urbansonnets

An open mind is what the body seeks.
Embodied wisdom is the truest form
of life in nature’s panoramic swarm
full of living things. My skin sweats and leaks
as I jog around the track. My mind streaks
back to brighter days when weather was warm,
before the doubts, before my college dorm
opened me up to life’s valleys and peaks.
Younger, dumber but with an open mind,
I sought the magic in the white sunset
and found the glory as my planets trined.
I dove in, but somehow did not get wet
under starred skies near shores open and brined,
I lost my mind and buried my brain in debt.

The smell of sweat that pours from every pore,
detoxifying flesh subject to work,
a brief escape from life where guidelines lurk
in every shadow and at every door.
New England was my home for years before
New Jersey, where I figured (like a jerk)
that freedom was somehow a likely perk
of New Life, with new places to explore.

Well…I sweep through a classroom, pick up trash,
and chase down students to keep them engaged
(to their great annoyance). My sweat goes splash
on the green rubber, my spirit uncaged.
Now there’s sweat in my eye, white lights aflash.
I perspire and therefore am not enraged.

The desire to run has re-entered
my body; should I also be surprised
that words have come back whole and mobilized
from foreign thoughts, fluid and de-centered?

I long for novel thoughts that flow un-mentored
by past experience, destabilized
by a current of reckless dreams devised
against a life where liquid thought is censored.

But to renounce my earthly possessions
and depart tomorrow for distant lands
would be the height of my life’s aggressions.

So I continue to tie up my hands
in life and work and baneful expressions
of rebellion against my life’s demands.

I must ask myself, who are my people,
by whom do I define this life’s journey,
on the mezzo cammin’ up the steep hill,
who must climb with me, who should concern me?

Is tribe defined by family connection
or by similarity of interest?
shared passion or blood ties: which does know best
the path of my pulse, my heart’s direction?

But at the end of the day, why bother
if life is ultimately lived alone,
and the destination always unreached?

If no one asked me to tell my story
then my journey’s hollow, echoless tone
would leave all walls between two hearts unbreached.

The best is when the air is tremulous
with the humidity of bubbling broth
while exotic vocals gurgle and froth
over the beat making time emulous

of space, which can saturate our senses
and make time appear redoubled, sacred
and life is lived as if off the fake grid
that is shaped by time and all its tenses

But time always wins – tomorrow’s Monday
I die inside of pure acknowledgement
of the freedoms yielded while on the clock

I must relive the trauma of Sunday
and write these words as self-admonishment:
time’s the threshold to your self-auction block.