Overload #31

Four Poems

IN MEMORIAM

We
witnessed
azure shores
turn crimson with
the crisp, healing wind.

Summer came and went with the sun
dancing over lush hibiscus,
drowning in watery sonnets;

manila-papered reflections
of sentences never written
or uttered, except in prayer.

Our verve born in modest clusters,
lost in the veiny leg of an adjective
I choked on while thinking of you.

What word was it? What song? What thought?
I fancied it to be more of a sound,
an artful stroke of a waking timbre

merging with loose follicles of
a cryptic truth, tinted by penumbra
of the mind’s myopic eye.

There was no reason–
no grand meaning nor
divine answer to life.

There was only then
just as
today is only now.

NAUGHT

Earth tasted strange,
like prepubescent moon salt
fashioning its iridescence on my tongue;
sweet of a verb’s membrane
so alive, it moved within me.

It was as if I bit into a shadow
and realized a dream,
treading through sky-kissed waters
curled around my knees,
thinking that was the closest
I could get to infinity.

I would melt and bleed into the world.
Horizons would melt and bleed into me,
disappear into cotton mist of softer notes
better sung after a glass of wine
in a gentle, if not soothing, hum;

then steal me away
to an eternity of non-consequence
to watch noble willows
break ground beneath ground,
bash the eager sunset with fists
till pink fades and falls into night,
and live till I am naught.

RHYME

Before the crying season,
I’ve witnessed flora
arch toward the ether,
the flavor of a nimbus cloud,
faltering on a petal’s eclipse
till she was weak of weeping.

We were inebriated,
open and full moon,
caught in a thespian’s verse.

The lines were bleak, swollen,
misconstrued June green filaments
of dragonfly wings – the color of
eureka-bearing notions,
thick with ambrosia.

It was dulce,
spicy, eros, chilli on the lips.

Sliding…
It was poetry.

We were cat-eyed, sleek-tongued,
forbidden crescent apertures of night
beckoning words more succulent
and warm with the fog-crested hours.

Flying…
We were rhyme.

TO LAURA

Once,
I felt
like sphagnum
lying flat on
a demi-god’s knee.

Hell could not have been more obvious.
It was Sunday from the fold of her skirt,
the arch of her brow, and the feel of her…

Twilight rested on her chin like a moth;
the carelessness of which made me grimace.
I delivered a curse in semaphore;

semi-affected gesticulations
that bled into the configuration
of her curves. She was all but womanly,

with the audacity of a man’s spit.
Time thumbed through her wrinkles but she would not
bend to him for repentance. She flourished

like lice amongst other lice. I hated
her D cupped bagpipes, that heaved as she breathed
criticisms while quirking a pinkie.

She was an ill-sung paean, refusing
to croak till the last pinch of salt crumbled
on her defiant palm. How I miss her.

I wonder if she’d still remember me,
call me stubborn, lazy and foolhardy
if I stood by her grave long enough to
listen to her cry from below the ground.