Tag Archives: Reading

Portraits

Binary Stars – The Kid And I

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The kid comes in, snaps a few photos of a living clutter, the retail store.

“We don’t have anything like this.” The standard review, spoken by the parent of the kid who shares the photo on Instagram, Facebook, or some other app.

The shop sits on a tilted, bottom floor, two blocks from the Willamette river, not wanting to budge from its spot.

The rest of the shanghaiing office building was abandoned long ago.

The old offices, upstairs, real ghosts, shades of what they used to be.

I write receipts in illegible handwriting, transfer them to yellow, college-ruled paper for inventory, translations of the ancient product.

There’s a million means to be misunderstood, just as many to understand. Two sides of love I recognize.

If there is a dead spot in a day, receipts rest. I read Dante’s “Inferno”.

Crawling through levels, until you reach something frozen, eating away, without regard

to what’s around it, all attention spent upon what is being chewed. Virgil and Dante crawl down/up the leg of the Devil, out of the ice, a double paradox.

“This must be a dream job.” The parent speaks again while buying the kid a logo T-shirt of the shop.

The kid looks hopeful, if he moves here, there’s a chance to reach paradise. He can go to college like his parents want him to, live the lifestyle he’s always dreamed of, get away from strip malls, advance placement classes, bullies, lovers, and parental expectations.

He has been misunderstood so many times. He desires to reach understanding. Two sides of love I recognize.

I smile, showing all my missing teeth and think of Virgil as I write up their receipt.

 

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Poetry

There Is Always A Then

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Thoughts are objects

And they are bound within

A fiction of our infinite pages.

Leafs so thin,

That we fit them

Within forever

With careful words.

The parchment is made

Of flesh and leaves.

We press flowers within our covers

Endless, every so often, an influence.

Readers who cannot stop,

Addicted to page turning find

Characters caught in the act

Of dying

Heroes making eternal desire to themselves

Murderers, the best lovers

Lovers, the best murderers

Gods on mountains

Mountains who claim to be God

Words of control

Words of wishing, then

Children…………………………..

Waiting patiently, silently

In footnotes, then, then, then, then….

(There is always… a then.)

Little baby asterisks

Crying for literary attention

From larger print.

The print, always so damned quiet

Inside the Library of Babel

Busy, copying sheet after sheet

Hoping to snare a novel

Wrestle with a poem

Gargle with flash fiction

Enter into a serious relationship

With a creative non-fiction.

It’s a grapple with

Endless mimesis, a shape shifter,

Always on the move with forever,

Building bookshelves, planning

On how to end the epic..is, is, is, is

An object of thought

 

Poetry, Portraits

The Blank Page (Portrait #9)

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Full of space, it invites your wishes to be written down upon it. Then, as soon as you jot or type something within its parameters, it looks back at you and tells you more about what your wishes then you knew. A rectangle of entanglement, trouble and love within borders, the space is…

It lulls you into a sense of control, then lets loose your words, out, into an area larger than infinity. One little word or sentence stubs your toe or swells your head. Most likely both, leaving you in a state of ogre, the state is…

Ogre. They eat humans and your words are eating at you. Ogres carry large spiked clubs, a metaphor for your pen. You pound your club/pen onto the blank page, into pulp, poetry, and snarky snippets. Look at what this writing space has done to you! You are…

You wake up the next day and begin to think you have gotten it under control. You’re human again. Hey, you’re a writer. It’s tempeh and rice, it’s tofu and garlic, it’s a bowl full of kale. You wash down your normalcy with a nice local cabernet. But, the blank page is like a stomach growl, because some little word or phrase gets stuck in your ogre gut. You then hear the words that start it all, that little gobble, gobble in the back of your head that says, Wild Turkey, pot roast, and pie. Fat is….

The blank page is an empty dinner plate, bone white china. You are searching for when the fat lady sings. She has tendency to sing loud. It’s all about finality. About knowing where to place a period. You have double-spaced, with 12 point font and still the rectangle filled with your thoughts, squirts from under your lucid typing and splatters upon the eyes of the most interrogative reader. The reader is…

You, the blank page, full of space, wishes written upon it.

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Poetry

The Collision Of Paragraphs

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The heated horizon

Produces an allure.

My eyes follow

its linear line, moving with

the melodic narrative–

There are other voices—here

Where hills make outlines.

Harmony is horizontal–

A dialogic freeway.

It is the rain

That stops streets

And plays with the oil

Leftover from sentences

Blocks and paragraphs

Stories—cities, maps, the membranes

Of the lay out to thought

 

The horizon burns, it must.

To maintain its fix.

Pierces a way inside

Leaving me to forget

How notes are placed

on top of one another–

They are not static, all is noise

Counterpoint and polyrhythms

Bouncing off other events–

Experience, a lose few chapters

Their print flying off, landing

On edges, never settled

Remaining, vibrating

Rubbing itself in tension

Spewing multiplicity

 

The horizon ignites

A promise of finality

Of oneness with meaning

A road that flirts with following

Doesn’t know where it leads.

Only a traveller has a map

And it is two-dimensional

Until looked at–

The gaze, full of plurality

Small foot trails

Leading to death, life

Or at least a good mushroom

Growing on the side of hills

That fight the horizon

A creative feat of inclusivity

 

The horizon’s fever basks me

My voice, forced within a stave

Is seen screaming out of mono

But, all ears have flattened

Flush with their heads

Now, an orange/red sunset

Is only a page in rotation

That comes back

Slightly adjusted

Set to scrape another sky.

I listen for the collision

Of paragraphs falling

And helplessly read horizontally

Which is

The story that includes us all

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