Arte Soy

You are the sweat on the brow of a mother in her thirteenth hour of
labor. You are the fickle fingers of a child grazing a splintery fence
midday. You are a sixteen-syllable sentence uttered by a woman with
beautiful lips. You are the thousands of end-of-the-world kisses in
constant exchange at each terminal. You speak and rain falls upward.
You blink and butterflies dissolve. There are shells of people out there
trying, each day, to become an atom in the vast dance of your
movements, to seek the mode in the range of your emotions.
You are bottled nebulae with a cork that is waiting to pop.
You are lunar flora: prickly pear cacti which fill craters steeping in a
celestial marinade hailing from the Horsehead. And should you stand
beneath the sun for too long, the land which surrounds you would
recede into the dark recesses from whence it came, and the soft
luminescence of your eyes would suffice to lead your way.

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You make me die,
a little bit,
each day,
without even the tremendous helping hand
of time

By sundown, I’m but a million morsels
of decay
as atoms reverse their tap dance
in a delayed orbit
around each eye full of almonds:
two salty caverns

Your torture is as exclusive as it is
elusive,
swift, comparable to
a mere drizzle of honey; it’s funny
But not in a healthy way

(Sarah Martin contributed this.)

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I stood at your grave,
with fists full of change,
change in the form of words,
words I couldn’t previously say,
due to tides of time,
ebbing and flowing in the form of
change, change in the form of words,
words I collect in a felt hat, as
I busk for saplings of change,
change in the form of words,
words written in ink, exchanged
between changing strangers,
in the rain, on the bus, in the
train station, as people change
hats and faces and trains,
trains in the form of thought,
thoughts I collect in a cup,
a cup I keep above my bed
with a straw, a straw in the form
of a speaker, a speaker moving
voices, holding song, above my bed,
talking about
change.

(Sarah Martin contributed this.)

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2:58 am: My feet are almost as calloused as your hands always were. These hands are virginal apparati with a texture similar to that of honey or warmed dough. Virtually unmarred and scrape-free. Clearly, they do not make nearly enough.

3:02 am: My head is buried in my pillow now and I’m thinking this can’t be healthy- being reminded of your life by the faintest sound of music that you never even got the chance to hear. I’m wondering if I’m sick for never wanting to forget; for fearing Alzheimer’s at age seventy more than Death at age thirty, for wishing for any physiological malfunction over amnesia. I’d like to always be able to recall the inflection of your voice when you would ask what it was I had learned in school that day. At twelve, it posed as a hideous question. But at twenty, not so much.

“What did you learn in school today?”   Now, that’s a poem.

(Sarah Martin contributed this.)

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