Ode To The Cicada

The amplitude of your mating call
Reverberates in the summer air
A premonition for some
A rambunctious rustling for others
I pray to thee,
As you behold light.
Fourteen scores after you birth;
A burrowed, quiet thumbing through layers of dirt (…that eternal librarian)
That climbs up the plum tree under a star plagued sky.
It is the beginning of summer
And you bloom at mid trunk.
Leaving a carapace.
An underground rumination to forget,
To start anew, mid trunk, alighted
From a crystalline skin;
You burst!
And trade your marionette strings
For song and wind!

Always a tyro pilot,
Haphazardly navigating the effervescent summer air
I wonder how you make it from
Branch to branch
As Sphecius waits for a chance to
Stick to your side his stilling dagger.

I carry no coinage in my pockets.
A lump of dirt in my right pocket
A handful of seeds to my left
I’ve planted trees by my endless windows
In hopes that you made them
Your courting ground for one summer.

In the thin shadow of high noon
Your presence is the quickening breath of the tireless singer…

You’ve filled my childish evenings with magic
As my puzzled mind made sense of your former self
And my afternoons with the invigorating electric sap of the summer heat.
Then, at night, you told me about the future…
And I listened…

Sweet Cicada, I belong to you.
To your calling that lulls me to sleep under the weeping willow…

trains (and stops and andamios and re-routes)

In trains we pass the lines

Of incandescent dark tunnels.

Your eyes like blinking far-away stars

Their radiance eons away,

across

Right in front of

The gaze that shifts

In guttural tremors;

And I want to tell you that I am lost under this brick and mortar without your embrace.

My Teeth Are Gone

Down the riverbed

Dried but always nascent

This time of year.

Frogs underneath sleep a dream

Only perturbed by the percolating

Rainwater

with careful step, I feel them once again.

I am off to a quiet place.

 

The dunes, ahead,

Flank the bend

Of the riverbed

and I must turn left;

Once it straightens again.

My great grandfather first told me about this

When I was still holding my mother’s tail

And off he went,

Off to a quiet place.

 

If memory serves me right,

He looked at me the same way

That I am looking at my sons and daughters on this day.

We’ve wrestled through this path with countless marauders

These countless dry spells.

But I fear not for their safety…

I have taught them well.

Some are stronger than others and in this

I find rest.

So I stay behind as the riverbed straightens

Until a little one strays from his mother’s rear-end

It is they that, just as I had then, do not understand

But all my brethren will keep them safe

As I am off to a quiet place.

 

The trees bare the minutest leaves

In this patch of dry grass

They are easy on my stomach, in vain…

But I let melancholia

Run its course

Like the rain greens the land

I’ve always trekked

Where the elephant shrew makes its home

And I never see one twice,

But know of his mother’s scent.

I will not step on them,

Never have I

In these endless suns, neither will I today

On my way to a quiet place.

 

Bleached bones and hardened skin

Some have disturbed the sleep of my elders, family, and friends

I hope this is not my fate

This I know, I’ve passed through here forty suns ago

Because of lack of food and smoking thunders among the trees

But this does not stop me from lying down

My tired frame.

I have finally arrived to the place where my ancestors have gone

Once the river straightens

And the trees become few

Amidst the boulders that hide

Our bones from the winds.

Our quiet place.

Of All Your Edifices and Grand Statues Only Rubble Remain (old rumination)

Concrete cracks in time

Lets the flower

Bloom divine

Ode To The Cicada

The amplitude of your mating call
Reverberates in the summer air
A premonition for some
A rambunctious rustling for others
I pray to thee,
As you behold light.
Fourteen scores after you birth;
A burrowed, quiet thumbing through layers of dirt (…that eternal librarian)
That climbs up the plum tree under a star plagued sky.
It is the beginning of summer
And you bloom at mid trunk.
Leaving a carapace.
An underground rumination to forget,
To start anew, mid trunk, alighted
From a crystalline skin;
You burst!
And trade your marionette strings
For song and wind!

Always a tyro pilot,
Haphazardly navigating the effervescent summer air
I wonder how you make it from
Branch to branch
As Sphecius waits for a chance to
Stick to your side his stilling dagger.

I carry no coinage in my pockets.
A lump of dirt in my right pocket
A handful of seeds to my left
I’ve planted trees by my endless windows
In hopes that you made them
Your courting ground for one summer.

In the thin shadow of high noon
Your presence is the quickening breath of the tireless singer…

You’ve filled my childish evenings with magic
As my puzzled mind made sense of your former self
And my afternoons with the invigorating electric sap of the summer heat.
Then, at night, you told me about the future…
And I listened…

Sweet Cicada, I belong to you.
To your calling that lulls me to sleep under the weeping willow…

Gray is a Memory

The morning is a horrid mess of ice covered snow and sleets of cold water

breaking through

the gray of this perpetual             morning of all mornings.

