I Hope, Or I Could Not Live.

So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all.

Jeanette Winterson, from The PowerBook (via lifeinpoetry)

Photo by Byron Johnson 

skin the poet

skin open the poet to find out how books have been deceiving you: not all hearts pump blood; some, expand in rhymes & contract in line breaks.

skin open the poet to confirm the rumor that between the liver & the spleen lives a tiny being; an imp, absent in daydreams -a social drinker- & a lover of the sax.

1.- take the poet’s arm, & rip off a tear of skin. behold a waterfall of metaphors soak your shoes in summer’s breeze.

2.- on a surgical table, lay your poet down in such way that his pointy nose threats to drill into the ground.   & with the help of a sharp knife, split the meadow on his back into two nations that might have lost it all in war. proceed then to spread open these lands, & discover that a poet’s spine abides as marble columns once did in falling rome: oh the burn or the glory? 3.- light a match & heat the poet’s earlobes to 95 °. careful, the smoky smell of blue winter shades might stupefy your brains   whilst the poet’s head gets caught in flames. if so: no stress, your poet’s mouth muscles might stretch into a smile, but do keep in mind it’s just an involuntary contraction. or not.

4.- once the fire’s out & the buzzcut’s ready, grab your baseball bat & crack the poet’s tibia by the half. hollow bones & secret chambers. see that rolled up paper hidden in there? take it out & read it to the skies; correct, it is nothing but the transcripts of the poet’s conversations with the moon. tally marks for bleeding hearts.  

5.- as a final act of this medical extravaganza, severe the poet’s head & hold it between your hands. do you feel it slowly floating, as if being drawn toward the clouds?   stitch the head back in place using a silver needle & a thread of slurred speech. remember poets heal on empty illusions & broken things.

that is all for poetic anatomy 101…   …now wake up the poet.

- @skinthepoet 

Flowers which as in a dream at sunset I watered faithfully not knowing how much I loved them. I am so lonely in my glory.

Allen Ginsberg, “Transcription of Organ Music,” Howl (via millionen)

I want to open my mouth and sound a language that calls all language home.

Nickole Brown, A Prayer to Talk to Animals (via tristealven)

scientists fear

with a hand on the window frame, you looked out at the night sky. & turning your head toward me, you said there was this theory about the universe being ever e   x      p        a           n             d                i                  n                     g.

that every star, planet, galaxy & blackhole currently alive, is endlessly drifting apart from it all.

as though in their hovering for distance, in their majestic swaying through stellar matter, every atom of the universe claimed independence from our shared existence.  

that same night our last the spellbinding vibes in your beauty & that rant over the cosmos, walked me into a laberynth of oblivion; cause what i forgot to tell you & what you didn't seem to know, was that there is another theory out there: an antithesis on the dynamics of the universe.

scientists suspect the universe will eventually stop its expansion to begin its c o n t r a c t i o n. exactly as the ball vertically thrown to reach the sky, that at a certain height surrenders to gravity & starts its way down.

scientists fear that every star & planet & galaxy & blackhole will shrink into a single spot in place & time.   a sort of big bang in reverse. outside going in.

boom

which is to say: you fled away from me to smash piece by piece the things we had built. i guess in some shape or form we mimicked the universe by drifting away from each other; by sitting on opposite edges of this galaxy; dodging our own asteroids; breathing distant stardust & riding comets that might never cross paths.  

imagine, just imagine that these scientists' fear comes true   & all we know to exist begins to compress; will the universe then bring us back to where we were?

a massive clash. gallactic friction.

cosmos to cosmos, blackhole to blackhole, planet to planet, & lips to lips.

hey, this might just be the universe reminding us that       we are destined to collide.

- @skinthepoet