/lit/ - Literature

I want my limbs to be strewn arabesque limbs,
not some expression of a dry breath or statuary lungs hung with canvas,
or granite.
They are white, clean, and spotless of tire tracks—
an unspoiled place of rest for the tired bee or drop of rain.
Pure
as Saint Sebastian before he was perfectly slain.
Gift me the ability to be memorized by lens;
to stand erect
towards the sun, God, my mother (so far away!) has given
us Spring and a proper birth from the cruelest months
of suffering in the stony rubbish of grass.
(Those somnolence’s,
those strands of ritualistic hair, those ardent rejecters of recumbency)

Life becomes what we turn out to not be and here I am
growing with a symbolic order turned new
with a delicate blow against delicate cotton.

Take the scattering of plotted grass to my west and east that spring up
and exclaim they are the stuff of natural earth that I cannot match.
They are the dirt, as I am in the dirt.


The wind controls the emotions of stoics; fluttering the trees with its sudden isolation, needing the regalements of appreciation for its service.

“Aesop has written about my wit; yet all I ask for is a medium for the purpose of self-expression.”


Wind has replaced God in the eyes of Hokusai. Yet
I am in the lines of Lowell, Williams; writers, those thieves.

Old age come to me, let me dry in the rains of May
somewhere in Louisiana, like moonlit bone against the ashen rust of mausoleums.
I can feel the grass
growing in the icebox around my brown. Nothing more
than a green wasteland, I am surrounded by the tonalities
of Summer and all.

limbs, sick as I am sick!
Vibrant opacity overtakes my old and outstretched limbs
still yearning for grace (even a day more)! and
the girl stares me down with a gasp
releasing
the pressurized air of my severance. Oh!
ball of cotton am I, weed am I;

Become nothing, wind, drone your lyrics,
fall,
express the water disguised as a mirror.

Flower I am not (but not more: not more) : nor chartreuse or nacre; only
a Spanish tragedy. I am a tunnel, a seaweed-green (who shares my lack of petals)
plucked by the hands of a little girl and
tossed onto the bleached ground
after I have been used to the wind,
the wind that I define.