I was hoping for a day off;

a day of mooring myself in sheets and covers in a cold room.

There is a dog that does not care about homelessness or bills or school;

hell!

I don’t even think he knows he is even breathing.

No, but he feels it.

That’s one thing that matters when looking out of windows at passing shoes and perched pigeons;

feeling the cold window panes,

the warm breath against the back of your hand,

the condensation collecting at the bottom of your finger tip as you trace your name or someone’s name;

a scribble of running droplets.

Starched sheets covering the lawns

bring me back to waking in fogged mornings and,

as I made my way to school,

stepping on puddles of ice sheets making music with my rubber soles.

Small polyrhythmic compositions that filled my calves with joy and traveled to my ears as they interrupted the sound of my own breath through the vacant streets.   Ice floes shift above my head and I inhale the moist air as I balance my body on one leg that sinks into

the crunch under my heel.

Dalmatian Dream (Gefühlsmensch Mist III)

Speaking in three languages

We stared at the stars

To keep ourselves sane.

And after cups of Dalmatian wine

We nestled in a minuscule bed.

Tu sonrisa tan contagiosa y tus ojos sinceros estan inprimidos en mi mente.

Sweating, I tasted your skin again and again.

My hands trailed your supple legs

And I thought of your eyes,

The color of Hvar rocks and rich clay

Tu piel tan suave como una pluma ligera, tu pelo, y el aroma de tu cuerpo todavia juegan con mi olfato.

As I suggested, we were to dream together.

You asked to hear stories and

I told you shaky tales to sleep.

El sonar de tu voz corre, como un niño en un jardin, de una oraja a la otra.

The soles of your feet against the top of mine, we walked through

The hot and heavy air of our room.

Tus suspiros acarician mi garganta y tus manos apretan mis caderas.

Your heartbeat woke me numerous times

And my hands learned the geography of your breaths for which I was a demigod moving, rubbing tectonic plates and sending waves through your limbs to your

Fingertips

Mis manos se mueven en el aire cuando pienso en tu cuerpo.

When I think of your body my hands move in the air

Cuando pienso en tu cuerpo mis manos se mueven en el aire

My hands move in the air when I think of your body.

Hvar - its rock and soil

Sitting in the cemetary, opposite this building, is where I wrote the english part of this piece. Mostar

Frogs

“Don’t you put your breaths into the webbed fingers of another.”

Whispered a lecturer into the microphone…

I could not stop laughing at the thought of swimming frogs chasing magenta bubbles

The careful little copulates gather together

Clinging onto each other for days on end

I could not stop looking at their folded skin and how they struggled to move about

They couple onto each other

Endlessly forming permutations of one goal

I could not stop thinking of my lost sense of direction and how the sky is always above my head

“Don’t you put your breaths…” echoed in my head

“Don’t you put your breaths..” and I woke up drooling on my desk and gasping for breath…Everyone looked, and I got up and wiped my chin with the pages of a book; I also looked  at them and my chest began to rise and fall steadily…my eyes were newly tapped wells.

“Don’t you put your breaths…!”  I screamed

And I could not stop tearing at the fact that I was breathing again.

06-28-2010 (Monday) Bony Arses and Something Lost.

There is something I wanted to write.

Something… and I can’t find it.

It must be around here,

no;

maybe it is in the kitchen.

Hold on, no it is not there.

There, I could have sworn I left it there.

I need to write this thing now and it is nowhere to be found.

Let me retrace my steps:

I thought about it in the kitchen,

then I walked to the living room

where there was something happening;

I stopped thinking about it

by the time I went to the bathroom.

 Something about the prince falling off his horse, no!

That is definitely not mine.

Damn, this is like killing flies under fluorescent lights, the trails trick your eye and the smell of the light, if you are lucky, exacerbates the

guts

s   p    l      a      t        t        e        r         e       d.

Back from the Balkans and a German spell

There is a certain feeling that lingers when I return from every trip.  I cannot put my finger right on it.  After an elucidating trek around the Balkans and a serendipitous stay in Frankfurt filled with twists and turns as well as the number 7 signaling every single change, I am ready for another round and hope to be back there as soon as I get all things lined up.   Some photos of the trip and much more writing to come.  I am just gathering all my thoughts and getting my head straight.

Drinking some homemade rakija and eating salad...the proper way of drinking rakija in Macedonia

The baba Gilevski in the front yard and sharing her wonderful home with me.

In the highest mountain in Hvar. Riding bikes from Stari Grad to Hvar City, Croatia.

The Stari Most jumpers in Mostar.

Riding bikes through the hills of Hvar with Anne

Drinking wine on the roof overlooking Dubrovnik with Anne, Julia, and Sam.

In da ghetto!

In Ljubljana...what does?

In rainy Bled, Slovienia.

In a boat party in Frankfurt.

In Frankfurt with Anne.

...???