%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
 |  A poetry journal of everyday clippings |
 "The astonished muse finds thousands at her side."  R. W. Emerson I made this poetry journal because I like to play with words and lines and I wanted to put somewhere some of my practice work (or first draft) in verse, written--within a very short time, probably daily on the spur of the moment, with the idea to work on the entries later--with or without the help of the astonished (should I say shocked?) muse. Some of the haiku I have mixed with senryu, not only because I am not a purist, but also because I like to do what I like to do given what I feel at the moment. |
| Easter Egg Shoved aside by the taller ones, the tiny girl with the bruised shins crouches under the stairwell to hide herself like a secret message; her eyes wish to simply see the beauty of one second resurrected inside her cold Easter egg, the only one she could find in the hunt. The egg's colors throb into patterns, a twirling medley of purples and blues, that whisper promises; stunned, her fingers tighten and crack the soft shell, making her wonder if she could be anything but human. Salted with tears, she resolves she won’t go about blaming herself for the other eggs she missed and the shell she shattered while the world rose and fell, moments jumping on a green trampoline, back and forth, back and forth, crushing years into one egg. |
| Cracked Stein and the Cello Missing a String a haibun Rust stained driveway stretches in front of the garage door, its brown pain peeling. Discolored clothes on hangers lock eyes with the bric-a-brac on the card table. Inside disorder, a spell is cast on huge stains; you find, you purchase. An ancient rocking chair establishes a sway with some help from the breeze, knocking down the cello leaning to it. I help the cello lean against the wall. The cello tells me stories of beautiful hands sliding the bow, in rhythmic accompaniment. My sad confession: I crooned, pinned to her legs, half alive half dead. A furtive glance from the sun illuminates the cello's wood as if it is the moon, ripped from the night sky. My heart beats together with its eerie, distant music. He left her; she died. I poured over her body and broke a string. On the card table, stands a cracked stein, sidelined, but still inviting. I pick it up instinctively. The cello begs. Be careful with that; on the crack, lies his last sip before he raced off. I hear the owner coming my way. She tells me: "That was my father's beer stein; you can have it for free." I point to the cello against the wall, standing fragile in open space. "That, too, was my father's. It has a crack in the body and the bow's missing." Still, mind's brew gives life to victims of conjecture: the cello and stein. |
| My kiln is hot; the pedal under my feet bounces up and down with ecstasy as I sit at the potter's wheel and spin my clay, shaping what? An urn, a vase, a jar, an amphora? But no, my container has to be more. Not porcelain or fictile, since I'll fire without breaking, and I'm still in the making. My container cannot fit to a mold; it will be handmade, without a pallet shaped, nudged, pulled, flattened, and in patience, tempered. Never mind the coarse outside; I fumble more with punching, pinching, and correcting the inside, to urge delicacy, smoothness, and ease; so, the container can bounce back sturdily after a tumble, and rock back and forth, in character, while the world repeats itself spinning, turning, churning, spurning my kneaded clay. |
| When you’ll leap from the deep obeying nature’s verdict, you’ll feel the sap inside your stem, rushing the season, and you’ll know where you’re going. So you’ll open your eyes to the sun, appealing for detached rays of light; inside the vacuum-refreshed density of your universe, you, a galaxy of hope will change hue to dainty purple petals. And you’ll bloom, raising your neck from the patch left by the last snow, like the white space so important between the stanzas of a poem, welcoming what chance brings. |
| Manhattan Maraschino cherries, spare tires in the bottom of the glass; a distinct moment of revelation when long-handled glass stirrers filter the sunlight, working out new kinks. Sweetness, a good foil though spoils quickly, as pearly whites anticipate the crush after the sip. The heart of the lion holds the brightest star; no, not Regulus but Manhattan, the city I toast to. With words like anesthetics to wounds still bleeding, here’s to a beginning renewed cheers after cheers: “Let our hearts be wide open!” |
| You and I (to my reader) I perch in front of the keyboard, to the tune of a whiny husband, and try to maintain the habit of my ostensible soap opera, the object of my obsession, if not the tiresome kind, while I extract images and shop in my twenty-four market for buried subtexts, inspiring syllables, and verbal daredevilry. Predictably, at the first flash of eye contact with you, my words, amplified and panicked, rush to the checkout counter self-conscious of their own rattling, their lungs collapsing without hope, when fantasy worlds end up stranded and miracles don't collide. Though I fear your yawning's trauma, I imagine you. With your delicate jaw-line bent, you pout your lips; you complain of blurred vision from the scavenger hunt on screen; and you shrug your shoulders at the drama of my obscurity. Then your eyes catch the ice pinnacles outside your window, and you take a sip from your hot tea, which coats your displeasure like a warm blanket, giving you solace for mocking me. |
