Peach Poem

When you have a peach,
what do you do?
Do you squeeze it and mash it
up against your teeth?
Do you grip it heavy and
rough like a ball and leave
dents with your fingers
as you switch hands?
Do you sniff it and tease it
a little bit before easing
it into your mouth?
Do you suck all the juice
before it drips down
your wrists, and into the
pit of your arm?
Do you let the warm sugary
blood from the fruit
glide willingly down
to the floor?

I've seen a knife taken
right to its core.
I've seen it peeled and
skinned alive.
I've seen the fibers grasp
at air.
I've seen skinless yellow
flesh without a hair.
I've seen it in the hands
of women.
I've seen it lay
by the wayside.
I've seen it sour
like a lemon.
I've seen it in the hands
of men, devoured
like a clementine.

That isn't all.
I haven't seen it all.

So what do you do with a peach?
Watch next time.

From the Light-Hearted to the Grave

Often we find ourselves asked who we are, and in a rush to communicate the most apropos of answers, we inevitably dramatize our own lives.
Everyone word is immediately made concrete.
Every opinion or belief is painted on our forehead, immovable, immutable.
If accuracy is the goal, does it really matter what we say, or how we say it?
To some degree, yes.
But considering how impossible a task it is to describe to others, much less to ourselves, exactly who we are, I say it matters little what you say, and a great deal more how you say it.
Don't we find our personality in between our words, in and between our breaths, our gesticulations, our mannerisms and our tics, in every in-between?
This is an old idea, but it has freshness still.
In fact, the way things are going, it seems this old idea is only ripening, fattening up and plumping in bulk and pulp, making droop whatever branch on which it has grown for millennia.
I believe that what you'll find in fiercely honest responses is a stark comparison between you the listener, and him the responder.

One must only possess the patience to listen, and a healthy curiosity towards other people's stories.

So, I'll ask myself on your behalf: who am I?

Put it this way - I love cats, for example.
I will try to like any cat I see.
Even the bitch cats.
The ones who hiss and give that guttural groan because they hate you.
The bloody, beat-up ones in the allies with scabs and scrappy diseases.
The skittish ones with spiking hair, and a good sense to run away, but an ignorance to know what from.
The ones who will meet you in the hot brush of the jungle and paralyze you with their beaming yellow eyes, then swiftly gulp down your head and fatly grin.
I will try to like them because I am a lover of cats.

I am a lover of humans all the more.
I will try to like you, too - man or woman, young or old, however you come.
I will try, and I will sometimes fail.
Somewhere, though, in the flux of my emotions and my reasoning, in the place that weighs information against information and makes a calculated or miscalculated decision, there harbors at least the chance that I will like you.
(Most of the time, though, chance will be a last resort. Most of the time you'll be able to rely on your merit, your integrity, your courteousness and your generosity. Chance will be buried under the positive qualities and good looks you possess; your ear for music and your taste for food; your consistent loyalty and tolerant demeanor. Most of the time, chance will have never a need.)
From that point we will be connected.
We will have gripped space and time and made a knot of the two, strangling the moment, seizing our lives.
And while we coexist, however we coexist, our alliance will be borne of this intercourse, and you will know how I feel about you, and likewise I will know your thoughts of me.
Then, after having learned enough about each other to teach it, we will begin to communicate as animals: wordless and physical, straightforward and efficient, immediate and stable, supportive and fun.
Respect itself will marvel between us, but we will hardly notice its gawking.
Instead, our black holes will point themselves forward - two pairs pulling at parallel futures.

Even when out of earshot, out of sight and out of mind, we will have a sense of knowing, of connaissance, for another person that will blow away the perennial fog of loneliness, when and if it's felt.
Upon our (hopefully) countless reunions will resume the language of old friends: enormous detail, mutually inclusive anecdotes, splitting laughter - and joy.
And before we're even conscious of it, the combined force of our black holes will pull apart from the center any sense of awkwardness, of fear or insecurity, of strangeness that may have built upon our absences from one another.
We will both cry the same tear, for the same purpose.

And then it will happen: one of us and then the other will away.

Our pure black holes will stall, blurred by sadness, and rest woefully on frozen skin.

And in our mourning, mine or yours, with one hand at the mouth, and the other on the coffin, our lips will draw a wide smile, that at its corner will collect a single tear, because we knew we meant the best, and made the most.

It's nice to meet you.

Calm Calamity

People are awfully calm,
considering that at any moment
an earthquake might begin,
and there goes your pen and paper,
your New York Times,
your Ethiopian coffee beans,
your daughter,
your left leg,
your right brain,
your desire to live.

But then again,
you could always win the lottery.

Man

I survive on bricks of
coastal salt.
There's always sand underneath
my nails.
I never wear clothes anywhere
I go;
I just let the breeze hang out in the
hairs on my head and chest.

I flex and shove my face
into the water, open my eyes,
and bite down into a struggling fish,
guts everywhere.
I'm tough as fuck.