Salt

In the song I chose today
it’s the ocean
three times
that carries us out.
É o mar
É o mar
É o mar
que carrega a gente
para a gente pescar…
but today it isn’t about the fisherman.
Or the salty seawater,
or the tears on shore.
It is Tides. Today
It’s about the Tides.
Beyond our sense and best interest
there’s a whole territory
of salt.
Castles of salt where
he’s deposited life
in salt forms.
So much so that
if the light refracts right
It’s furious and pretty.
The tides must have
arrived and receded
a million times
to leave him with
this much material.
But it wasn’t all his doing,
or the ocean’s three visits.
There were friends
and oceans came from their eyes.
How kind, to include
me among them.
So many of us
still not sure
what to do…
with all this salt.

Chain Reactions

Some people should
have set off chain reactions
Some 4th of July meet
science lab shit.
When you meet them
some people are
magic, like that.
You begin and end with them.
It is this eternal
kind of quality
that has some kind of nerve.
You know, I don’t remember
how we met.
The day probably
left adrenalin fueled
and looking for trouble.
When I draw a blank
about the inflection in your voice
instead I remember your crooked
good-for-nothing smile.
Like Russian roulette
I’ll pick up another hot gun
to draw a blank.
What was it
you wore that day?
Instead I imagine the curve
of your spine
and how it dictates
the way a shirt
settles on your shoulders
square.

Crowned

“We all must
learn to accept
the departing nature of things”
She says crowned in the
leaves of her bougainvillea
that emerges from
a million places other
than its pot.
“Eventually we lose
even ourselves.”
She makes it seem
so calm
as if the idea of…
dying might be
the way a leaf settles,
changing form
to become another leaf.
That is her lesson in losing.
We’re a transitional period.
A period
between two transition periods.
And just like that
we’re losing and finding
each other forever
in a house where we
walk in circles.
You are too real.
This dust just
couldn’t settle.

Black or White

With cloud cover
these empty spaces
are so loud
I can’t find
a rational thought
among them.
Every room is a revolving door
circling around
black or white
until everything is gray
and reeling.
It is a barefaced kind of swindle
such stunning showmanship,
he hardly reveals
his comings and goings
until the unshakable is broken down
and I’m left
teetering dangerously
on the edge of
his mouth.

Practicing Bluntness

I want to practice bluntness.
Chip away at the point
until I am shapely,
until I have curves that
aren’t lost in the spaces
between the lines, and in the air
between us.
The short breaths among my words
are my heart jumping.
You didn’t know –
my tongue
has a string tied
to a blanketed heart.
I stumble my way across
our practical conversation
making light
as I weigh
your words like a hot stones.

I think you know you love someone when you find an old photo, one you didn’t remember taking or intend to find, and something settles into your ribcage that is hot and cold at once. Its a strange sensation, like something is decidedly laying low, while another half pushes at your seams.

 

Happy birthday L-train. Love you.

Sleep – unfinished

Sometimes I will
my consciousness to slip
and it wont,
like it has some tacky life of its own
or it doesn’t fit where it used to.
In the mornings
It has this graceless dance it does
as it comes back into four walls, some sheets
three dimensions,
slow and formless
as if to say ‘sorry for last night.’
It settles into the backs of my eyes
and checks its size in the mirror
like it had a body
that’s different from yesterday
some form of excess
that doesn’t settle
into its own shell.

Early Fall

The season shifts a gear
as I pick up
and realize it’s been some time
and only now am I settling on
this one shadow.
Seems by some unfathomable violence
Fall arrives early this year
and in a darker costume.
I guess if you look hard
good starts to be
absent-eyed.
And I guess I didn’t even know
I could watch
seasons shift gears
for a few boys as they take
one too many falls
and two lives
to leave a late summer
feeling like a hard fall.

Rails

Rails
Graphite on paper
2009 – Sommer Smith

Landlocked and Buried

 

Sommer Smith

Time, carried away on conversation
Evaporated from my eyes to condense into salt on the terminal floor.
The taste of morning still fresh on lips,
eyes swollen sleepless remember this–

love comes in a landslide.
The ground is condemned to change.
And though time might try to steal away today.
This is not his to take.

And so what happens when the landslide calms?
Is reality quite different than we had thought?
You’re landlocked, I’m buried
The silt is in my blood.
Its not the wind but the water that can remedy my faults.

And so soiled love, let the river run its course,
And wash away all this remorse.
Sometimes we rush, sometimes we fall,
sometimes the oxygen seems like its not there at all,
But we go on.

And love comes in a landslide.
The ground is condemned to change.
And the silt is running fertile through my veins.
Its like an echo, an echo of your name

So care for me and carry me through the ripples of your mind.
Take these waves for what they are, a wrinkle in time.
And in stillness reflect on the surface.
Your image will grow fonder with time.

And love comes in a landslide,
The ground condemned to change.
And though time might try to steal away today.
Like he did yesterday, this is not his to take.