| I ate a mango for lunch, in the park, on a dusty bench. So sweet that mango was, like the smile of the Fed-Ex man who delivers packages chanting truisms. Afterwards, being the gullible troubadour of platitudes and banality, I wondered out loud, in my singsong voice, if my sticky fingers were bad management, defamation of destiny, or if the Fed-Ex man smiled, expecting a tip. But I never expected to see you watching me from a distance for entertainment. |
| With nods and knowing eyes, the pillow takes over the opus magnum, as darkness kills the sounds and the foundation under me sags, threatening to crumble. On the enormous expanse of the haunt of dreams and fantasy worlds with accidental variations, where I end up stranded on an antique kilim in front of a magical castle filled with dark wood, the pillow points to the tricky winds in spirals narrowing to a keyhole. At each toss and turn, sorting through the crypts of buried subtexts, the pillow cuddles the dark head against its white, and lets this protagonist raise a ruckus to update her plot. |
| You face time in platinum, the limited edition, epitome of style, crafty hands, back and forward forward and back, a perpetual sarcasm from a single crown adjusting to the local time via date’s declaration --the day, the month, the years-- benefiting short-sightedness with an oversized calendar and the seasonal review changing constantly as life fine-tunes to your dateline. |
| Oh, you the pathetic one, the empty tankard with the unhinged lid, the lowliest of the teentsy writers! You’re the slipper the dog has chewed on. Though your vocation remains the same with no wages and no days off, you tantalize one subject after another, as if a slave changing masters, and while others write tomes of fancy words, you check into a dictionary --bigger than your size— for not-yet-discovered phrases, to find yourself tearjerker chores, mixing experiment with anti-form, and keeping a close watch on a few tawdry lines. Then, during your ridiculous tenure, to humor the muse, you call yourself a poet on a burning impulse, like a sacrificial lamb with resignation. |
| You tell me: What happens to love held back? Does it effect a cure akin to an ointment in worldwide renown or does it turn into an accursed scorn and dangle with indifference? Does it croak like a mutated frog, then go jump in the lake? Does it reek out of lazy armpits not accepting any roll-ons or does it turn into a dastardly master haunting your nightmares? You tell me, You should know. |
| Don’t be scared… Let the mutinous wave manipulate you inside the trap of its relentless arms to keep you alive multiple times until it explodes on the rocks to abandon you there to your maritime fate, like a martyr, so you witness a masque with pantomime and dancing to the seabirds’ cries while you feel their beaks piercing through your nothingness. That is when you discover, the significance of your bubbly life: a short-lived emptiness on one limitless ocean. |
| “You still use that thing?” What a question! My favorite tool those tongs in the kitchen to pull the hot toast out of the toaster that you glued with tiny hands twenty-six years ago in school: a clothes pin in between two tongue depressors and the recall of your granting me your gift, your boy’s eyes aglow with pride, handing me the fruit of your ambition and labor in pursuit of praise and appreciation that led to one tiny family legend. Little do you know that when those tongs hold the morning toast they also shake hands with me in your place, pulling me close to remind me of other tangibles I keep inside a shoe box: a lock of your baby hair, your first doodling on a piece of lined paper, a bitten piece of a crayon, red in color, one tiny sock, one tiny mitten that lost its pair, and your tyke shirt, Dr. Denton’s, size three-months, which you outgrew within the first couple of weeks. All these little things stir the memory of your enormous ability to change my world with your baby smell, your baby warmth, your child’s laugh, and your first “I love you” that caused the time to stand still. |
| The dawn of the last storm… Though anchored inside the exactness of insomnia, you feel fortunate as you shiver with your forehead to the windowpane. The lights are out, the lightning slashes the sky into uneven wedges, and the floorboards shake under your feet, threatened by the raucous thunder bouncing its articulate rumble through the arid darkness and tearing into your eardrums with candor; your cat meows shaking in abrupt terror under your unmade bed. On this godforsaken island sitting between two anonymous coasts, you watch an arsenal of floods sweep away the ground down below, and since you put up with robust flaws in relative chagrin, like an aristocrat in silhouette, you too are a part of this storm. |
| She writes inside the lines and in between scattering rumored secrets like broken glass, sharp-edged, cocky, cutting through her breath. She gasps, struggling between the revered truth of wanton fiction, and frankly, the stories she’ll never tell out of mercy, or pride, or love, stories deep, dark, cold, stories abandoned curling dry on emptiness. She says her prayers every night, to keep her alive so she isn’t left empty-handed, and with her words growing skin, she hides inside each prayer, every night telling a story of errors to herself.
