so i shall

degrees of pressure
and the velocity of action 
with everything in perfect measure. 
you measure perfectly. 
and your touch,
that soft, soft thing you do,
that slow, soft thing you do--
pendulum swing swing back loop, looping orbit,
orbit
orbit around you--
is the reason.

the soft touch,
the suggestion
the pause
the articulation of godly things
in the opening
and closing of space
between one
and the other. 
the embrace,
the fine-tuned meditation
of the palpable vibrations of the other.
the suggestion and open ended sentences,
the ellipses...
the commas, and run-on, run-on, run-ons

tell me of your past
and your dreams for the future
write it on my skin
use different colors
and please mix up your metaphors.
i come for the images, the lights and shadows
the depths and shallows of your being
a bluesy roll, a tete a tete
that's what i'm getting at
a meeting of the minds as well as the
finger tips and toes and legs and torsos.

i want to study the grain of you
each grain
each wave
i want time
to contemplate the weight of you
and when it's impossible to pen
i want to lay with you in dumbstruck bliss.

strawberry

go tell lacy at the lake that all is lost.  the 'l's roll like beads of sweat down my back.  i've lost my place in line somehow and am now behind a little boy who has never had a real strawberry.  i worry that i'll collapse before this place does.  what more can i do?  how is it that you must earn more than 50,000 a year to taste a strawberry?  surely there are places in the jungle where they live without HDTV, where one might be able to hustle up a strawberry?  Lacy doesn't mind that i've lost everything, everything including my mind.  it's an empty cell here, crumbling walls with starving rats that will scurry away with any food i might have had for thought.

it's not all that bad when you forget what a day was like.  i vaguely remember the sunshine perfectly meditating with the clouds.  but the sun is gone and the days are set, perfectly, calibrated to promote the longest life possible.  but all is lost and lacy knows it.  we don't wear sunscreen anymore because we all have cancer.  it's good to start at the same place i suppose, no one ahead of anyone else.  except inequality hasn't changed much.  the boy has never had a real strawberry.  it is a foreign concept.  it's not the light pink he thought it was, and not as sweet.  he doesn't want the true essence.  he wants the distilled essence.  but it's not his fault, lacy will tell you, it's not his fault that he was born into a world already starving itself.  starving ourselves of true essence.  go tell lacy at the lake that all is lost.  i'm withdrawing my last American dollars.  i will find a park somewhere, because that's all that's left, little green squares of lawn we call parks and i will set myself on fire.  i will hold the dollars in my teeth.  i pray to whoever is listening that someone will give him a strawberry.

June First: Drawing Water

and what does it all mean anyway?  you above the fray, in the shadows, in the cool?  me in the heat, inside the sun wanting to lay in a soft bed but waiting.  waiting?  i'm exhausted, can you tell?  we are not similar nor are we close.  but you try.  and i try.  you've come quite a distance.  how kind.  now can we get some sleep?

***

i ask myself, where am i going?  am i the river rambling down the lane, rambling down the lane, rambling.  rambling.  such words invite ellipses.  i love ellipses.  if i could be  a mummy, i'd want a sarcophagus made of ellipses.  made of ellipses like running water, and the cascading of images onto a page beyond geometrical that it is geothermal, pulsing hot and echoing cool.  cool the pop of rock giving into perpetual motion.  per-pet-ual-mo-tion.  repetition, repetition, forever. 

what is any and all of this but nothing and sound?  mind sound that is melodic and magical.  a movement from the mundane is swept up in a helicopter's panting.  helicopter, helicopter way up in the sky, will you fall down?  down like water, rambling like pages of poetry pantomimed in paper notes, like wishes squeezed from a squealing child all flushed with the tickle of hide and seek?  i'm so surprised every time you're there for me.  presence is symmetry.  and delightful.  and novel.  every time a hand covers the frame. 

water from up.  water from down.  below and above ground.  in the sky.  a big cubic space of water.  all i hear is music.