alivealivealive

12.15.08

leaving the temple i
go to the shoekeep
point with gun fingers at the teal
soles saying “the hot ones”
slip him 10 rupees and
he puts his hands together
the ganges

-NEE
(www.neilenggist.com)

Lasting is organic, sewn with

Temporality that networks and reaches

Always to haunt as its

Most forward. Young

Bushes can take punches,

Hardly account for

Being moved through

Firmly, revert to whatever

They had been,

Whatever they had known,

Bullheaded and apolitically.  

In the minds of enough children

A man can live two hundred years;

So long as he’s dead, he can be handled

Like an old rice bowl

Perched in the bushes

That had persisted to scream a name, 

A string of seasons

And the scents that had stained it.

Your face eschews conversance 

With blight.  I see

Glee is only passing, as it flushes 

From your cheeks so thorough, 

With such alacrity.  

This isn’t yours, 

Doraliz, clamped by a country impregnable 

By fruition, where young men don’t raise hands but 

Swing them for precedence; a city from which

I wish you deliverance, not necessarily passage.

Your smile is a stretch, 

At rest you are pensive, 

Hunched over your

Thighs, belly-ache, your 

Hands stick to mine tourist dry

As cash.

It is important to overhear sometimes, not.

A mongrel herself, mentioned

In that pasta kitchen in Tampa

He looked a little like the Grinch.  Said,

“I make a lot

Of money, I’d like to keep it

All, thank you.”

I thought both she and Barack were

Quite wonderful looking folks, 

Laughed being attracted to her 

Until then.  I eat alone often and once

Spoke in a chapel, said

The sense of sight

Overrides, that if God was really the people’s

He wouldn’t have set us so far apart,

Wouldn’t have made the seas tenable.

That like polarities would never embrace.

My older cousin was a metal head who

Liked to swing butterfly knives he’d intercept

Monthly from the mailman. 

He used to try to hypnotize

My sister and I with hand jives and elixirs.

He showed me my first magnet age six, 

Buttered the little kitchen television with it, 

Held the future was through the silver lining

Between the magnets legs.

I thought the way they’d so ardently

Insist on refusing the others advances head on

Across the linoleum was more impressive;

Couldn’t understand why he gave up on the trunk of Legos I’d

Dump on the living room floor

While he tried to burn pine needles in the yard.

I’d like to plug gaping wants

So I’m not pulled apart by 

What it is 

That on account of my self

I must not be without

For long.

Without the libido

Say,

In a matter of years 

I could become water

Which cannot want

Merely bows

Its head into any shaped 

Temple,

Evaporates.

**

The ground asks for lightning–

Thunder does not assault but courts,

Poeses like the trenchant answering of prayer lain

Properly upon the ground.

A guttural scream is one part horror 

–Any brand will do,

And one part lacking physical activity.

Just like the lightning in looming,

Flashing.

A Judy meets me at a disco.  She is easy-going, likes to make out early, wears Uncomfortable heels and comfortable jeans.  Her younger sister is aggressive.  She has taken the family confidence and set it more brazenly than her sister has.  Already with child, who’s name is tattooed over her foot in the window of her high heels.  

We hang out at the same parties and get loaded full of the same shit.  I can feel Marge walk in on my skin, scampering across the television, off, that holds all of the pictures we don’t take.  She throws herself about like a horseshoe, believes she is a gift, like the best preachers do.  She is a bouquet of perfumed, plastic bangles around my neck, she must be seen a second time if it doesn’t burn the first.  

Marge can’t stand to walk, curses like a man, freezes to watch you kiss her not kissing you back.  

Yes, he meant all that shit,

Even the tangent, the scent,

From which he wouldn’t return,

Something

Forgotten burning. 

You tell me,

What’s the sense in finitude and understanding

When it isn’t black and white outside?

Artistically, it is uncouth to repeat 

There lies 

A high-art line 

Right of which 

Refrain marks it lowly.  

What is vying too hard

To be heard? To peck or to order 

What relatively is most 

Pressing by the mathematician’s

mode?

If you turn too many corners

Inordinately

We backtrack,

Rehash.

Repetition is the only consistent 

Treatment of any synthesis of information

Main street Las Vegas;

An only way in or out of learning 

Flushes the actual contour of that which

Provokes with candor,

A preservative.

Hardening

Is an illusion that 

History sits stacked in homes, proud,

Touches, that the future cannot, is

Gaseous.  

–Crippling.

We’ve transgressed before

Multitudes of stimuli

That have picked us apart 

In the plain specter of their 

Being there, inanimate.

Within this encirclement are lies

Lined aisles of white lies

Like hall frames that stand for what it is

That is missing

Between Saturday and Sunday

Between some love for a you

And some hate of a self–

What is not unwelcome but consummately troublesome, near;

The newspaper, and the neighbors that

are not quite friends.

Private folks are wounded,

Public folks pray for martyrdom, stakes.

Greenland described as an iceberg

Venezuela; bottle rockets

tearing through a carnival.