Border Town

Have you ever walked a border town beside the edge of the sea?
Where rocks grow below your feet and beckon you entrance?
The wind is cold and unstoppable guiding your every fall
And all I can do is dwell between, for in between is all

I walk the border towns and can’t seem to stop
I’m walking these border towns and my foot slips in a crack
Where bits of sea splash in the depths
And creatures bob in waves unseen

Border town is all around
It appears with every step
Not too sure if this ever ends
Can’t recall when first I noticed

But in the border towns you are surrounded
On either side by Destination
In the border towns you’re the edge
On the little line of noticing

The Daughter Project

Yesterday’s talk in circles like vultures above a carcass
‘til you pick out the hate in my bones
The mother marrow
Separate flesh from bone and set me free
like a Jain mountain mystery

Still say you loved me (and the next minute beat it out of me)
Forgetting biology is asking too much
And you’ve never looked at me with fresh eyes
without despising or realizing
I could be possessed by an angel or God
and still you see your decay projected onto prodigy

I will separate from you
A guest in my mother’s house
Uninvited embarrassment
Electra’s treasure locked in the closet

My rebirth independent from mother or father
While making love to the Other
Immaculate conceptualization of starting all over
And I’m goodness after all
I always was a good little girl

Conquistadora

I

I’m a crude pirate full to the brim with passion
Enough for a tribe or a legion
For a life of plunder
Equipped with a sharp intellect
A temper of lightening and thunder

My compassion altogether wider
Feeling so wide like the world
Meet me on the street and I’ll fail to recognize you

Such a snob, a fraud, pretending and friendless
Rich yet penniless
I sow the life of independence
The sour taste of pettiness

Reap the fruits of emptiness and
Build a fire
Burn it all and throw it against the wall
Starting over

II

New name, new identity
Cut the strings that tie me down to anything
What is Benavides?
What are names synominous with forgotten Sephardic royalty?
What is Colorado?
And the reddest earth and juniper valleys that flow within me?

These emotions of nostalgia nauseate me
Throw it all down the communal garbage ravine
Let the gatherers take what they need and leave the rest to rust

I move on like a ghost
A shape-shifter who’s forgotten her art
I’m not human, nor really here

My heart is so full its bursting from wear
I vomit out old lovers and
Purge myself of all memories
Illusions and impurities of something unique or special

I’ve honored you all more than your worth
And now I’ve no more use of you
You all like spiritual leeches in my memory
A cancer of feeling I habitually feed
In the prison of nostalgia

I’m done with that
Like the shedding of a healthy uterus
Like a snake against the bark of a tree

Perhaps nostalgia is just a symptom of the disease
Not living fully, not living presently
If I die without any nostalgia
Then I would have lived purely

Nostalgia is the soul intuitively missing when we lived without
This bullshit of individual identity

Visionary Paranoia

They whisper in the dark places of the local watering hole
Observing and cackling my every swerve
My thoughts reveal too clearly on my face
Serve me not well among the carnivores
They judge me unjustly
And single me out among the crowd
As if I turned on the lighthouse magnet beaming
of the rejected
I take it the best I can bravely, cowardly,
Until all pride of acceptance is purified in the fire of humiliation
Branded the freak wherever I go

I unknowingly rejected the unspoken social contract
That endeared me to the ultimate conformity
Makes me want to confront them
Be bold and well spoken in my originality
Confrontation head on
For one more chance of acceptance

Not so that I can finally belong
But to give them one more chance to find me
Give me another chance to be loving
To confirm their unbelievable rudeness
Display my visionary detachment once and for all

Valentine's song

For a grown man, a professional in your world
You play silly games still with the girls
You attract them
and put daydreams in their heads
The smartest of them, the one most misled
And when she makes you conscious ever so slightly
Of your game
You feel caught in the web
She spun
But you instigated
She’ll respond in kind
And in the end, you run

The weaving of a year
A year from this moment
The web of a romance so unforgettable in the tropical setting
Two strangers on an abandoned Asian island
Consummating their first impressions

The penetration of a moonless night
The surf breaking urgently over their nakedness
Drowning in a phosphorescent current on Oneness

You finish what you’ve started when it suits you
You finish just before it really begins

She is wiser than you in her fearlessness
And you still play silly games with the girls
You feel caught in the web you strung
And she spun
Yet you instigated

She’ll respond ever braver
And in the end you always run

Phoenix in Venus' Labia

She said she was ruled by Aphrodite
So she kept to herself, set apart
A moon in orbit for somebody else
A temptation to be herself
She barely resisted seducing somebody
Who belonged to somebody else

She knew her art well
A craftsman of flesh and the dark
So she kept to herself
Kept her talents to herself
And nurtured eroticism with God
Divinely set apart

