Some Other Light

I almost get the picture but my brain and thumb
Are out of synch, one dreaming, the other balancing stuff.
It's an old dream in a new-ish city, oil leaking skylights
Across the entire dome of tomorrow until we see
The universe and the blue sky in the same puddle;
Until the flight that carries and the flight that punctures
Are the same thing, explosions and ribbons
Ripping and lacing the sky open and whole simultaneously.
We are dreaming in gloves and calipers, only a little
Star stuff and gunpowder before the colors rend
Our sight from darkness and give us light.
Daydreaming in the city already smothered
By creeks and bayous and rivers dreaming of salt depths,
Of the deep darkness where islands are born,
Some other current, some other light
One facing the heart, one facing the heights.

Sharing today with Poets United for Poetry Pantry #498 (sorry it's not a Halloween poem!) and with The Sunday Muse for Sunday Muse #79. 

NaNoWriMo is coming up and I'm going to be going for the 50K (words, that is) this November, so I might be erratic in my poetry. While November looms before me, I'm thinking of a writing class I recently attended and how I want to approach the project this time. There is a piece that's gnawing at me, asking me whether the other pieces are dodges for the things I could say but don't. Someone claimed today that responsibility was restricted to what you do...you can't be responsible for something global (like pop culture) or for sins committed in the past...but I'm feeling like writing has become...something that shows more blindness than insight for me. And so, perhaps, this November, I'm going to pick a project I don't like and remember what it means to write about the things that bite. Or...maybe not. See you on the other side of November, when I know what I've written. 

-- Chrissa

Where is My Answer?

There should have been a beginning:
There never is, of course
There is edge of darkness, sight of the ceiling, settling of the spine
Before the motor catches, deep like a breath.
I've never believed in anything like this,
This road that narrows and drops, its skinned edges,
Pinched asphalt leading to places
You're going to have to leave--sooner,
Faster.

There should have been a moral;
There can't be acidic crystals below
Titrated sharply from all the mistakes, flickering live cave paintings
Because it ends abruptly, interrupted
As if it isn't a story and I'm not warning
Myself that there are turns ahead on this
Path.

Sharing today with The Sunday Muse and Poets United. I've been putting notes on paper for November's NaNoWriMo draft and thinking about places that become more and more placeless and that restless undertone of "time to move, time to move." Love the way the picture chimes with the idea of movement without any of the mundane needs of going. Where would we migrate if our dreams were geese and we had to chase our flocks? 

-- Chrissa

My Whole Body

My whole body becomes chest and throat; October raises me, like a forest sliced and glued and soundboarded, to his neck. He will bring the wind, the last heat, and the sudden fall of night. Until this concert, I had always imagined my ghosts drifting in robes. I am varnished with a formula only necromancers and beetles know. Everyone says the instruments are electric now; we are cyborgs so that you won’t fear when the night breaks into inhuman traffic; we are all electric shifts, spots of shadow and cold. Or that is October. In his tuxedo and with those dark shoes polished so that I am looking at the limelight below...or a streetlight, beyond which the stars are blank and silent.

My whole body is chest and throat—you think he plays a special effect. A game of wires and electronics. A game of hunting for the soul in the buzz of a human house, humming to itself and letting its doors drift open. Like the game we play listening to the static of the stars, already turned between channels. Too much light pollution on the stage to see them in the midnight leather, they are only pieces of all of us, in the dust.

My whole body has become chest and throat and it is my voice that threads your nerves, plucks your stomach, and seems, almost, to form words in the goosebumps trailing beneath your formal attire. I sing in muscle. I linger in the drift of honey-crusted pine sap scraping across strings you’ll never quite see. I sing in the taste of the forest October remembers like an old score, long settled.

My whole body has become chest and throat. A song moans in the rafters.

Sharing today with The Sunday Muse and with Poets United, provided this passes their threshold for prose. :) I'm glad that October is here and I'm hoping that the rumors of a cool front next week will prove true.

-- Chrissa