urbansonnets

Writing as probing is never a new

science or technique when thoughts flex like snails,

crawling in trails and sloughing down a glue

trace on the arrebol tiles with gold sails:

There is a message on the watershed

in hidden letters of fishscale that read:

SPARE THE ROD WHEN USING A WATERBED,

SHARE THE WEALTH WHEN SCATTERING YOUR BIRDSEED:

East meets west when the sun drowns its bald head

in the mentholated Caribbean;

when it bolts barbs will feel astringed and dead

under the strident deafness of Leon:

This way we minimize the razor’s bumps

when affecting our heads against blunt stumps.

With flowers to flank its privileged placement,

Paradise, above and beyond the horde,

is constructed despite the defacement

of a landscape in which savage hues soared:

A mask with a toothless grin looks faceless

as it’s tacked onto the collective heart

of a nation that pegs itself raceless,

contradicting the mask’s plaster-cast art:

Down below, though, the clouds blow like rainbows

and the hammers break hearts like blue dandies

and the blood circulates as the pain flows

and the spinster still smacks on her candies:

Recused from the pilgrim’s rescue mission,

our brothers on high bray to conscription.

With a whetted whistle to pierce the air,

I begin to cut the gentle fabrics

that breeze between me and the single chair

that sits in the woods before the sap leaks:

Enter the house at the end of the wood;

coax on each light unilumined for years ;

the puffy photos stand for what has stood

always – that is, class, affect, lions, bears:

Linoleum floors too hard to fall on

ground your walking meditation through time,

where memories carve traces of fallen

flesh and duties preserved with salt and rhyme:

With an open door, the breeze can get in

to refresh the patterns sewn into skin.

I know that my dreams are alive and well

when I look out and see the yellow flames,

dancing in the shadows of the wall, tell

of the spirits in our corporal frames:

They stay with us like light lingers at night,

resting on threads spun by other senses,

perpendicular to the thought of flight

from this field of invisible fences:

Running on the barbs of the jagged wrist,

the currents of courage ripped up their feet,

and the blood drips down to where winds have kissed

the marrow of the leaves, whose foils I eat:

I know that my dreams are alive and well,

since I am what they were before they fell.

How does one bring the truth out of oneself

when smiling faces play games on concrete

and vanity seeks to couple itself,

when time fuses into eyes, hands and feet?:

The eye is a charm on a medallion;

the golden cataracts ripple upstream;

there are rocks to avoid and a squadron

of livid lizard tails to cut and clean:

Caught on the threshold of a slamming door,

I lost a limb so many years ago –

it was a magical appendage for

all us children whose hopes fluttered aglow:

The orange bar where I drank from our root

was covered in citrus, flame – now bones, soot. 

The internal horizon is the most

expansive; its inside-eye insight flails

across form and floods into the stretched coast

where castles are pitched with Masonic pails:

I throw mango pits from the balcony,

from the Eye inside the palm of my heart,

while the iridescent pulse of money

softens and slows to a certain stop-start:

If I squint to unclose, I can see Mount

Purgatory as a hill, draped in greens

through the mist of my imprecise account

of time behind space across these pierced screens:

The yellow fruit was tasty, but the seed

rotten: winks of sweat – this thought was one bead.