Jerry Gordon (2.26.06)

Abandoning the Solid


The wall is where we start.
From there we can't resist departing
and abandoning the solid. We touch
and it is touching myself.

I let the ocean fall from my hands as rain.
At such times I almost know generosity.
I almost fathom the infinity of
your patience,
letting each foot fall in its print
and each head loll in its sleep.

This is the language I read in dream billboards--
the city of poetic highrises
where words are building the sky
as a slightly unfinished sentence.
I read it
for as long as I can leave off understanding it
as what I want.

What does it mean?

I'm still afraid enough to ask that.


. . .

It Asks


"Why are you here?" it asks.
I'm here to drop the bubble of poetry into your vein,
to commit the necessary crimes of shame and grandeur,
to abandon every mask of self I love and therefore fall in hate with,
to set the clock forward and back,
to always be arriving in the chariot of doubt,
to learn how to carry each person into burning buildings,
to film this slow-motion car crash.
I'm here to ride the tattoo ink and build castles of smoke,
to appear,
to drift beyond sanity,
to keep each creek in tune,
to miss the chances others take
and paint a single corridor of mind with soot and prophesy.
I'm here to lose my way and every sense of punishing sureness.
I'm here to be fearless
because what matters is to get hit in the face, to smile in photos
and to encircle my arms with flowers.
My healing and decay ressemble my mirror of pride and envy.
I'm here to touch the surfaces of water,
to ruin what I've worked for and ignore what's important.
I'm here to look into your eyes as you look away,
awaiting your return before I flee into dream bedrooms.
I'm here to lock doors wide open and collect the nails of effects.
I'm here to beg and be betrayed, as is every bastard son's birthrite.
I'm here to breathe and never cease returning.

. . .

A Trespasser


I come out of my door
in the big-drop rain
and find a man taking shelter
beneath my eave,
like some elderly angel
in a soaked white shirt,
an odd pattern printed on his chest.

My first thought is he's my daughter--
the girl whose name means Dream.
But she never looks at me
with the humble eyes of a trespasser.
She'd never appologize
for being on the stoop.
She does not have
the thick skin of the sun
around her eyes.

So, to find him here
feels like catching a glimpse
at a mirror of a future;
a man paused by rain
using a tiny roof to wait
for the sky to dry.
A stranger, enough like me
to one day be me, unknown
but just beyond the door.


. . .

It's Afternoon


It's not everlasting,
it's just the afternoon
and with it we're completed
in our flawless incompletion.
It's not tender.
It's not new.
It's just what we are going through
and that's the Big Bang culmination
of God's first exhalation of the word.
The honest ease of all our struggle.
The indigo dragonfly's flutter.
The dust and magic song of rust
as it takes us back to grass
beyond our longing. Our belongings
coming back from all these
strangers' pockets.


. . .

Asleep
on the other side of the train,
a woman's head lolls
to the shudders of the LoopLine.
Her mouth is open
in an endless "ah."
Her finger keeps
a place in her book.

I don't imagine the world
she is dreaming.
Last year I would have
been so arrogant.

Today it is enough
to see her thumb tap twice
and know she believes her lies
as much as I.


. . .

This End of Night

I have no pet.
I only have my ignorance
so I chain it to a leash
and walk it proudly
through this end of night,
dressed up
in elaborate fashions
that never hide the fact
that it is really my ignorance.
People smile as it barks and bays
and yips and yaps
and tries to hump their shoes.
"Oh, so cute." "Look, look at it. It's
just like you," they say
as their dog squats, delicately shitting
polite memories on the sidewalk.

My ignorance sniffs itself
in such delight. It would be happy
to do it all night long, but I drag it on,
against its will. We have our loop to make
and a schedule to keep. We have to get back
to see the man made of light
and nod when our cue is flashed.

I have no pet.
I only have my ignorance.
I walk it proudly
through this end of night.


. . .

As Fallen Flowers Do


Ophelia floats within
her world of fluid blues.
Watching the past grow faint upstream,
she dreams of gravity
and our only moment.

Her shoulders fall.
Her hair looks full of wind.
A bubble escapes from her lips,
rising past paper flowers folded for emotions:

Irises of papyrus for guessing.
Roses of vellum for rememberance.
A hyacinth of cigarette foil for doubt.

They float around her breasts
as fallen flowers do; obscuring
what is too beautiful.
They will never get to burn
and leave their lines of smoke in our eyes.
For that, we must imagine
beyond what is and isn't
possible.


for a Chika Yoshii painting at Panarama 9.10.05


. . .

Falling Down


No one else can fall down for you.
It's all your own
embrace with gravity
and the intimate percussion of splat.

That!
That's the face
we all know firsthand
rising up through hands stinging
like the smallest sands of fire.

And I can imagine the earliest man
followed your ritual lead:
standing up, wiping his hands
down his hairy pants
and then clapping two or three times
in the way that has come to mean,
"I'm done with this."


inspired by seeing a 2 year-old boy trip and fall
9.13.05