The Fruit

And again, it arose:
The need to shed
To strip the skin of culture off
its seed, each shred
To lay life bare, fresh,
bruised and plain
To devour it whole:
flesh and pulp,
kernel and grain.

The paradox

That's the paradox, she thought -
The weight of it all.
It shouldn't be heavy - how
Silent, how small
Are the lives we lead, gently - but
How sudden the fall
When we reach the edge, at
The end of it all.

The thread

Yes, more than anything I want
to feel the tug of thread
encircling me, encircling you

To feel the stitches loosen, the loops
slacken, limp as a dying embrace
To feel the seams stretch
taut as skin, as we move apart

To feel the thread at needlepoint
piercing me, piercing you
and find at the end of it
a knot

Another time

there was a place i used to go
when i was young and not so old
full of words i used to know

Why?

And it struck me how contrived -

from the idling of meaning in words

to the dust-speckled sun -

the world has become.

There are too many things;

there must be just one.

Night sky

decipher the night:

the stars read like braille
find as fingers fail
a pale meaning

Hemmed in

when we with old eyes by a new light
trace the patterns in the palindrome

palms pressed against a wall blind

and stumbling in the broad midday we
traverse the expanse laid before us

measuring its dimensions in arm spans

spiraling like a horizontal free-falling 

the stitches unravelling in staccato steps

each second held stationary at needlepoint
along a striking linearity but this here now
is a point and nothing less

Toeing

toeing the edges of a vast 
silence, so afraid to speak into the 
hollow and see my words 
fall and watch 

my feet 

follow 

Speech

spitting on dirt to form 

words, those shallow graves 

in which we bury meaning

and mourn it in
epitaphs

When

when the mist settles -

a tower of playing cards collapses
in a flutter of painted faces against
the wind/ discourse dives, adjective-
first, down the tunnel at the end of
the truth/ dancing cave shadows die
into the light/ a wedding veil lifts for
the first time/ the last curtain torn
into two/ trumpets sound and finally

we see

illiterate

these words
(once breathed, now borrowed)

become in me
a gargled pulse -

the sputter
of a swollen heart
punctured

by poetry   

To be heard

like a child with tweezers -
  picking, plucking the seams -
clumsily jabbing at the stitches
  with a blunt needle, trying
to create that frayed effect -
  that gap in the fabric,
that lull in the sentence into
  which i could slot my words
like spare change down a well
  where rusty carcasses lie still,
barely polluting the water -
  in hopes of finding a fault,
freshly sprung, within that
  stagnant, unfading fullness
in which the world rests
  untouched

But something

something died in me
             yesterday

                     (and the day before)
and what it was
    before it died
      i cannot be sure

there

i am not
there,
where
my bones
break
and
become
air. no,
not there,
where i lose
my voice to the
wind and unearth the
hollow from beneath my
skin and i live without, i die
within and i would never begin
myself
again.

On the bus

there is a poem on this bus - something about the
collective sway of bodies as it hits the turn
and the studded whir of the motor's churn

there is no drum like the hum of steady breathing
and no beat that could compete with the seething
of passion and pulsing of pain, punctuating the silence