She was made to come over and over again
To be an oven of orgasms
For the enraptured to burn in
For the mortal to gain momentary immortality
The Dark Lord kidnapped her for a season
She died and rose up like Lazarus
And died and rose like Jesus

If distance makes love understandable it’s a phony imitation
Love is understandable in union
Beyond intellectualization
So she saw her Lover in everything
He was everywhere instigating, caressing, fingering

She was made to come to Him
To come over and over again
Because of Him

The Letter

The letter burns in my hand
Don’t resist
Don’t even sit

Wait a little while longer
Present company
These walls, music, mountains wouldn’t understand
Nor are they wanted
Just for this moment

The letter burns in my fingers
Exotic stamps
Cryptic and foreign alphabet
Im alone united with this letter

Tear me open with no care to the packaging
Tear me open so secret pictures fall to your lap

Not a letter at all
But simple poetry biblical and ancient
My face burns w/age
My hair is turning silver

This letter w/Mercury’s wing
Matzu’s fingerprints
Mother Mary’s perfume
Not a letter at all.

Spectacles of Soft Hair

The nearly visible hair on my thighs twitch like antenna
Or a lizard tongue smelling the air glistening like spider web

A hair will twitch intuitive on the sensitive spaces
Of expansive surface flesh
What information is received and transmitted f/such finely tuned receptors?
The future of course

I’ll keep the images to myself
But the method is always same
No matter if my eyes are opened or closed
The visions are crisp and untainted

I see w/ the spectacles of soft hair on my thighs

The Convict

Convictions lost
Convictions rediscovered
Can’t shake the conviction
We were made for each other

Once we owned the city
Legendary Dean Cassidy Denver
From the Capitol Building
To the Snake Pit Disco

The priestess landlady read the cards
Fight and not stop for blood
Fight ‘til the police show up
Three days, three nights in the belly of
Denver City and County

Uncork the bottle of Beaujolais
Walk to the hitman corner liquor store
Take my hand in the winter snowfall
I take your hand on an Indian summer night

Function like treading water
You and I much the same
I just appear to function better

Let the shower run, Love
This city is such a desert in disguise
Steam our pad
Lie down wet beside me
We’ll cool off the heat together
With love

Cover my nakedness over, Love
It’s much too cold to be uncovered
Too expensive to use the old heaters
Layer me with your numerous quilts
Warm me with the expertise of my body knowledge
We stay cozy together with Love

Function like treading water
You and I almost the same
I just seem to function better

My dignity is in the suffering
The pain of our separation
The last sensation of Christ on the Cross
My dignity is in the humbleness
The deficiency of life w/o you

Put on my headphones

Put on my headphones
Inhaling deeply
The full moon

Surrounded by translucent
Dancing swirls of nebulae
Twirling nightgowns hemless

My moon phase renewal
Usually a full moon
Bleeding my sterile loss

Reverse it all on the other side of the planet

Full moon ovulation
Breasts harder and swollen
Anticipating bigger hands

I bleed in the dark
These people live in the dark
But the sun is shining

Pity

I found you hiding
Weary and starving
Alone beside the communal garbage

My surprise was obvious
I’m so obvious
Yet all you assumed was wrong

I think you liked me
Friendly, uncompromising
But I feel your misogynic frequency

I depart quickly like a mystery
You’ll search your whole life for
I pity the woman who loves you

Shall we take a picture?

Shall we take a picture?
Freeze this moment
For future reference
Or is that too tangible?

There is attachment in looking back
Remembering
In perfecting an image
And keeping it

Freeze a moment
That’s already lost-
All we ever observe cannot be contained
We will separate as everyone
Part ways in partnership

Makes me realize I’m loosing time
I’ve extended more time on this island
At my inclination
Your joking suggestion

In 3 days and 3 nights
I will leave you like a Savior on a propeller plane
And wonder…
And wonder…

Will I hear from you? Or disappear carded and numbered
In the catalog of experiences collected like common seashells on any beach

I think you a bigger man that that
I cannot pretend to be calm

So calm me and claim me
These 3 days and 3 nights

Dreaming of Istanbul

I

How do I explain our connection?
Having never been properly introduced
meet me anyway
Inducing you with intuition
Giving me visions of coming salutations

Your guardian spirits have been seen fellowshipping w/ my angels
The spirit world brings us together
What stories and laughter are exchanged of their earthly stewardship?
Theirs is a pretense of Destiny inevitable

I feel your company among them the invisible
Faintly, I see them like an odor smelled from the corner of my eye

And still I ask,
How to make sense of your connection
An invention of the strangest logic of my mind
The depraved sensuality of the body
And so now I’ll try to answer-

My Iberian blood long cocktailed by Moorish golden ages
Absorbed and integrated long ago
My Syrian great-grandpa who bedded an Indian
Your Allah is not so foreign

I harmonize perfectly w/ your Sufi heritage
I understand well my body as temple
I’ve had interludes with the Beloved in my garden

