Nervous Green

It's red and black
perfect, tainted by green, the
filth that paints neurons on
chips of an earthware teacup
- its acid bores from the fingernail's
unseen underside all the way up to the
inland sea pressured in my left eye –
that green that tastes of wrong place
and time, wrong leaf and wrong apple.
I cusp a convex container,
for the time being allowed to
pull together different strands
in expectation of better days,
savouring a sleep of no dreaming
- the glossy surface of spiritual disturbance
which no mind can successfully mediate,
which does not fulfil requirements for existence.
The shaking earthware cup screams aloud
for it pains, when crimson, to be tainted by green.

Exercise - Dramatic Monologue: A Night in Mother India

There, contact once again. I could feel them following me all along, waiting for my hand to gesture to one of the little plates casually arranged all over the pretentiously faux-cheap tablecloth, ideal companion to the even cheaper paper napkins – some of which were still laying, useless, over the messy arrangement or under curry-smeared dishes.
For some reason, that seemed to irk him to no end. Not sure if it was either a forced, preposterous display of antiquated manners; or, perhaps, the awareness that I had exposed his game long ago, but his eyes kept darting from hand to napkin back to hand through water glasses, chunks of gummy rice, the usual fare of a table of too-grown kids who think making a mess is the mark of appreciating ethnic cuisine.
At any rate, the snob didn't seem to share the love for exotic flavoured food of our peers. A bowl of almond rice – I' quite surprised I remember that in the first place – is all he asked the waiter, a preppy pseudo-Indian young man more saddened than invigorated by the table of sixteen-odd students who stormed the establishment just a mere hour ago.
The rice wasn't even halfway gone by the time I caught a glimpse of the poorly-disguised game he was playing with me. On the fly eye contact.
Very Original. Or rather, somewhere in between the old fashioned and the downright pathetic. His version of the antediluvian trick went something like this.
Follow crumbs on table.
Follow girl's hand playing with crumbs.
Wait for girl to be called and turn her head.
Once girl's head returns to original position, eye contact.
Of course, with all the effort he was putting into the little trick, I had to give him some satisfaction – a shy smile here and there, an equivocal hand movement vaguely in his trajectory, little peanuts like that. Except the couple times he was peeking at my chest. No peanuts for those, sorry.
It took a while, but in the end my attempts to make him lose interest succeed. His sight slowly retracts and veils, his whole body slumping backwards and assuming the International Deep Boredom Position – provides full protection to one's more delicate thoughts while substituting less effective techniques (see Nod And Smile). Someone talks to him, he does not care and does nothing to disguise it. Shouldn't be the one to criticize, as I do even less to disguise my own growing annoyance for being where I do not want to be at the wrong time. This should be tea time. It's always tea time when you don't want to be where you are.

(Another one from Robin Behn's book. I am clearly not cut for fictional prose - not yet anyway.)

Ecru

In ecru lives and happens
all that is desirable,
of the flesh.
It is of ecru to be an
invisible fluid, to
always move down-
ward, in the direction of
its proper fulfilment:
which is flesh.
Ecru is distillation of
the female, it mimics its
form, signs, movement;
it is by a shameful mistake
that passion turns into crimson
against its own will.

Sieve

The weaker thank you, the
paths of least resistance
we choose, so that it might run
smother between
and within us
- watery silk –
you cannot hold in
your hand, clean of all this.
You should force it down as if
crunching dust:
in the fledgling horror of self
- defense –
all experience is fractioned in units
so equal they
(are) matter no longer,
shredded into ultimate servitude
by a mind like a sieve.

A Fluid

Among the folds on the left
corner, it seems close to
impossible that I might
exist in such a form,
fending for myself – approaching
night by the second;
depth feeder,
poison contra poison.

In the participatory
act of letting it all in,
upside and laughter descend
into what was before you,
and then it means nothing
to me any more.

Irony Lily

Irony Lily
I'll be the fake in your
condolences, gently
useless,
I'll be a
staff (I suppose), a cue
voice in
your waterproof, seething
limesong.

