Kalaidescope

I want to isolate in these rare artistic moments, fraught with feeling, a foreign vanishing, grown of wishes and my own great expectations. As summer creeps open, vigilant and viceral, the world outside seems to mirror my insides: icy, blooming and blushing, groomed only by the gods.

For all of the mistakes, misuses, abuses, moments broken by wishes at our feet--spilled like bloody wines on cotton whites--for all of these real broken hearts lie sly certainties, birds with bated breath, slightly soured by the whole fishes gutted before their graves.

My world, my inside world remains soft and plush, as pathetically protective as a spotted tortoise shell, familiar as the slate grey pigeon that carried my initial love--overbred and full of promise, unique as the red-sand desert, filled with rodents somehow deserving of sun's nurturing eye.

Sometimes, many times, I want other things to matter most. I want to revel in the wash of hot water, be pleased by the rare if perfect sky. To sigh at the inhale of bakeries and weep in moonless nights. The small, not of my back, but of my own knowns, is that every rain of laughter is colored if not brewed by love; every tear shed is empowered by love. Why it has become both my house and my martyr, sacrificed by some sick strength of my heart. I am certainly discerned now from my lover--no longer are my cheeks wet with someone else's tears, my rage our offspring (virulent, violent and somehow still wonderful). Yet when I close my eyes I reinvent memory, or reignite its slight flames--a playback of familiar films, kailadescope versions of life that dance on my pupils, soft lenses baked to the core. Sometimes they are spinning, set to pounce, and other times as dumb as deer, greeting demise; or a child on the brink of opening the world, without the bulging chocolate of bunnies to tickle the armpits of the real, raw, sticky alive.

Sometimes I can stare back at myself with an open yawning of callused hands, milky bath water, sandpaper stubble and the disappearance of dunes.

Dunes of course are the high build up of sand, washed up barriers performed naturally and crushed only by children with vengeful tools. They are the real glass walls, set aside any ocean--the perching ground for parasitic birds, opaque, ovaler, wedded to water. They are barricades, barriers not only to the waves but also the lax lull of storms, the thickest silence of us all. To write about love, to live next to love in this sense is a velvety dawn, smoothed of a smothering landscape, disengagement, grown-up stomping out and down: not short of sand castles and buried feet. It is a devouring of the dunes, spilling forth, damaging of all the dams built between. And in this gnawing of the gates, not golden but skeletal and washed out by times in the sun, secret gardens bloom bent and born again--a gilded age of innocence, never wiped away but whispered through our crackled lips.

Love of words

Of course old men in pubs throw snow at girls who dare the streets. It is obvious and yet I am still oblivious to this very British life, lifted up above a past as short as my own, my nation, my city of god. They could be angels, these frozen fairies broken at my feet, or strings of cotton awaiting warranted spring. It is here I would expect them to write, a rare if real creativity cordoned off by ice queens and quick outpourings of skies, not love that lasts. But yet I think of poets that belong to my city and my own song. I think of stories not of pebbled pretense, not of Portuguese winds or those winding roads in which I saw desire, but of the very south of home, of the wildest buildings grown pale by the sea.

Perhaps writers are simply snared by words, themselves; they love rhetoric more than the real, soft, feathery beings that can keep them warm. They are cold perhaps, snowed in by wounded, wound up minds that never stop, the trails of tick-tocking, internal clocks that shudder even in the full mooned nights. Perhaps these snows, or these failures to warm the ice are real stakes that bend in hearts; they are the stakes they hold, such flippant hands in life, all aces or nothing, at its very, beaten best. All wings tucked into the crevices of breasts.

Vampires then, I find in writers, as I find in dreams. They have sucked in the life from others' lives, from lived experiences claimed in desperate prose. All stories told are real, not white lies but black realities. real as that fleeting cotton that will melt in moments at my toes, real as that ornate aching of every, any broken heart inside the darkness of these english pubs.

Words, as snow that does not belong on this forgotten island, as deep and damaged as the pebbles that grew our greatest poets--drowned inside of themeslves by active, enemy skies. Set to lurk, set to flight, their phantom fangs never abandoned, for no saunter, no skin can live up to a love of words.