Cue orchestra.
Burn sun.
EXT. DAWN.
Green palms sway
notes of music
for napalm to play
Violet smoke swells
disappears
crescendo, decrescendo.
Helicopters appear.
Waltz.
Blades twirl
clear smoke away
clearing throats.
Song arises
from descending fire.
Dance in three
steps: bomb,
forest, song.
Prelude.
Gown dark, sultry,
fluttering, winking
smoke, shadow
stirs breeze
and fabric spins around legs,
the twirl of helicopter blades
lilting purple silk
smoke
song.
Four-step,
four walls, ceiling
fan, blades, motor mutter
chant –
breeze ruffles hair
and naked bed sheets
like palm leaves.
INT. DAWN.
Jump Fall
Lizard climb
tightwire through
drifts canopy
along cloak river;
gasp hangs
air audience
tingle breath
no clap yet.
Balance fitted
costume sparkle
scales sequins
sweat along wire
tight,
lizard through
breath watched
air tight
wire hangs
audience drift
along sweat.
Frog laugh
canopy crooked
croak tongue dirt
eyes poisoning
tight spectacle
loose wire
hands claws
dive smooth
spotlight scales
danger shimmer
costume eyes
croak hands
spectacle gasp
smooth hangs lizard
scales sequins
audience claws.
Body Orbit
Gallant slime wraps
like veins around
the rainbow arc of the bow
on the boat
and its red
is a thirsty tongue
with an invisible cut of acid
flowing through
the wet body.
Undulating lilac
water playfully grapples
the fingers stretching
muscles, they scratch
a twilight game
in ripples reflects
the knuckled steel
nails and hands
are mast, deck.
Gliding orange-slice sky
glows hot,
palmed and plucked
for acid juice
by the pulping hands
wreathed in slime glory,
hungry body thumps,
writhes,
bobs.
River mouth
ready to swallow,
to gulp the sweet
and mellow gait,
the fluid stride
is blue glass of dessert wine
to slurp along
the red tongue
and glittering
starlight teeth.
Skylight
Shock spray in technicolored sparks
fleet through the black midnight dome
sky, not sure if it’s night or day or if
it’s just forgetful combination.
Flash of sprinkled rocket light, memories
bright one second illuminate
the huge brain sky with no horizon line
to rest on, just swampy shadow mist
and firework rememberings, who explode
then tun ash, cloud,
lazily crumble gray through mind’s
labyrinth air and flutter daintily
as embers now on red sand shore
where clattering jungle fires once seemed
as though they’d burn forever on in war,
embers pulse with thought of fires
they once were, still glow electric orange
and wait for a brave man to step
lightly over them in an exotic performance
of confused nostalgic pain and pleasure.
Footprints overlap other forgetting footprints
and form prisms that refract the firework light
into grand magician color scarves
which are wishful ways of looking back,
tricks, performances to add surreal cartoon crayons
to black imploding chaos reality
or the memory of it.
Fireworks in celebration of grand acrobatic war,
troupe, uniform, march,
a lipstick kiss and giggling perfume spray on embroidered kerchief
to remember someone by –
kerchief in magician’s pocket,
never ending illusion rainbow spectacle
and a promise of beautiful fireworks
at the end of the show.....
Linger
stepping of the boat
onto hot sand
we see the jewels of the hell
we’re entering
ground turns
in daylight grasping
glass
lightning cooked sand
slipping between
our question mark
toes
beams of light
still
twist like cylinder
kaleidoscopes
ground spins
but in place
we look
to one
another only
mirrors of ourselves
irises revolve
like planet
wheels
the pupil stays center
refracts
rainbow skeletons
of light
femurs are diamonds
used
to cut each other
ribs are sapphires
in a stew
little finger bones
worn
as jewelry
skin tossed on
sand for the lightning
to bleed away
Untitled 1
Forgetting who you areis easy when faces are strobe candles
flashing instead of talking
as they discuss the muted way you wring your hands,
because everyone wrings their hands,
sweats behind bars, steals glances,
and to be everyone is really
to be no one
especially beneath a sun
so tricky as to form a morse code with you
in order to truly melt
silly little
wandering mine-field minds
like the one you lay claim to
but have no claim to - ah,
was that a sip of coffee
you so vividly imagined that it neither seemed real nor was real
but was real enough inside
the thought of tastebuds to wake you up
with cream?
with sugar? and a clap of teeth
against fine china,
against your hot tongue that thirsts to form a sentence
in clear opposition
but cannot help but daintily to
agree.
