Poem-A-Day #241 : Everywhere / The Dream

Everywhere / The Dream

It's hard not to see apocalypse everywhere

The dream of drowning again - the one with the boat
and the attempt at fleeing - the one where your arms just
give out and your lungs are only shrubs not trees

The one with the darkness of water - the tingling
necessity of cold - spikes of jellyfish tentacles
never teeth not sharks this isn't that kind of thing - it
is a gentle death - so fucking quiet

Remember when you dreamt of bees all the time

They would land on your cans of soda - somehow find
the hole in your jeans and sit on your flesh - tongue
the salts there like miners looking for veins

Those were good times - less cold - often so full of sun
that you would wake up needing aloe on everything
feeling itched like poison oak - you drew oak leaf
patterns across every page of every book you read

At 7 AM the phone alerts you that a child has been taken

It is the sound of alarm - a sort of bleating in the darkness
that also resembles the klaxon of air raids - a unexploded
bomb in a churchyard - the mine your foot just ticked

The child is traveling in a beige car - are there
still beige things in the universe that do not travel - that
do not move constantly towards being less beige
do they all have children in them

Then at 9 the notice of a bomb downtown - a robot
lobster clawing at it - digging in a trash can or a strange
backpacks large pockets - there is a question in the sound
of alarm and that question is not why

In the dream of drowning there is a moment where you want ice cream

And that is natural - you probably want to go back
towards the kitchen - the boat sinking breaking falling apart
about you - you want those churned salt-licked milk crystals

There isn't anything clear in all this is dark - it is night
will continue to be so - the bomb will not be found - will not go off
the boat will sink and sink and sink because it is an unreal
a fractal inside your brain of what a drowning looks like

Poem-A-Day #203 : Driven

Driven

We are really going - we will not need a map

Until the wheels are worn - and we have come
to the end of the world - the journey will be the positive action

Dear Evil - Oleander is poison is the flower of Hiroshima
it was the first to bloom after the bombs exploded and the buildings burned

When I died - the empty field the road to nowhere the open gates
of the spell - we will come back - we will break the spell

The end of the world is a cup of stars - insist on
the cup of stars - hope - find - a house of stars

The map is a line dear Evil - it crawls like millipedes

Julie Harris in The Haunting (1963)

Poem-A-Day #124 : Guernica

Day 2 of my Remember project stumbles to the starting point of my obsession with Pablo Picasso's Guernica. It began with a really odd piece of theater. A high school did an original dance/movement piece that slowly revealed the full tableau of the painting across the stage. Each of the figures in the painting was given a solo dance. It was crazy and wonderful.

The original:

Guernica (12/6/98)

Came from above the rain
The purple is broken open
Tossing summersaults in the air it falls
Something inside me makes me want to run
Something inside me makes me want to put my arms up like I were crucified
Someone inside me runs away and is gone
Came down to earth
The red is spread out
Twisting summersaults in the air it falls
Guernica is confronted
Guernica is gone


The edit:

Guernica

From above the purple
          above the rain
the sky is open

The pouring face tosses itself in the air
          it falls

          You want to run

          You want to be crucified

          You are both

Red spreads like paint
          summersaulting over the earth

It ignites
          and within moments
it is gone

Guernica (1937) - Pablo Picasso