call it dreaming

it is not much trouble walking on heels digging inwards. sidelong glances confirm my long held assumption, he is a bird.

as if a mesh of well-placed guilt slowly dissipates unannounced freeing my soles when i lend my wrist. this is reaffirming.

amidst the blaring, honking madness, a kind of green and grey, blurred as only possible with too many bodies tamped down together in a soft spot. slow marination before the heat from their bodies render them supple. imbalance firsthand, tight roping through the crowd, my over-sized handbag.

again, nondescript roadside chatter, the kind that dismisses all my gumption. except the wisp of soft drawn meaningless in the ear. certainly these lights swimming on the road can hear my thousand questions. what is this hot air ballooning in my chest, this tongue laced in aspirin turned too heavy, where are the answers. i need a smoke, the hair is a nest of what it is.

on the topic of weather then, sure and comforting, a cloud of deadpan resets my expressions to human. i don’t feel nothing. yes. yes. yes to all he asks, this is easy. yet this waft. this origin of disproportion that smell of cinnamon? custard? three day old flesh hashed and now drying by the flies? i want to sit with it and talk. i have so much to say if only i could rise above this skin and itch.

call it dreaming

the woman by the basket of fresh water lily stems beckons, almost pleads with childeyes. see me. regarde ici. now is the time. ask of elusive shaplas and barbed wires in sleep, spread-eagle and clean. to sum up, ask of the siblings, the ones that took turns in whacking and whining; ask of all this feather, this felon in his body, the shifty ground his eye, ask him why he reminds one of cemetery and sex, feverish laughter and bitter gourd, choking for breath, for space, for empty above water like this.

the correct summation of his life, a series of verbs. following which a shot ring through the carefully propped hazard of an open air concert. whoever thought of this is a fatalist genius. come rain, come anodize the music with pellets, raw and fresh. he squats like a pigeon and sprints like a deer in a flash. with seconds and feet shuffled in wetting the cloth, i wish to reverse the ink on the page. close by, the precision of the gerund- also its own undoing. the shots ring clear now, like a bird shifting in its ribs finds the heart to fly.