Soap Opera

I remember the first time I saw two men kiss.

It was on television. I remember handling the remote control, waving its unsteady weight around with tiny hands, sitting cross-legged on the floor. The television hovered in front of me, the only real thing in the room, as I watched with innocence like an unfurling nocturnal flower, and then a growing sense of faintly uneasy curiosity, like a quiet dog nosing his master's cold, dead hand, soft paws padding in the sticky, vast ocean of scarlet surrounding his corpse, just feeling, never knowing.

Their shirts were too tight, hems pulled tight across bronzed muscles, hair too perfectly coiffed, features too pretty. I didn't understand. They had wine glasses, winking in the grainy light like secretive smiles, dark liquid shifting inside imperceptibly, their manicured nails tapping the crystal rim to emphasize their words heavy with a meaning that I knew enough to acknowledge, but could not name.

I remember what he said, his shining lips parting around white teeth and his pink tongue, enunciating demurely.

-I have rules, you know. People can't just walk in and out of my life as they please. He reclined easily, the challenge apparent in his voice and eyes that even I could see.

The other man replied, slipping the wine glasses out of their hands and smoothly setting them on a table out of sight, out of mind:

-Is this against your rules?

And then he was kissing him, palm flush against his face, fingers firm on his head, and they were serious and intent and wanting, and I began to understand but I did not. It was too much, like the way that holidays were too much, with too many people and too much food and too many smells and tastes and touches, too many shifting shadows and laughing, red-faced adults, too many flickering, dim lights and feet tapping on polished hardwood floors, and lurid decorations you weren't allowed to touch, and not enough children to take the edge off of being outsiders.

My unknowing eyes searched the screen, ravaged for every detail. I knew my mother would not approve, and because of that uncertain fact I looked all the harder. She was in the other room, and as I suddenly heard her footsteps sounding in the hallway I stood and ran, little bare feet pattering on unsteady legs out the doorway, a earth-shattering portal to salvation.

I stole a moment of solitude as a child in a house where I never knew shallow loneliness, and I saw two men kiss and it opened the world up to me.

I Have Stopped Believing, Neruda

I dream of poetry, Neruda;
Of your words woven in the fabric of my dreams.
They unfurl, barbed and armed, from the mouths of boys I have kissed,
and from the parting lips of the girl I once loved.

I could write the saddest lines, Neruda,
but I know that they will never be the saddest lines.
This is just the beginning, and there is no real end.

I have stopped believing, Neruda,
in everything that I have been promised
by those black-tongued rogues of my youth.
I have stopped believing, Neruda,
in things I was told that I deserved.

I have stopped believing, Neruda,
in a love that waits for me on the other side.
There is no silver lining with which to sew between my teeth,
I am not doe-eyed in my reflection from the flat scrying water.

There is only my imagination, Neruda,
that keeps my crystal gears turning and the curtains rising.
I imagine my dreams come to life,
and because I have no nightmares I can taste the pleasure piled thickly on my tongue.

It is late, O real one,
and yet I am awake.
Where have you been? I've missed you.
I have missed you, and I still do.

There is paint on my hands, but I have not been painting.
There is blood on my wrist, but I have not been bleeding.
There are stars in my eyes, but I have not been loving.

Él es el rey de mi corazón y mis sueños, pero no lo amo.
Como un perro, tu mientas postrado en mis pies,
y como un perro tu me moderá cuando cierro mis ojos.

In the Style of James Joyce, I Think

With every brush of her pen's ink on paper she felt empowerment creep over her, until she was suffocating on her Self. The power within her limbs thrummed unbridled, and she entertained, perhaps for the first time, the dim notion of what one unstoppable person could achieve; she became one of a race training to be heroes, and though she scarcely could give real definition to the word she felt wholeheartedly the burden and satisfactions of such a calling.

She was proud of her meagre words, the rush of perfectly formed English amidst fumbling Spanish. She sometimes felt that her unmotivated inability in Spanish gave her inspiration and determination a rocket's push, throwing her fearlessly forward into the realm of vaguely unexplored literary territory.

