28.07.07

just around your ankles, can you feel the starpricks of
cold cold beautiful water and the glassdrops from the
blades of grass trickle onto you?
--
those eyes, swept around with cat-brown liner-
too young for what they bear? well, they're old enough,
old enough for dragon-taming and looking back to Egypt.
the neat cool rows of metal-and-glass that we enter and
animate. see life, see life walking up and down the keysof
the green accordion, resting on bundled herbs and bakery bread.
those hands, comforting and grey-brown holding up
small empires and letting fall pretty gestures, describing,
circumscribing. persistant and the snap of a camera like
teeth closing around a captured image. that's not my face
you just sunk your teeth into, camera, but I can look it
in the eye and see laughter in it, anyways. see life crawling
with ants in the grass- will we pull our legs away, brush it
aside? you remember opression and harmony and life sits
contentedly on the stairs as we talk in the sun.
that head, gleaming like wood against my jawbone,
that head (that head I half-hold inside my own) circles like an eye.
we are very brave and
we are very glad.
--
look you, look you, look well the oddessy,
look well we are not who they decided we would be.
look you, I am not a surrendered vase, you are not
a thoughtless beauty. yours is not a thoughtless beauty.
I have not mustered so little passion as that, to wake up
and look 'round and recall music and cinema in my beating
soul like a bracelet on the ankle of a walking girl,
like beads of water on the tired ankles of walking girls.

--

i would dedicate this, but i think you'll all clue in. consider this the voice of doom.

photo credit to mrs. strauss.