New Euro Poems: Unkillable and Saunas

Written about the European trip I took with my mother in June, 2018.

1. Unkillable

Mechanical machinations, the geese are dripping with saltwater
and the sun swerves to extract their then wet and my withering eyes.
We quiver in a dance made of shallow arguments of life and death.
The earth is stable and designed to pressure us into union.
But union never comes in these long-lit spells of purplish being.
Sunset over characters from a book and my dumbfounded exclamations.
There is no fog and no clouds and no storm today: just geese
whose ninja beings in this northern European ecosystem are freakish.
The blood from my wingspan is weighted with a grayed gravitas.
Gravity does little to hold us together; we propel into horizons.
Time too at this age of daylight does little for intimacy.
We’re flashes ruminating memories: forgetfulness of dreamy hesitation.
Everything leaves everything else alone when the weakened days glide.

2. Saunas

I watched the phantom scrub his legs clean.
Jerking motions become screams in objectivity.
The languid sense of a subtle, masculine realism.
It is harsh amidst the futility of the sweat.
I can feel each molten cascade on my back
as cinders or timely, blind incinerations.
And there he sits, feet away, glancing up at me.
And there he sits, his breath of a dragon’s,
an uncertainty as he leaves to shower, returns,
and it’s the blanket privacy of the sauna reaching me,
his nobility or humility a set of displaced contexts.
It is inevitable, his flight, after my rejection:
and as it is time for him to be disappeared,
so it is time for me to steam the water once more.
Magically the bucket leads to the cloud of steam.
There is truth in these visions be they anything.
It is the fictionalized memory that leads me away.
The certainty of image is the realism I crave to hold.