Reality Check

I need a reality check,

    a list of what is real,
    and where it is placed.
A diagnostic for life,
    these moments
    their coordinates in space/time

the air temperature and pressure,
the phase of the moon
the dimensions of a 5 bedroom town home.
the velocity of muscles reaching for jam.
the decibel level of a bus at 7:44 am
the parameters for programming alarm clock

What is the length of space between here
    and where I am going?
How long will it take to get there when caring
    1K + 85K + dreams?
Will I have enough liters of fuel to get there,
    if I don’t calculate in every variable?

What do we do with ‘matter out of place’
Do we right it and call it good.
Give it the blessing and go to sleep
Is it forever out of place,
calculable but always in a different place
moved for the moment and knowing
energy can never be created or destroyed

only transferred (perpetual motion)
And hair brushed once will have to brushed again
and muscles stretched, toned, torn,
will have to be worked again, and again, and again
until the heat death of this body in
two thousand seventy something.

[November 2011]

The Day Patriarchy Won for a Moment

I think she grew tired of her scales.
One day in space
they tipped to one side,
and we lost our way.

Of course a day in heaven
is a millennium for Us
(space/time is like that)
The moment they tipped
in one direction
was about a 6000 year process.

I think she is just picking up
her scales again.
Chains singing vibrations,
a string of holy harmonics
throughout time and space.

It was such a calamity;
that cosmic consternation.
Sagittarius shot her a glare,
and Leo let out a great roar.
Aries, Taurus, and Capricorn
fell to their knees.

We all were touched
by the shifting of a starry muscle.

Oh the heavens shook that day,
when Virgo faltered,
and Libra tumbled out of balance.
How that shaped our world,
they will never know.

The Verb: to Write

What is a myth

but a creation story told at slant;
a skewed eye speaking through its iris;
all the spectral colors of a rainbow
dancing through a space/time matrix
colliding with a web of well formed
malleable, plastic, electric rope mass
we call a brain.

What is a story
but a tale told over fire;
a groove carved into the earth;
an archetype with a thousand faces;
a goat track that everyone can follow
but is fully traveled by those who really know
the words by head and heart and hoof.

What are words
but A,E,I,O,U,
(and some days Y)
strung together with consonants
fastened with punctuation
meant to pierce the skin
and vibrate the flesh.

What is a plot
but catabasis or anabasis;
a series of descents, accents,
and single points
on paper and on air and on the lips of time,
written on the horizon of space;
an old woman with her old dog
wrapped in an old blanket speaking
I feel that’s all I have to say
               for now.

[2011]

Because you are a Shooting Star

*Please excuse the momentary dredging up of my intestines (which is really a string of metaphors), my stomach (really a bag of similes), my pancreas (a producer of personification), and my lower organs (these are just my testicles) for your reading pleasure*

I can’t bare this anymore. I see you all false and with out direction; like the illusion that is the aura borealis which secretly wants to be a solar flare or part of the deep space nebulas. No! This is too heavy for gravity, this need. No, it’s not a need, not a want, not even a desire. It is a wish.

Like a shooting star in the night sky of my life. All hot and bright and fast for less than a moment. You are not an expedition to mars or a fleet of mining ships that extract iron ore or diamonds in meteors. These are wants, these are desires. You are just a shooting star and shooting stars are just wishes incarnate.

Not a comet are you either. Comets are my reoccurring lovers who enter my orbit, penetrating my atmospheric layers for days. Shooting stars are quick and they punch and burn up all their helium and oxygen in my nitrogen rich aura. But shows of orgasmic creation can not happen in a vacuum. No new worlds to explore are in a shooting star. No vast caverns which formed in the great blackness of space in which to play. I can not. I will not pulse my way through the empty space.

How I do wish to reach out across the universe and touch that icy hot tail, that speck of cosmic dust in process of using up everything it ever was. But it is to quick, not sustainable and my blazing iron core will never make journeys through space/time for something so fleeting.

Will you someday crash into my crust? Will it require such force that you cram a creator into my surface, a mark, a forever? Can you reach my skin and kick up green earth and bury yourself past my blushing red mantle and merge with my core? Do you have the strength to endure my gravitational field?

Perhaps not. Wishes burn too quick to have the desire to met a solid planet. They’re only cause in space is to be peaceful, glide through a void and one day, when the time is right… Pop to life with brilliance all their own. With the last atom of carbon or magnesium or phosphorus release they’re final thought: they hope someone, somewhere below was there to bear witness.