You stroke the cheek of your face
as a cat might use its paw
to clean its whiskers, then its ears,
and scoop away the sandman’s sleep
that lingers in the fleshy corners
of their eyes, such wooden eyes with undisclosed
dissatisfaction sizzling here and there
among the constantly mutating pupils
that seem both to absorb the flaying sunlight
they love and also to shield against it
in a curious combination
of adoring and hatred, which,
for some reason,
always seem closest when at odds,
and are never not at odds
and, you think, what an interesting phrase
as if odds were a place you could be at,
and perhaps is not just an unattainable theoretical place
but a present state
that you’re in,
and how you’ve gotten here is surely
what’s on everyone’s minds as they watch
the squirming creature
that signs your name, speaks your voice, runs its
hand across your unshaven face
and asks your questions with your lips,
"Are the bars of the cage really the hours
melting with the moon somewhere
between my eyelashes and my liquid
mind?
Or are the bars my eyelashes?"
Untitled 2
Gazing at the stars I think
they’re really words and shouts
in the yawning breath of night
and the orbit of earth and moon
are carefully drawn lines of thought
conversing with each other and the ocean,
which is just a yarn of ripples
stitching themselves into waves or monsoons
to cleanse the earth’s body and mine
with salts that are covered in life forms,
microscope Atlantises thriving
from a clean and simple structure
of very descriptive language - streets made
from complete sentences,
public parks from paragraphs,
little fire hydrants from commas and the gleaming
capitol a polished page of poems
and the style is something reminiscent
of an author whose name escapes me
but wrote as though he were preparing a dessert
out of tart and velvety pieces
of dictionary, the fragrant dough
and sweet frosting
beginning as a lovely sludge
to dip our fingers in and delight in overeating.
Silkscreen
Found yourself let go in a weird, dim mazemade up of his voice and your thoughts dancing grotesquely across
the little ashen typewriter, his merciless fingerprints
pressed over those things that make up words like mini labyrinths
with mini minotaurs, waiting in the dust for victims, sacrifices of beautiful myth,
no power in being written down but when spoken
will travel over thousands of years or miles to ears that hear and remember.
Is this a cave, you wonder, as you lift his manuscript from the chamber
reserved for his brain, his last breath gliding out
like the music of ink on massive stack of yellowing paper,
or just a buzz from a radio, you remember, and your assignment "will not be easy,"
but was easier than you thought –
don’t lose yourself in the shadowy discourse that remains fixed between your ears,
it can be easy to stumble on the path that begins with a moment in a neuron’s chemical structure,
leaps over an abyss of simple nonexistence to end
in something that occupies neither time nor space,
but thought
which can always be a tricky, flirty thing to capture at the end of the maze
and only when your trail of breadcrumbs has all been snatched up by birds or blown away
and you’re left to trust the walls around you and your burning instincts
and us, your dedicated audience, who eagerly await denouement
to your compelling story, but not before you
speak a few meaningful words that weren’t in the script,
and just under your breath so we must lean off our seats to hear you,
float towards your lips with our ears
to find the journey in ourselves, in between
sighs and applause or just the sound of your face fading into black,
which isn’t a sound at all, I suppose,
but creates for me a scene that is easy to picture –
the darkness of a theater
and the step between though and action
seem endless, but never are,
and the sounds those come between are my shoes treading the carpet
as I throw away my candy box and leave behind me
an empty seat in an empty room,
the potential for which is magically endless and yet restrained
like a brain and thoughts that yield to it
or a voice and the whispers that lurk within the noises one can make,
leaving trails on the long, flashing reel in a movie
I plan to see again.
All poems by John Tilley, 2008.
No comments:
Post a Comment