and your teeth were floating up there
among the long winding
sutures of the sky.
a few looked up as people do
and saw themselves there
beautiful
with outstretched arms
and grins that demanded
“come over here and
drown with us.”
This small turnout just south of Carmel Highlands
holds more of the Holy than I am able
to capture here. I am sitting in the bed
of my mom’s Ford something, which she selflessly
lends to me any time I come back here
and I am thinking of impulse, foolishness,
and self-exile, though in the scope of
all history, I’m sure this is pretty dumb.
All I know now is that god’s land has been long
occupied, and though the waves crash wildly
against patient rocks and the wind hisses an
eternally drumming note, this place feels
domesticated; it’s displayed like a wicked
petting zoo. A few free things make their home
in the sky, though even they depend on
the will of people to preserve something
fundamental here. Only the deep fault lines
waiting to rise and stretch their stiff bones remain
unmanageable. There are always other
powers that will refuse to bend under the
pressure of human desire--unseen, still,
a cold and unfeeling creature which will
carelessly bring to dust a whole world of
convenience that invites millions to forget:
The only ones telling the stories are us.
L O V E / / R O O M
Though I love
Though I am inclined to sin(g)
Though Pontevin’s Spirit still
dances ( inside of me )
Though my words hang above my
head like a halo or
a crane
I am still confined to the three rooms I have made.
There is a room with - out
windows / or / lights
and I can only go in when
t h e d o o r o p e n s
but I can never see what’s inside.
There is a room of
stolen gold that is
locked so nobody else might
steal it/backfromme.
There is a room I
tried to burn away once (
look how it only
dulls the bright of my
eyes / look
how the ashes settle
in the spaces under my eyes
).
there is nothing sad about broken.
each of us is a
patchwork car job
held together with
duct-tape & bailing wire
and the world is an
invisible factory floor
chopping together
chunks of body & heart
with a ricocheting clash
like armies and storm clouds
in the dark. memory might
be lain upon the flesh
as a thin layer of whatever paint;
and the back fender that was
never readjusted, slapped
as if to say
“there is nothing else to do here.”
a portion of some wall rises
letting the light of reality
ooze in like water or sludge
and another broken thing is
released, playing on a limping
tire like a skip and finding
in the junkyard of the soul
the immortal scraps of each other.
you are not dead
you are dying, but
you are not dead
your dying is of the dead
and you’re dead are never dying
still, you are not dead
my dead asked me about the dying
the dead always seem to forget the dying
while the dying always remember the dead
until they are also dead
my dead asked me about the dying
as the dying became a part of the dead
the dead opened and the dying went in
and the dead always seem to forget the dying
i am not dead but I sometimes forget the dying
the dying come to me and remind me of the dead
for the dead exists in all the dying
and the dying is absent of all the dead
the dying sometimes imagine the dead are singing to them
the dying build vessels for the dead
but the dead never inhabit them
the dead are always forgetting the dying
still, you are not dead.
Bionote
Brian Sheffield is a performance poet living and working in New York. He is Co-founder and Editor-in-chief of Mad Gleam Press, which publishes POST(blank), a French-American Word Art journal. He has been published internationally through small and independent journals and anthologies.
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