Viewing items with Tag: "poetry"

This is the morning for sleeping, she said, quietly
(and with a mouth full of teeth). Immediately after
saying it, of course, she did, although her eyes remained

open. If you’ve ever slept with a woman who never closes
her eyes you know just how off-putting this can be.
If you have ever loved her you know it is possible

to overcome any physical defect, and eventually grow
to love the fault as well. Eventually the faults become
the person. Inseparable. Entwined. Tangled

like a couple of seabirds in six ring plastic bondage;
which is exactly how we were together, rough skin though she may
have had, and all those teeth. I watched her

sleeping there, all the same, the whole while working her lips
around her great rows of teeth, never quite managing
to hide them all. Needless to say I never asked

for a blowjob, and fortunately she never offered.
For love, it seems, we are willing to make
the gravest of sacrifices. For me, she gave up the ocean,

but was disgusted when I suggested vegetarianism.
I asked her once if animals dream, and she just glared at me
before rolling over in bed. She my be older than me by a couple

of million years, and therefore wiser, but I think I’ve got
her beat in wit. I found my answer watching the dog,
when we still had one. After it disappeared, I couldn’t help

but notice how eager she was to get another one. But can you
really blame her, my creature of the blue depths, who
knows the belly of the earth and its phosphorescent secrets,

my carcharhiniform tigress, my requiem, my aptly
named milk shark. And despite the mouth that owns her face,
despite the wide set eyes that seem to look everywhere at once

all pupils and glare, all cold blooded inquiry, how beautiful she
was, this sleek bodied lover, voracious, insatiable,
able to give and to take at the same time. And she did give,

she gave and gave from the beginning of time, throwing herself
at us, offering up her body again and again (those pornographic
photos of her, upsidedown sprawling her grin of teeth)

we have eaten of her again and again and now she is gone,
not to the depths from which she came, but to the walls of our
institutions, she now graces the ceilings of our museums

and I love her for it, in dying she has saved us all
from a cancer worse than her own (ourselves)) in her great act
of disappearance she has taught us the value of remaining:

and so I have promised to keep her body, to love it
as I have loved her, all unblinking eyes and teeth,
now unmoving, quiescent in the eternal grin of love returned.

the only thing
that we have come to understand
(in droves we came to stand
we the delirious and horny other
who frothed at a thousand and one mouths
jet lagged and lovehungry who slept)
under its dark wet awnings
black scale tiled prayers
of roofs on empty houses
on the front lines of silence

like rootless trees we drove our cars
our bicycles our drunken private soldiers
to the end of reason and
it was still

there striking us with bamboo shoots
which we preferred to being shot
(though both are equal in invoking the infinite)

we found the whole in the side
of the earth and lived next to temples
slept in shrines were roommates
with gods and God and

mountains after the air after rain
that layered shadow of onions
edible root of lotus lettuce
let us inside the joke is freezing
whose lifting tells the corners
of lips cast ten thousand years ago
in bronze in gold and carved
in the aching knees of cypress
so that we breathe life
into the thing that is still

what we came here to find
and we are still searching

find fault in my eyes but then everyone here does
this whole island this country finds fault
in the way they are shaped like almonds are hazel
not brown and how my face is small
chisai they say small they say and such
a tall nose hansomu they say and when
i am buying fruit the old ladies giggle
and the small boys run around gallop
around holding palm fronds
to their crotches singing
amerika-jin no chinchin are toooo big they sing
toooooo big and they thrust their pelvis
and the fan of sharp leaves shakes in the wind
koizumi-san no chinchin they sing
toooooooo big they scream
and they laugh at the thought that their prime minister
has a chinchin like americans a chinchin
shaped like leaves that shakes in the wind
and in their laughter i find a smile
i find myself smiling as i walk home
with my bag of fruit and these round eyes
and this chinchin with rays like the sun only green
and thoughts of what I would do if the faults
in my eyes were to suddenly shift
and a new continent was born