You spend he rest of the day
on your knees, in half-light
scraping – invested
fully in your persona
to tote, to tangle up in everyone
so spritefully, right?

I'll spend the rest of the year
sleeping tight, in your
bathtub, useless:
I'll consume water to
write these words down,
looking upwards
all the time.

Adoration

I adore the figure of
clouds into autumn's greyout,
that season where all is preserved
from the slights of rainfall,
and the hillside-flowered grapes tend to fall
in the hands of men just a few days
too soon.

Calmly under foliage – her
clothes an universe of their own,
that smirk which I always thought
expressed malcelated concern
(like I cared) – she inhales the
autumn laughter concert, stirring
uneasy in her bed of three months:
for now, I can do little but adore
the subtlety of her precarious position.

Humus – the marrow of the land – rustles
of a myriad small creatures, guests uninvited
but welcome to our little tea party of two:
grapes find their way to the basket where
just a tiny crust of earth is always to be
found – as if the engagement of high and low
was, somewhat, inevitable – lingering, from the
remains of disappearing birds' corpses
to the back of men's primordial minds.

I should save adoration, for
there may be time when it's not
right – her flesh not so fair,
the will to crawl under autumn leaves
seeking affirmation. Then, I might
want to be made of breath
instead of soil.

Stones of Old City

As winter endures, our
breath grows warmer and
wider, it moves from actualit
-y to memor-y.
The intricate, constrained
pavementation bears no
weight, draws no lines or geometries;
It supports no arguments or
interpretations.
Sanguine, bound shawls and shoes
are all that is needed to
regress - their
sound that's settling, if
only sound would end perhaps I
could be listening to myself.

Roger Mitchell's "Tell By Showing":The Failure of Flesh

“Worlds are altered rather than destroyed.” Democritus

The failure of flesh is a
lack of means to accommodate
the flow of instants, who
cannot find port in this
layered, yet curiously hollow
construct.
Decay's intrinsic alienation
is the enemy of recreation - fissure
of one's imprecise perceptions, cycles
floored like so many sad,
unused predispositions.

A Cautionary Tale

Once a
young girl asked her parents
for instruments of constraint - drew a wall and
meditated upon the value of consciousness
'till consciousness was barely a flicker.
Years later, taken to ER,
treated for abrasions, lacerations and perpetrations:
sculpted a mirror from scratch, she
wondered if it could be crossed both ways:
It's a one-way ticket to ride, it seems.

Soon she was declared enemy of all that is human
and bound to a cascade ruby opal grand design,
to pronounce orders of increasing magnitude
such as – Let There Be Light- or
- Let There Be Escapism Through Melancholy.
Unknown to all, something was at play: by
a summer in a green - peace garden, where all could be
cross and crossed, forgotten just as easily,
nothing but a movement further, yet stepping sideways.

A Certainty

A growing child in red is a murder
phased in expectancy,
a tendency to throw everyone
else beneath - cast in fabric,
hammer and nails.
The hue is not cohesive, it phases
back and forth at each swell,
up and down the backstaircase
where pale condense testifies to
such a lasting impression.
Growing in red, a long
fastidious life is a
certainty on which we can depend.

10 - Minute Spill (Rita Dove exercise): Blackberry

The whirring needle, from the
top of a blackberry bush
finds its way undisturbed into
the cloud of whirring dust
that my body is.

The temptation to push its
subtlety further in, stifled by
sudden – surprise.
A blackberry - juice - tinged cloud
scours on my bronze ring.

(exercise from Robin Behn's "The Practice of Poetry" Good book, you should get it.)

Antidote

Grating forward against organization, the
pale and the grey win over iniquity, trample
black and red.

Explosion – the outward manifestation of
young hands of gratitude, bliss versus
echoing a dim-lit room,
hateful.

Here as there, sudden implosion of
self over self, snow over cold, the needle
marking the signs of our times.

The whispering song of sex, antidote to the short and
clearly naïve, wings uncovered to escape 19th century's
trivial, 20th century-like ignorance.