For Kora Mao
November 30, 2017
Urban COFFEE Lounge, Kirkland
The grease on my hands
reminds me of the guns
I never learned.
Where is compassion lurking?
Where is the inward smile?
And where is the almond,
the croissant, now that I’ve eaten it,
consumed, grease on my fingertips,
words on my chapped lips.
The walls close in and grow.
The growth continues as a wall.
There isn’t a concept here.
There is burnt remains and laughter.
Imagine a poetry reading with scripts
for performers and audiences.
A lobotomy for men the next.
A deck filled with testimonies.
Or is mutilation something else?
This strain is the bulk of life.
What we live for is bulkish.
Can I perhaps live beyond everything?
Is there a truly anti-social mode?
This is what the addict says before
the long line of lights goes out.
Her hair is the color of dead leaves
and she is so far away.
I wander what the hair sounds like
when stepped upon, crushed.
None of it is random. None of it
an emersion of transience.
I put skulls on the empty dish
and forget my right to normalcy.
I seek my body without flesh.
I seek to seek a featherweight
sequence of existing again;
but the only way is to drown awareness.
Tides are splashing oceanic edges.
Somewhere there is a coastline
and it is filled with life I can’t have,
or even be privy to, it isn’t my
place, never was, none of it is,
or was, the basis of a book,
or an interception of miracles.
It takes time to know that it will
ultimately arouse a basic urgency.
My words may or may not exist
but their potential is a blunt strike,
which sends us into paralytic stasis.
Things could not be any more outward.
Until they wrap back around, maiden of
iron, hands of a man of sugar,
eyes glistening with thrombosis,
my words and responses curt,
curved in the poorest posture,
a preamble into a dead-end,
situation of adulthood, Solaris
sitting in the way of breathing,
trees in a full and substantial nudity.
It helps to scream into the future.
It helps to own up to the bloody
possible outlooks that could exist.
In a brittle season of exhaustion
the spire of black reckoning chills
and moistens into a deadly preservation.
Libraries beckon names and there’s
no telling in the told or bespoken
moments we attach onto our timeline.
Timeless is the estranged admitting
that will lead to vibrant detachment.
Pointlessness leads to a dulling becoming.
It helps to have a head on your shoulders
and a smile on your shovels
and a boomerang of eye twitch
supporting the angles of the grave.
Who am I kidding the graves are
watery and abyssal and startling
and lost to us and our culture.
Our calm communication beyond
the commodore’s greatest attention.
I spit up the spirit that hushes me.
I am filled with an imperious spite.
There is no grateful blood here,
clotted weave providing the edge.
My mouth, a sore revenant,
leads the way closer, moment to
moment, to death, which is not anything
else as it is the same in a world
of faulty entitlement, devoid of conversation.
“Where is the loyalty?”
is the repeated, melodious question.
Accountability, commitment,
the erroneous respect and responsibility
shows its way to us again and again.
Smiles are incredibly performative.
Focus on the conclusive elements!
It becomes a strain on muscles
to otherwise indelibly exist.
Ache, yawn, sigh, stretch.
The confined explicated gift
is the truest crime in this peering,
pouring resilience on and on.
It will trip us up and flip us
over, and when it does, best to you,
and those you contain within,
for it will matter more to them than
you, and that is an indestructible
realization beneath the ceilings
and beyond the warding of walls.
While words like shards of glass
remain incomprehensible, and present.