it feels like almost yesterday/ when the sky was still blue enough to notice

There is such a thing as a cloud forest. Beneath the fog of traveled tropics, there are so many branches that when feet get too tired of standing, one can swing from the skinny roots dangling from heights too high to climb. Leaves catch the drip of moisture and one can easily swim inside this meditation of wet. The ground is hairy. Carpet of flowerless green. Or moss. Or earthy currency, which can easily buy you a meal of nourished oxygen. The clouds run marathons in the sky. Call them yungas or laurisilva or  afromontane or poema.  

this is where stars go to die

You thought it was a shooting star. You thought you could squint your eyes into a version of evening and wish upon and wish upon and wish upon

You thought this is where love derives from

You thought this is a sign from planets to validate your existence

You thought     this is beautiful

You thought this was a necessary explosion of transported lust

You thought this was a sign of romance and rust of musical movements

(but)

This is actually the death of plasma and gravity

This is just an American-made jet fighter

This is a collapse

This is just a calculation of patterns

This is an adventure of sky and planets and you are trespassing

This is actually just a whisper of meteoroid

This is just a British drama with or without laugh track

This is just a novel

This is an airplane full of over-worked travelers and screaming babies and some guy who is flying away from his life down below

This is just a song by Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Elliot Smith before the stabbing

This is an explosion of heat and third-degree burns and unless you can donate your skin, stop watching

This is just a scratch in the sky

This is strange and innocuous but also toxic and may cause permanent damage

This is just a bully of light

This is just a formation not an evolution

This is just a repeat from yesterday’s indigestion of cloud consumption

This is not beautiful

This is not marvelous or made to help you arrive at a conclusion

This is not love did you think this was love this is never going to be about love

This is not smashing; this is just smashed

This is drunk

This is sky addicted to flash

This is just sky

This is just a light

This was never going to be about wishes or wishing; you can remain down here for that.

there are oranges in the sky and they are seedless

It can be difficult to wake. Dreams are heavy like ten thousand words, typeset into body.

When there is another beside you, it can be easy to remain in bed. They hold you as though your organs will flail if they let go. Their smell is so familiar but when the sun lets loose in the sky, you must unfold and drift up.

Mornings can be a reminder of the day before or several years earlier when you had a porch and pup. Or when you floated boxed-wine in icy lake in the woods when camp-out lasted several days and home was referred to as: beyond the highest trees and past the boulders and before the mountain.

The bowl of fruit in the sky is ripening. There are kiwi and mandarin oranges and bananas and pomegranates and a few mangoes. We can call that other one tropical or traveled. There is so much to be eaten: humans & harvests & even the histories we collect.

It may be difficult to go on sometimes. What I mean is, sometimes death feels erotic and loving. How to tumble away from that ledge because here in the city, fire escapes are collapsing. Sometimes the sky sends out smoke signals to warn of this collapse; sometimes the sky forgets to notice.

how sustainable is this.

The day begins with rain. The sky breathes in and out and in. We walk toward the scent of roots and earth. Notice the radishes and it is too late for kale now but that broccoli is something to write poems about. Basil. Beans. When you pop perfectly-circled cherry tomato into mouth, there is a pop. You purchase a small basket of multi-colored tomatoes from a hippie with a tattoo of words from her grandmother. A loaf of bread for later. Some peaches. How beautiful is this. How much will this day cost and what about that time we cried on half of a hill on a Sunday because all of it was ending. But the vegetables never abandon us. We can always rely on the growing pattern of farmers and seedlings to last past love. 

located between violet and green.

Dear Kazim,

Do you know how many offerings of blue there are in the sky? I call them offerings because these hues arrive and they remain as a gift to our sight. There are many things that we forget to notice, such as what exists beneath our feet or the vast field of water’s reflection above us.

Kazim, there is a red hook. It exists in a watermarked area of Brooklyn. My soul sister and I follow the trail of salt and orange-scented horizon welcoming in the evening. Our toes twist into strands of grass that tickle and tease our summer calluses.

Here is where I collect thoughts. I ignore the scab on my shoulder from the weight of things I carry from borrowed home to borrowed home and feel gratitude toward the one who holds me on a night I feel my insides attempting an escape. I’ve been carving love letters to Brooklyn into benches and brick walls. I haven’t received anything back or perhaps I have……I’ve no mailbox anymore.

Let’s call this color squashed blueberry or sorrow’s lust. This sky is our rooftop and suddenly I feel home. 
 

 

 

body is a fireplace for rummaging ashes

There is a strange aroma that arises with each burn. And nothing just disappears. Because if you look within the crumbles of fire, you will see each woman devoured through external glances, the men, the books, the meals, the water, the leaves, the mountains, the spices, the bedframes, the silence, the sliced animals, the musculature of eardrums, the roads.

Sky is a cannibal. And the sun is a combustion of yesterday and the decades that wait backstage. Are fingernails flammable. Is the belt you whip your pages with fire-proof.

Save the world one spit at a time. Hoard saliva as though it is a remedy. When you see something worthy of keeping, hiss the liquids off your tongue and gyrate to the sizzle.

Not everything is a metaphor for something else. Sometimes a fire is just for warmth or a need to extinguish evidence of life.

When one sets a body on fire, the only thing left are the bones, hinting toward the remains of existence.

sometimes you need to remember how to love

An early morning sky resembles a history of love. There is yellow like jaundice, a bit diseased or perhaps an attempt at pushing out the infection left by another. It rises out of yellow and presses itself into blue. Mixed with bleach. A streak of orange which symbolizes the one that was unexpected but got away. Went away. Can one file a missing person’s report if the misplaced one chose to walk out of view?

A new way to make coffee this morning with alternative saturation process (suggested by magical friend). First gulp–because sipping is never an option–reveals a smoothness similar to the hair of a past love. Fingers always slid through it like a blond waterslide.

I know how to love books, poetry, the color green that can be seen on grasshoppers. I always remember how to love music, even when the words are too loud or fast to be deciphered. I can lose myself in the blend of instruments or hum of a singer’s voice slipping away from throat.

I need to be reminded the direction of how to walk. I tend to step backwards. I stop reading a book 10 pages before the end. I don’t want to feel like it’s over. Like I have to move on. I don’t like to move on. Practice the art of wavering; it eliminates the mourning process.

I can stare at leaves for hours. Or, Autumn leaves. The ones which are like mood rings. Hold them long enough and they shift color. Some are striped. Some are curved at the ends. Some have holes or are ripped or without stems. Some are so big, they fall apart when picked up the wrong way. Some are too small; they go unnoticed. Leaves are like bodies.

Blame the ghosts. They claim too much of our attention. The ghosts stick to walls and hide in the corners where cobwebs grow. The ghosts steal our taste buds, scratch our eyes out, stick bombs in mouth to numb our appetites. The ghosts turn off our alarm clocks, lock our bedroom doors, throw shadows into window panes to scare away our ability to walk away.