When you go through the birth-hole of divorce,
you emerge wet and green,
covered in a slippery film of life-affirming water.
Blood,
bile,
mucous,
meconium,
suffocating amniotic fluid
laced in a warm lanugo sweater.
It’s really all just water,
Grace water.

The green fuse from a previous life
is still attached for a while,
until you clamp the cord
and take those first real breaths
before a sudden, and frightening slap
gives you the real world.
Then, the air in your lungs
can only cry
to let people close to you know
you are here.

Aerated, peaked gossamer spoke to me in a new language created by fire.  Her dress, the flow of her gown, weave an illusion depicting fire’s animation.  Musical vibrations contort her muscular movements.  Satin skin floats under silk, enlivened by cones of light.  Her swerves recreate the pointed genius of a firestorm erupting into trains of heated blue isosceles, and spheres simulating the shape of a flaming blaze. Her alluring profile sweeps the air with sifting webs of lace, at once clinging to and repelling from her body, creasing the night sky with the marmoreal folds of fabric becoming the tremulous layered pastry of flame. There is silence in the crowd while a lone violin provokes her flights.  Faces beam in cellular light as her muscular legs and the air-occupied contours of her garment mimic the wind’s serrations into marigold flame as if driven by a hidden puppeteer drawing the wind’s strings into her extremities aligning the redundant fabric into assemblies of burning witch’s peaks. In rapid freeze-frame and cycles of jumps and landings the core spool of her spine arches over backwards revolving and crisscrossing her stoic shadows with flares and flags of garment fanning rogue bundles of flame perfectly calibrated to arouse a keen reality bursting into flame. Her crescentic and severed angulations violently dominate the stage sending her gown into a twisted maze occupying a mad version of hell that at once dives into the depths and then emerges in angelic repose with wind-blown faceted wings growing like a dervish from her white-blue flaming core.  I sat reeling, dazed like a student of Mesmer, fascinated by the integration and dissolution of flame unfurling like smoke, then exploding into a carpet of confetti with sparkling sleeves.  The threaded parts from her core flew suddenly and relentlessly into her dress pulled by a prolonged updraft in the grasp of the wind’s strings as a condensation of flesh-tones charged the ribbons of her garment, steering the fringes of a miraculous orange conflagration into the camera’s eye located within a node of focus contained in every viewers eye.  This spectacle continued to rise upward to trapeze heights with a kite’s proclivity.  Waterfalls of gossamer were struck by the sun’s vermilion shouts enveloping meandering light into her studied undulations of waves given birth by hinges in her core that quieted into soft furrows of flame one second and mushroom clouds of synthetic fiber the next as if unleashed by a mad Switchman. The changing colors of lights emitted from the sky and from beneath the floor reveal the winds of prevailing attitudes towards the science of fire as it leaps into disease and the treatment of human ailments.  Her name is Loie Fuller and the blues and yellows of light illuminate the strands of robe into great blinding sheets aflame. Those who ponder the poetry of her dance emerge with insights hidden under the mind’s trap and are returned time and again to the novel questions that uncover the strangeness of beauty as well as the secrets waiting at the forefront of a revolution in the physical nature of atomic science. All within the confines of the  moment we see a melding, a marriage of art and hard science, a blend of dance-poetry and atomic physics, all contained in the gestures and expressions of her unique art.

I glance at my watch

time is quickly forgotten

unimportant to the task

I look more for aesthetics

stoke my pride

a date portrait sits in its hole

time’s trapdoor enlarged

the cyclops eye

I remember this

the seconds hand

a wicket

a hair

a blear

gliding by

also magnified

barely visible then gone

uninterrupted flow concentrates into the bloom of a ruptured moment

tomorrow

my Birthday

I think about another one reluctantly

the sapphire mirrors my reflection,

it reminds me

etchings in the chrome plaque trophy spilling accolades

the brash hills

victory landing a warrior pose

just how short-lived forests spawn old-growth muscle

everything pressed against my door,

holding back a glance of time

poured into painful cupped-palms of sacred water.

Time doesn’t droop like skin,

it mimics a scaled being

failing to hold plasma in its veins

turning into coral fixtures

a curiosity abandoned by time

puffing the engine

spinning the turnstile

to the holder of another year

time becomes everything and nothing

erect in its barbed and painful slants

the date’s black figure

stares back,

carved on its bone-white background

holding up the weight of what didn’t last.