Maybe its my Apache and Navajo migrationary places of origin
A far off steppe Kingdom I’ve never seen ruled by Khans and Mongolians
Perhaps we have a common ancestor, a common mother
A similar synthesis of Mediterranean and Asia
of sea and prairie and mountain
I’ve traveled around the world many times this life
in the wandering of mine ancestors
Only to return to the Origin
To Life
To You
The hero of your city
The pride of your father


II
The crowds line the streets armed with flowers and garlands
We trot side by side on horseback
Over 2 thousand years of genetic evolution recorded in the handling of our saddles
Of fiefdoms and clans of horse people
Of mountain people
Of epics of biology and Fate
Exalted for this one moment of unity
Of Love victorious

The wickedness and heartache of history, of war and senselessness
Kneel at once to the sounds of hooves upon the ancient highway
And all the obscurities and mysteries will become knowledge
for the masses
Who close their markets for this holiday
And celebrate this date like a flawless jewel of joy
The purist blend of metals
The gold of fiery sunlight smelted with the distant planet and coldest star


III
You are my sun
The gold of the deepest vein of preciousness
You melt the coldest void of the universe
I am quicksilver, cool as water dripping in caves of gaseous amethyst
Others misplace my honesty as fire

But only you know
I’m the silvery moon reflecting the sun

Double Exposed

Seeing you like a ghost
Still trailing me
Still staring through me
Double exposed

Contact
After so much time
Tell me your secret

Reconfirm
My highest hope
My worst fear

So where do we go f/ here?
Loving others in disguise
Buying time
Til the reunification

Depending on you
Waiting as you struggle
Waiting, waiting, wanting
I struggle too
Letting go not an option
We’ve tried and failed
I’ve never failed you
Believe in you

By All Means

I am the most precious gold
The golden vein leading to the mother load
The Old Mother in us all
Working overtime as usual
Overcoming

Compatriots abroad seek the meeker
“Weaker” sex as Viagra substitute
Aphrodisiac of vanity

Loneliness and inferiority
Complexes make men desperate
To prove collectively
What they subjectively lack

Just look around Taiwan here
Or Thailand, the Philippines, Korea
And see the old losers from home
Livin’ like sun burnt kings
Their only merit is their passports

At first pity these poor sisters
Slaves to the Confusist traditional inferiority
I can’t blame them for wanting freedom
What is love anyway in bondage?

Bondage from the body
Live like a ten-year-old girl
Your whole woman life
W/o breasts or hips
Or a mind to think yourself out with
Except to be devious
To bare male children only

The western man trades love away
For the trophy China doll
Willing and trained to be displayed
Different degrees of companionship
For them it is enough

I need it true and simple

I am vintage wine alone in a cellar
Gathering dust on the surface of my bottle
Internally a masterpiece in waiting
The wait is in the creation
Palatable only to the initiated

Western man a trader by nature
Kills the democracy to be an equal
A challenger in his own language
East and West are equal under God
But different philosophies, ideologies
Make politically quite unequal partners

I cant even have European lovers
So different are we
They’re afraid how to handle me
They can’t understand me
My dialogue, collective destiny

Even in my own starvation
Hunger and in weariness
I’ll not trade my treasure
For one spoonful of incompatibility

I dine with equals
Whoever they may be
I’ve no pretense of superiority

I am a forgotten map
Leading to a mystery
Both the map and its destination
The source and explanation
Are all contained inside me

Wipe the sleep from your eyes
Mine are awake and tired f/watching
Unless love is true
No secret agendas, plots and planning
But open understanding of choices, behaviors

Then by all means continue
W/ the destiny of mankind

Over the sea

Over the sea I sat gazing
Across the thin straight to an ancient enemy
My balcony like a prison, looking through iron bars
My hammock like a sling for an injured body
Selective vision blocks out the sores of ugly concrete apartment buildings
That leads up to the edge of beach and shore

From this distance the water is clean azul
White surf dancing, frolicking like pubescent girls
But I know that beach and water from morning intimacy
It’s as dirty as any communal toilet floor
Stray beach dogs have taken over in gangs
Making a mess of the human’s heavy littering of anything plastic

I don’t fear the undertow as much as the impurities
Finding passage to every orifice and crevice
Or the packs of starving canines, wild and foaming desperate

I love the saltwater enough to show restraint
And admire from the shore and commune with something more

Beyond the sea is sky and mountain
And the intermediaries of my cloud brethren
We link in kindred embrace
So I don’t miss anything subtle

Free and burning

I’m a kind of joke
A ghost and fraud most of all
Not that I keep up appearances
But I question being alive at all
I beg to be eased of this burden of living like I’m independent
Like I’m some kind of secure island

I’d be happy to be a vegetable in a vegetable garden
(organic of course)
Or maybe a putrid, bursting fig
Picked, providing nutrition for some higher life form

Wasn’t I a plant before?
I faintly remember being a mineral
Being lava flow particles, smelted liquid potential

Once we all swirled together
A hot ball of fire
A star shining unison
without identity

Free and burning

Mary in Buddha Country

How do you feel about a woman of pure heart when you meet her?
When you play your part
You actor’s part
The role of a real man?

