Middle Noise

A perplexing task
listening to what people are saying
Obstructed by the flotsam
that riddles the grey matter.
Matter seems to be at the heart
of what intrigues me today.
What matters?
Can you see the forest from the trees?
Not right smack in the middle of a lesson.
Not in the middle of a sentence.

Asleep on the couch
Body stretches
length-wise
Limbs spill over.

Randomness of melancholy
thoughts strum the skin
on a city sidewalk

White noise does not touch when
a thin-skin membrane wards
off the onslaught of battering life

Responding

Frida created scaffolds out of bones, metal pins,
fragments of her past to piece herself together.
Careful her soul is showing.
Rub her raw skin down.

Dots of paint make the seascape shimmer
eyes skim the surface, oscillating clarity
Tension created with static environment
across the canvas.

Arcing brushstrokes between the sacred and the profane.

A man placed a wheel at the end of his 6-foot wooden
cross and passed me as he rolled it down the street.

A ten-foot photo of
a subject with hypodermic
needles piercing the length
of his arm in a cross-hatch pattern.
speak only of cold blue
stones and smooth green masks
in our social composure.

Quick-captured glimpses
of color through slotted
views in the subway
tunnel between DeKalb
and the bridge

An artist cuts out holes on large
pieces of cardboard and glues
amoeba-shaped wood
pieces onto it and calls it art.

We have barely survived our history.
Our art is responding…

Wistful Pleasure

Words hang from your shirttail
Stand still while I copy them down
it will only take a moment.

You leashed an I love you note
to the collar of my white shirt
then left behind your scent
on my pillow.

Pull away other-
wise you will see
a drowning in disguise.

A wistful pleasure vision
swirling time in your mouth
in the dying embers of
whispers and laughter.
Water trails create deep
trenches along our skin.