Inside the auricle a man dreams.
Caught in a maelstrom,

Trapped within the ear’s
Spiraling drain of regret,

Caught in the fleshy pinna
Chewing on blood-red tissue.

His heart’ s fire
Surrounded by question marks.

Green lasso of lost love, grants him
One yellow eye.

It peers beneath clouds of chaos,
Immobilized by..

A brazier lashed across his nose,
Suffocating fate’s siren calls.

He swirls in the blueness of perceived calm
While awake, until he sleeps and,

Hears her voice again…

17 Lines
81 Words

Writing is jazz with words,

Painting with sound.

If Jackson Pollack,

With his horizontal canvas,

Dripping paints,

Added sound,

An echo would be heard

Through the lonely courtyard

Like a saxophone

Writing a poem.

While darkness settles on the uneasy air

Dense fog offers a species of change.

Boarded up storefronts

Soaped windows opaquely curled

Banksy inspired graffiti swirls

To Pollack’s blood-dawn

Saxophone screams

Sharing light with the directionless

Inhibited moon

Sifting through the city

Arc lamps amplify color

As the protective grates

Over puddles of glass

Steam art’s soft shelter.

Inside the canvas tilts

Paint runs like insects

Dragging streaks across expanse,

Segments of code, patch of heliotrope,

Serpentine yellow slivers scald white,

Military-tan becomes industrial honeycomb.

A distracted man wades in paint

Arched like a feral cat

Barely visible in his lattice of armored black.

Discordant rhythms form sheets of lead-gray

Taming the insects into their thread-bare lacunae

While these cocoons breathe new DNA

Into incendiary misfires of scooped-sky.

Saxophone’s aperture opens,

Rebellious yells and painted wings

Hopscotching the cymbals of new expression.

Here I am, prancing, faintly smirking, on this tenuous branch

Calmly I sit, cutting an ascetic, fashionable figure

The sky threatening to lock-on like a hammock of fear

High up where the sky’s shades absorb into my blackness

Inviolable, removed from the island of men, free from the tangle

Of laughter, hoots, whistles, arguments and sobs

Ceaselessly cavorting into the blanket of my wind

I am a chameleon, a ghost, a stoolie, a thief, an extra in a film

A shiver passes over my feathers,

A serrating light rides the black moon’s glow

Then, a yellow glare, a dissolve of smoke, a corridor of sound

From the cumulus floor a haggard and grizzled blaze of steel

My life is no longer safe up here

I’m an old lag, myopic, yearning to squabble and dash

I fasten my jaded attention and go slack

This is no road-kill remotely beckoning

I peer diagonally into the calculus of my senses

Calculating my accumulations from an unfeasible past

Trying to make sense of this ear-splitting engine of echoes

Bursting on tracks carved in clouds, foisting alarm, puncturing time

This scene inflames a secret nerve paralyzing my wings

I want to fly into a window

I’ve been caught in an interior and it’s left me wanting

So I wait and unwind my grip on on the cloud’s apron

Volunteering to stay, I feel the fascicles of my wings wonder

My anxious beady eyes flickering in the exhaust

And coal-fire of my own private spectacle

Caught in the grimy shadows of my misdeeds

I realize the blocks of steel are lightening

Scarring the night sky with the frosted steam of a new optimism

She poured her emotions

into colors.

Dripping her heart

kindled strobe of fear

slash and glare

onto the canvas.

Her hand was the wind

directing slants of sharp rain

salting impossible blue.

Each drop a colored beetle

smudged flat

by the hair of her brush

or her thumb.

Singing shades

where ice meets blue

into

vacant colors’ eyes.

Colors banded together

like secrets

pulled taught.

Striped species

with

games to play

jousting

whimsical.

Errant

under fate’s direction.

Seeping into cracks

traversing edges

of other colors

reluctantly blending

into red

where blood grows in stalks.

Lonely opinions

Chromatic scales

climb and fall

where comfort feeds release

hidden

under

the skin

accepting rays

from

whorls of the new night moon.

Shades enlivening

dark spaces.

Blurs of novel color

overshadowing

whispers of the heart

spoken in

known violets and green.

Soon heraldic white

surrounds and smothers all

like a paper tarp

over

the immediacy of unsure results.

White covering

a heated moment

tainted prayers

internal foibles

like velvet spores

driven

outside the frame

down

towards burial.