When the production is over
The taping and the editing
You can freely speak your native accent
Return to wherever you call your home

How do you feel about a woman of pure heart?

Her soul is like a glacier mountain
Where snows never melt
They powder her shoulders like a summer skin
Immortal like a spruce

I’m amazed I think at all
Of real winters
In a land of impossible Christmas fantasies

Here, Christ was never born yet

Scavenger of Affections

When I walk on a freedom path
The beach at night
With these incredible stars like chunky vomit
Each step reminds me of my pain
That wont heal in this climate

I injure myself with the sandals I wear, the fins I swim with
And cough alone in the dark, cough up everything I hide during the day
Like one of the dogs here, dingo looking and big eared

I hear the whispering of the so called polite-people
The pretenders escaping here too
I’m the dog repeatedly shooed away
Finding relief in the cool shade of a palm tree
Detached and embracing his niche as scavenger of affections

Sunburn

My sunburn lips are nearly healed
Raw w/recent exposure
Id avoid bathing if I could
Save the last remnant of island particles
Bottom of the sea pebbles
Hidden in the secret folds of my body
When we lived day and night like amphibians
Colonizing newborn islands

This tan will fade f/ the pollution cloud of separation
Shed this skin and grow into
Something other, better
How much of you will remain in the transformation
More of a question than an answer

Holiday love is like rich food you metabolize quick
But retain forever in the abundant places of flesh memory
In the hidden places
Waiting
Where you found me

Under Siamese Skies

For all the postcard paradise disease and death hide in the shadows
I walk among those dark places beyond human intervention

The sun is harsh and exposing
I’m permeated in the deep places
Broken and inside out
I wait for God and call him w/ struggle

I get lost in the distance between us
Makes me run into the hills like a hermit
And evade social responsibility w/ fellow man
I’ve tired of pretending
Pretending its all just paradise

Bachelor

You must have been feeling fearless
Blame phosphorescent New Moon tides
The nakedness of skin
The taste of saltwater in my mouth

I look in your eyes searching for assurances
And found none
Found nothing but bewilderment
As if you haven’t the slightest experience to compare this with

Colder than Science
Remote f/ even experimentation
You’re lucky to travel tropically
Our introduction, exotic seduction
A legend we’re creating
A new generation, a nation inside me
I am the pillar
Who finds your mildness frightening

Among The Multitudes

Exiled from Paradise
Driven out by angels in disguise
Ive worshipped a false deity

Feeling you over leagues and lifetimes
Let me go
Not in this life ever

Youre nearer now
I call you by thought
Finding you easily within reach

The voices told me to wander
Search for a promised land
Bear fruits lush in the desert within

Blossoms bloom in bloody thorns
Baptismal waters run underground
But I find you specifically
One thought, one hope
One desert star among the multitudes

We find each other
Beyond absolutes
Are paradoxes worth pursuing
Further
Until consumed

No one but you
I break open
Breakdown to the uttermost
Inside out
Inside sanctuary with walls tumbling

The source and the victim are one

Ode to Sir Spring

Drink an extra glass of wine
To idly pass the time
I have a moment
10 minutes maybe
Depending on the baby
She always needs me
I forget who I used to be

Am I someone better?
Wonder what the younger crowd thinks of me
I was once them, on the outside
Feeling free
Confusing license w/liberty

Now Im really free, painfully forced to
Redefine and learn and led humbly
This change
Depending on goodness
The real reality
Paradise is far f/boring
The schedule and daily routine
Paradise is at first lonesome
The neighborhood creatures’ couple
And alone I commune w/God
w/child
W/myself if Im lucky

Missing the lesser being I used to be
Habit energy unhappy and carnal
Confused and coupled

Changing me will change my destiny
And love accepts me who I am
And He accepts me as I am
The search is over
Walking alone in the garden
w/every tree available to me
I blossom

Fickle footing

Fickle footing in the straight jacket market square
Crowded labyrinth of shining metal wares
Luscious rainbow fruit touts yelling haggles
On whom all survival supposedly depends

Your trader philosophies are castles made of rice porridge
Fairy tales for grownup greed
In your glitter prime I called your bluff
Your shiny stuff couldn’t mask the putrid
Brainless mummification full of pride and dreams of longevity
Fantasies of youthful eternity

Now all the tribe councils gather
Trying to contain the spreading menace of street potential
Laborers who just might have extra time to evolve and revolve
Behead the royals hiding behind cracking castles