Between her hands and eyes a book lingered, hulked like a tiny subversive monster, quiet in its manners and always so much with itself in everything it did: A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man. While wedged between its pages she knew acutely the weight of his twisting words, plainly and verbosely explaining things she guessed she had always sensed but never precisely had the thought to think before. The moments of hilarity were burnt with sparkling clarity above her eyebrows and while her jaw hung slack with laughter she wondered if her classmates understood what they read as well, or merely completed their assignments and released the smoky images from their overripe minds like seeds in the wind.

The foreign language grated on her ears. She wondered how this could be the same language that she read out loud alone at night in her room from a coveted book of poetry, stumbling over foreign sounds and half-forgetting accents. Her tongue felt uncharacteristically thick and useless in her mouth, her lips getting impatient and racing ahead of her unimpatient mind.

The shrill, impossibly fast syllables ejected from her teacher's whorish painted mouth seemed hardly equal but for mere letters and lines-- the formation was the only link. Neruda sat curled in her bag like a weightless phantom, silent save for when she released his vapor into the air, parting the Red Sea and breathing his meaning through clumsy lips.

मोस्सिक

Your net is far-reaching, it would seem;
Edges frayed and tattered, torn, hanging from the shards of starlight
Pulled taut, allowing me no surcease of sorrow
And the night falls with a Raven-black intent
Behind my woven iron-will bars I stand bewildered,
Addled by abruptness, lost without love
Though your face is turned away I wonder if your eyes are open still,
and though your ears are filled with sand I wonder if you understand.

We Are All Fruit

And we consume ourselves.
A pear in an apple's skin
The plum of your dimpled mouth
The rotund orange of your cheek
and the peel between your knees
A peal of laughter bounces back
from the mouth once kiss-bruised against mine
And her brown eyes twinkle with triumph
with her hot palm pressed to his

Salt strewn across the expanse of her mind
Tears withheld by her Jewess eyes
A stalemate, a cat's game, but still we dance
With flaming pens to bar entrance to Eden
while the sickly sweet overripe fruit of our bodies swell and burst to reveal shriveled seeds and blackened hearts within us all
We cannot escape her Sin.

This Sickness

I never understood it until now.

I wanted to stop time and capture it in the palm of my hand,
to revisit upon convenience,
Hours upon hours of personal reflection

a photograph

I wanted to capture every single infinitesimal, inexplicably insignificant detail
And catalogue it,
To bring to mind a perfect pleasing place at will.

a memory

I wanted to know-- to live in this moment forever.
Because with the sun shining like that,
And the trees rustling like this,
And the sky so bright and blue,
and absolutely no one to answer to--

It is hellish in perfection,
the moment before the dream turns to a nightmare,
Before the score starts up and
the villain emerges from the shadows--

It is the first breath when you break the surface of the water,
It is the first rainfall of summer, it's the first dragonfly of spring,
It's the first kiss of a strange, new love.

It is the first step of newly bared feet on soft dirt and grass,
and it is hellish in perfection
and it is all that I want.

Tuck, or Maybe Roll

Grey armor slated overlapping just so,
Tapered legs reaching for the next green stalk of grass.
Unafraid when I slip my pen under his feet
When all others of his kind would curl into inconsequence.

He is unafraid, and I marvel at that.
Like Clarisse McClellan, unafraid.

And when I set him down
Upon this very sheet of paper
Those tapered legs and furry feet
Scrambled, quick as could be,
never tripping over tricky lines,
until he reached the edge
and threw himself off
unafraid as always--

A Gentle Shiver

A ripple through the leaves
And the earth rolled too,
mimicking the wind and the waves
of the sea,
And the voices of the birds
falling through the air upon my sun-warmed ears
And the grass waving hello
And creatures flitting back and forth
Only glimpsed between the corners of my eyes

I blink, and suddenly
the latch is lifted
White picket hinges swing
and a Bird enters with clothed legs, and arms
outstretched,
feathers rippling--
Like the leaves.

Lying face down on thick grass,
the kind we don't get where I come from.
Pen lazily scurrying across, lines;
My heart beats harder for a moment, and
I feel the earth's beat sync, and
I almost predict the next ripple,
but I get distracted, and the moment is gone.