28.12.2011

This is a small sorrow. Already
i sit bonecold,
unbroken

Tremble: black coffee a
welcome jangle in an
empty--

This is too small for heartbreak.

 Two days. Already my breasts
have lost their ache,
have shrunk unneeded to their
small untenderness--

(Tonight i will drink red wine.
A whole bottle. Two
if i want them.)

Oh small small grief
oh little bittersweet:

you sit across from me
you will sit there tomorrow
you will hold my hand tonight
and cry brief tears.


We are left heartwhole, barely
touched by that
small soul.

Left so little to remember--
just this day, wintercold,
black coffee,
sour on my tongue.

franklin --

o brown and glossy girl,
what have you known?
your tragedy is datelessness

your tragedy is highschool: melly said
you were a slut,

you do not eat breakfast,
you do not eat lunch,
o you are slim, brown girl,
you sip starbucks through a straw

you eat two bites of anything,
brown girl, and you buy
dresses for two hundred dollars.
Your daddy gives you
those dollars.
You do not have more
than your friends.

you have cellphonetvipod
brandnewcar
it is the tealcoloured one you wanted

you do not have more
than your friends

the fifth portrait

And you sleepy-eyed still tiptoe
in before the sun
creep in between us,
breathe our sour morning breath.

You smell, still, of princess bubblebath
and your own sweet child breath.
The halflight shines white off your hair.
Your small elbows and knees are needlesharp.

We lie, wallowed and pierced,
watch the spidersilk
your small breathing

The fourth portrait

It's a damn shame, and already they're blaming
and blaming.
Soon they'll be banging on our doors.
I don't buy nothing unless it's off the books.
I'm stocking up.
They can make their limpwrist rules
up there
but me -- I have the right
to keep and bear --
By God when some crazy bastard comes after my little girl
I will have teeth in my mouth,
I will bite.

The third portrait

The world cries white snowflakes;
tomorrow it will giggle
bluewinged butterflies.

Today we are weeping
over the small bare graves.
Below us the earth, unstoppable
pushes up its silent green.

The second portrait

This too is a message --

We have forgotten how to read.
See only stars --
We track the tides and storms
map different routes to work.  

We have forgotten how to read

the secrets of an opened bird.

The ancients with their magicians,

their calendars and instruments,

were wiser.

In the East and in the Americas,

in green Egypt, in their temples,

their eyes grew deepsouled from searching.

They read the circles in the world.

These lives we live now are circled too.

We live within one age:

another will succeed it.

After winter, always, there is spring.

Everything bad is a sign

we have forgotten how to read.

When landmines are sown

and reaped

when women and children are raped:

Read.

These are the death throes are the birth pains
the end of an age --
The entry to a kinder, wiser world.

We will live, then, more soul and soul.

Anyway that’s what I choose to believe.

It’s a more hopeful way of looking at the world

(we have to live in it)

grieving -

The first portrait.

When children die

don't cry:

They have gone out like stars,

still hoping.

We only are left.

Envy them.

Envy the passionate

the humanists, the atheists

with their fairy tales.

Envy the innocent dead.

Don’t cry for their small ends.

Cry for yourself:

you have still so many moments

to be borne.

Even the distractions become tedious;

the carousing habitual as toothbrushing.

I go on buttoning and unbuttoning.

I have given up finding,

in their lips,

any door –

I have come to desire one thing only:

to sleep through long seconds.

There is no one to ask.

We are all trapped in boxes,

breathing.