Little Golden Threads

Motherfucker.

Mother. 

Gutter. Goddess,

Hear my prayer.

The boundaries aren't on the outside,

like chain link and razor wire,

them boundaries be on the inside,

and they stick like cleavers.

I sat in the anarchist space,

pushing my boundaries out,

    flexing.

It was hot in there,

the zines covered the walls,

my eyes focused on the one for talking about consent.

The meeting began with the serenity prayer like always.

Our words addled rich phonetics, rhythms of sobriety, our mouths moved with dry pitches of swelter and sweat.

Mud hung on my boot from Oaks Park.

My sweat stunk. My cigarettes stink. I sat in my sweat in the folding chair.

      We talked of gratitude.

      We talked of sanity.

It is this golden thread sanity.

It is the threads that floated in the air at the park. Attached were green larvae, falling from the oak trees softly. The silk thread picked up glints of sunlight, and stuck to our hair and faces.

I picked buds of medicine from the mud.

The buds of medicine sat in the spaces between the folding chairs,

hovered above the tacky floor.

The medicine was exchanged

in the backroom       to be delivered with clean needles,

they    shoot     up      out      back –

And we say the serenity prayer.

We smoke and hear the parties . . .

on the tongue of that summer stuck in waffle cone, coating the tip of buds.

And the street lights pop on when

I stride down Lombard –

carts lit up – the golden arches lit up.

I hear the beats of my heart in my headphones.

My bus comes as life goes by in a Nissan with no lights on,

and we break our little gold threads

until we meet again,

Amen.

Ode to a Beautiful Nude

With a chaste heart
With pure eyes
I celebrate your beauty
Holding the leash of blood
So that it might leap out and trace your outline
Where you lie down in my Ode
As in a land of forests or in surf
In aromatic loam, or in sea music

Beautiful nude
Equally beautiful your feet
Arched by primeval tap of wind or sound
Your ears, small shells
Of the splendid American sea
Your breasts of level plentitude
Fulfilled by living light
Your flying eyelids of wheat
Revealing or enclosing
The two deep countries of your eyes

The line your shoulders have divided into pale regions
Loses itself and blends into the compact halves of an apple
Continues separating your beauty down into two columns of
Burnished gold
Fine alabaster
To sink into the two grapes of your feet
Where your twin symmetrical tree burns again and rises
Flowering fire
Open chandelier
A swelling fruit
Over the pact of sea and earth

From what materials
Agate?
Quartz?
Wheat?
Did your body come together?
Swelling like baking bread to signal silvered hills
The cleavage of one petal
Sweet fruits of a deep velvet
Until alone remained
Astonished
The fine and firm feminine form

It is not only light that falls over the world spreading inside your body
Yet suffocate itself
So much is clarity
Taking its leave of you
As if you were on fire within

The moon lives in the lining of your skin

-Pablo Neruda

Love After Love

The time will come, when with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other's welcome

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you.

all your life, whom you have ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

-Dereck Walcott

Letter To The Woman Who Stopped Writing Me Back

I wanted you to be the first to know - Harper & Row
has agreed to publish my collected letters to you.

The tentative title is Exorcist in the Gym of Futility.

Unfortunately I never mailed the best one,
which certainly was one of a kind.

A mutual friend told me that when I quit drinking,

I surrendered my identity in your eyes.

Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny,

the way monogamy is funny, the way
someone falling down in the street is funny.

I entered a revolving door and emerged
as a human being. When you think of me
is my face electronically blurred?

I remember your collarbone, forming the tiniest
satellite dish in the universe, your smile
as the place where parallel lines inevitably crossed.

Now dinosaurs freeze to death on your shoulder.

I remember your eyes: fifty attack dogs on a single leash,
how I once held the soft audience of your hand.

I've been ignored by prettier women than you,
but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silence
so far, without spilling a drop.

- Jeffrey McDaniel

old notebooks

3/9/11

Ashes

...And they always turn back into
    humans   lest we forget.
humming
looking at the moon  
glow
as dust gathers 'round
your shoes.
We melancholy madness,
weak and powerless,
haunted by memories,
and leaven things.
Crying to our mothers',
they too forget,
we are all still human things.

11/3/09

-Skinner Blues-

Calm as a cobra on a cold day/
I feel no pain as I shed old skin/
I feel no pain at all/
she makes me taller/
up against the wind/
I feel no pain,
as I settle in.
I carry her/
like a first violin/
I'm calm as a cobra on a cold day/
In the shade/
In the shade/
not scared of the shadow/
or the hint of rain.

Many memories of May

She spoke softly as we talked of magic.
I remembered how much I missed my mother. May is full of remembrance.
How I wished the shuffle of her feet still moved across the earth.
Now I have my own steps, moving with the music, joy, and sorrow that life gives me.

When I fall asleep the ghosts visit me.
I sat in a graveyard last spring,
enchanted by this one grave marker...
it was made of wood and the grass was encroaching,
and trying to make it disappear.
The wet grass stained,
I caught my breath.
The next time I sat in a cemetery was to bury her.
I said words, no one else did.
All I have is the earth of the town named "Ash Tree",
and the memory of shuffling feet.