me, I am Red.

a last lesson on leave taking

I have existed in your blood been chewed and sucked, spit in the dust with orange pips and cigarette butts. I have swum in your sight, floated in the salt and sand clammored tears down your face to know all the contours. I have stuck under your nails among the splinters and the skin, I have been breathed in and out slid along pulmonary twists, I have hid behind your knee, curled my toes in your hair, ingested bone ear and wrist, tasted all there is, and, melting ice on your palms and neck, kissed you good night, living your sundry parts, masking my need by your unblinking, moving in time to heartbeats, my favorite visceral words. The moment has come; old scars rent, clear liquid bursting in a rush to protect exposed tissues, then dripping with saliva, I am ready to close the shade, and relegate you to memory.