|
| "Picking up shards of hope my unique talent," I boasted, while you kept vigil in haunting dreams, hazy memories, botched up yesterdays. Today, maybe, I'll find a roadmap; maybe, I'll trace back the steps I took and connect the dots of hope in my storybook. I'll meet you on your way to see if either of us have gained any understanding, if you can still sing through the eclipse of the moon, not if you float distorted as a vision I imagined from afar. But... to sweep out the hazy memories haunting dreams, and botched up yesterdays. This time I want to embrace you the way you are. |
| Not an easy reality racing through damp narrow streets... A childish heart, worn-out legs, an aged cramped mind, rummaging around for musty dreams. My search gnawing the grain of a sorceress city, with its history mingled with mine, once upon a time; its grey river, now miserable by rains unpredicted. Angst digging in through, the insane summer of 2002; Europe fouled by floods, increasing the deepening torment of each footstep. Summer 2002 from the Latin Quarter, Paris The secret of re-birth, nibbling on renewed sights, hoping, loving, leaving, dreaming, among morose monuments dwarfed against the sky. “E-mail home" says an orange dome-shaped sign, of a feisty cyber café, at a corner cradled in Latin Quarter. To e-mail home, one has to be away; yet, here I’m home, with my high-pitched song of intoxicated wonder. Inside Café de Cluny, toasting with hope to this chancy life I am young, again. |
| (to an old friend) Primroses exploring the vast ocean of friendship and the simple life; drinking a bucket of water, improvising abundance, crowded together, inside hanging pots, on the balcony, Apartment 2A, at Place du Tertre, Montmartre. A visual keepsake. hooking itself on the altar of recollection. The flesh of bare walls throbbing with artsy aroma. Questioning the presence of shadows, in cheerful quavering lines, young-girl-laughter, our careless wisdom. While you sleep, I spill off to the river, scavenging for turpentine dreams through slumbering shapes along the bank. No way we'll be leaving, for we'll stay inside memories, like petals drifting unto the same pile; now hovering over letters we send, we never have been closer. |
| She first goes to bed with lights on, a modest hope chirping under her eyelids, preferring to ignore the darkness, trying not to feel, trying to slip past herself, trying to toss away dreams, but a weak tear reappears over the misery of a rustle of recall, a rumor she didn’t heed, like the whisper of green caterpillar legs sliding on a leaf, that forecast rose petals to be eaten away. How vaguely she created an unrecognizable face, a lover’s image, her soft hands reaching to loss, dragging excuses, tangling in calluses and shams! No more hush-hush... Her shriek, though internal, shrill and wild, pierces through the lampshade, like the Munch drawing “The Scream”; an outcry among black ink lines tracing countless sobs, struggling for voice inside the terror of the dark through a throat engorged with agony, attempting to feel a horizon and go beyond surrendering to fury. The chain of the lamp swells inside her hand as she pulls, daring the ominous darkness. To escape from a nightmare will not be easy, unless she burns the bed. |
| Somewhere to the south of the Equator, on the western slopes of the Andes, a rare oak tree rustles, chanting its special plea, when the wind breathes through it, with the sacred sounds of a reed, played in a temple, in worship. Hearing the Southern Wind, the oak in my backyard --shape-wise a pyramid-- in a ritual few have witnessed, turning its branches upward like hands praying, echoes the chant, which, through intricate continents, promises golden wings out of gloom, blurring the edges between people and creation and dreams they yet don’t know of. When that mesmerizing chant touches my ears, trusting the experience of a moment’s rapture, inside my silence, I reflect on any sin I can own up to, inverted in self-defense, using any crutch I can pick up from my collection, and the tree sends down its offerings of hope to establish roots under my feet, without asking for repentance, without any fancy words, without disbelief, but through acceptance, grounded in infinite love. |
 Log in to Leave Feedback |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
"Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies."- Ralph Waldo Emerson 
