3/3/23
I laugh like my father. A sound transformed moonwalk on our conversations to points.
Unlike your animated outwardness, dad holds his neck. His shoulders shrivel. His eyes slit. His upper lip tucks away, but he never leans forward. You like a sticky notes book, flip through laughs, running away from strangers, and sprint to corners.
It’s the only characteristic that diverges on a Venn diagram. Otherwise, you both stuff your elastic heads in between each other’s knees.
Leaning to the unspoken or fraudulent, your legs numb from plastered concrete poured yesterday and the second yesterday and the third yesterday and the fourth yesterday and the fifth yesterday and the sixth yesterday. All the way back since yanking throned vines from your self imposed grave. Remember?
It was January. The eventual shadow with a mouth for a face and arms for legs, yearly traps escaped yellow rays. It came on time. It always does. January 3rd.
By January 5th, it convinced you to glue your trembling blue lips. On the 6th, a crumbling squeal cut through sealed tape. On the 9th, marked 42 days. On the 11th, you collapsed. On the 16th, your mother, son and daughter left. On the 21st, suppression resurfaced. Vines sprouted across your 4th grade sculpted calf scar, it spreads through the first time you felt heat between your thighs, curving around your inner cheeks, sprawling to your crimson inked back, weaving inside the tumultuous weight of cursed motherhood, wrapping out your pulsating neck, shaving your virgin curls and smothers you with natures candy. Do you remember?
That was before you leaned in. Refusing to hold your neck like my father does. Single, morbid and stoic, in spite, he avoided disillusionment to trudge a sadistic path, that pulls at his toe nails. Unlike you, dad learn to unlearn. He left deceiving spaces and surrendered to vines. All the while, he held his neck and laughed, feeling each node of vibration.
What about you? Can you feel the atomic reactions through a granular level? Or do your pensive thoughts storm your yesterdays, todays and tomorrows?
People Watching
Immediate priority survival, work. Weekend invites bonds, binds, broads, births. Racing towards inches of a hollow ended tunnel, we molest each other. Acrylic facade impressions tickles our Adam’s apple, provoking a sensorial, splattering roaches, a rough edge resurfaces, the bitter ripe memory bursts. Refocus. Testosterone, bearded, pregnant abdomens hang. The swim trunk seaman bathed in holy water. Marinated chops the looming august spotlight. Puffs, stressed, overflowing a picnic table. God’s secret embeds between sound waves.
“Manhandled. I’m the definition of a try hard. The lyrical miracle god. Do anything just for an applause”
Intangible remedy for the equally intangible woke matrix voice. Ingrown’s sprout below the chin, a bed of ragged cat hair blossoms from the young boy’s chest. His baby feet grown into predicted shoes. His enlarged eyes shrink the initial peripheral world at bay. Mismatched skin hues patch between the ears. People watching, a reflection more so than projection.
El Jardín Sin Agua
I wish she built me a garden and nurtured my damaged, crippled seeds. Heaven knows I thirst for that now. Maybe I would’ve grown to be a majestic flower that’s plucked for a long awaited encounter or maybe even a grounded tomato vine producing rounded cherries for the seasonal Greek salad or weekly tomato soup on Sunday’s paired with grilled cheese. I smell a hazy popsicle Saturday twiddling my recessive type toes on the poop scented mulch beneath. I don’t blame you. The moral compass, vicious tides of yesterday, polar magnitudes of tomorrow and sorrowful metallic taste of today yank at your fisted shaped heart. Still. I long. A garden that I coarse softly down the cheek. For now, my chest walls encloses, gazing at the foggy road ahead. For my eyes are watered and hindered but my physicality, unequivocally fixed.
Rare Murmurs
It strikes at night. Squeezing the last drips of value in the 24-hour cycle. The itch to stroke with a pen, sway anticipated hips, yell yearning lyrics continues to shout. Frequent, quiet, and rare diligence murmurs from time to time. Disrupting the order within an organized mind, it becomes achingly foggy to visualize yet clearly felt, like the crisp cold air from a December day. Frostbite. Flower shaped lines sprawling from the inner lips. Coated white, furrowed and all. Like seductively dragging tightly fit shoes across a rustic city bar, involving the persons with wandering eyes to open invitation. Like the unison of moving bodies as riffs and drums blare volume, lighting passionate souls. Yet, descriptively, it’s unfathomable. Its fluid, invincible, emptiness reinforces a repressed belief. Omit its resistance. Unclutch at the sheer evident feeling, relax tense shoulder blades, list 3 items in the enclosing ro- 11:26 pm. The last of 3 doors finally close, 1 willingly stays in the unoccupied room where drinks were shared the night before, songs were danced hours before, and sweet nothing’s were whispered moments ago. Legs lie against the olive wall, the arms flare on the unheated floors, a familiar bass powers through the peeling headphones. The school clock, unfitting against the unremarkable interior, opaque blinds, tick, accompanies the night. Appliances clatter and a selected few neighbors roam the dark streets. Inside — turmoil filters as does stale yellow low lights hum. Seconds slug by. 11:35 pm. Cutting at a wounded heart an in instant, the idea grows its calculated pulse. The eyes dilate, the breath shallows, the fangs sink. Strangely, comfortable, the developing daydream lures inside the space where judgement, criticism and ultimate demise minimize. Free will on its knees at the steps of the heart’s natural instinct. Possible transformative iterations remain just that — possible. Short bursts of ambition. Possible and muted echoes. Possible and misguided. Never really likely possible, and elongated. Rather much, maybe much too short-lived.
2/22
It’s weird to wander among ominous streets but feel Procteted below the rays of daylight. Flat surfaces replaced with historically washed and paved cobblestones. Houses constructed left shatteringly and empty on a Sunday morning. Familiar with the hums of European cars, mixed dialects and overcast weather, these outskirts reflect the city in a ghost town wardrobe. Bathed in bleak, neutral colors, paired in limited numbers of families, cloth towards its furthest reach. And undoubtedly scorching so, noisy strong winds tackle through its stubborn walls.
