total page views

Monday, June 17, 2013

J'NAII OR BLUE

              The ideas of male and female are universal constants. Captain Kirk


J’naii or Blue

I want to feel soft inside
the body I live in, pink.
I want to know I have peace
and fluidity
where I am fragile,
forgiveness not blame,
whole not a shell in
my house of conformity.

It’s like you're not even real,
an alien, a machine, a man, a woman—
a person.
People stare at you, and
they don't even realize
they're staring at your exterior--
their mindless judgment excludes.
They don’t care about your
gender assigned at birth, only
assumed recognition assigned
at a passing look.
But you take it all in, the
projected energy undermining
your  given out-caste temple.
You take the whole universe in,
along with
the ricketiest of its conformed members.

Yes, she still encounters
the whispers and stares,
as normal as a passing blue moon--
people just look and smile at
a human that was once a him.
TJKG 
dverse  poetry

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

YESTERDAY'S WOMAN


YESterday's  Woman

Yesterday, a man,
a gray-haired man,
cohabitating within an old man’s body rolls in. He
flaunts a Parisian beret fairing a pin of three gold stars 
thrusting up the side of his head.
A man, a thin man, with artist hands, and wire hair
sprouting out from beneath the soft black felt. He sits down.

This man, who I ate a pasta dinner with
yesterday said,
he just wants to paint the perfect unplanned portrait.
This man, with two languid burgundy tubes acting as animated legs stares at me,
and as if out or nowhere says, “As you sit there in that straight back chair,
just as you sit with your hand under your chin--
I would not change a thing about you. No I wouldn’t.
I would paint an impromptu portrait of you, highlighting the red tint in your hair and
capturing the cobalt of your eyes.”
I smile and reply.   “How much is the portrait in the living room?
The one of...
the beautiful young Asian woman lounging on the velvet chaise in the afternoon sun?”
He spoke slowly after sipping red wine. “At a gallery ten thousand, for you I will do half.”

I decline.

I ask him if he was ever married. The golden sign was mockingly absent. 
I don’t know why that question was important.  I gaze at the women’s portraits
hung on spare nails around the mock gallery porch dining room.
He hums with conceit in his breath.
“Three wives- not one lasted. Each woman plateaued.”
His long crooked fingers parted the air between us.
“They each left. Actually I’d say I left them.
 I was bored. They didn’t want to grow anymore.”
 In half his life he is a portrait painter; in the other, he is
a vacuum repair man as his trade for a living.

“I want to paint portraits.”  He says as he lights a joint.
“I want to paint the perfect unplanned portrait.”
His smoky breath exhales to blow out the burning match caught between his finger tips.  
I believe he wants to paint women--
a woman with luxuriously tussled hair, a porcelain face of grace,
the kind of woman you want to kiss, who’s eyes want to kiss you.
The kind of woman that makes you need to
put your parting lips directly onto a taut canvas.
I wonder if the crimson lips he paints might just feel real.
Maybe he can make an unplanned portrait real. Make a real woman real.
I shake my head yes and say to the artist, yes I understand.
TJKG
dverse -- more poetry to please

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

RAVISHED




I cannot exist without you - I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again - my Life seems to stop there - I see no further. You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I were dissolving... I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion - I have shudder'd at it - I shudder no more - I could be martyr'd for my Religion - Love is my religion - I could die for that - I could die for you. My creed is Love and you are its only tenet - You have ravish'd me away by a Power I cannot resist. Keats




Ravished

Life smothers  
the soft pores of a face,
the slow sheath of an age,
from you to me, from me to me;
I once believed I could escaped time.
Life’s passage leaves a ravished face--
once a face of smoky tears,
a face of blue steel, an extinguishable face,
a face from the ocean’s bottom surfacing--
a face seeking life, a life finding soul.
Each emerging crease, a layered minute,
a shapeless destiny,
a captured experience flooded with
a rapture of a drawn presence.

Each time she was
touched, she was consumed, she was freed--
delicately, tenderly, knowingly
her face overwhelms the facade
of her silenced love. An absolute life
deepens the home of a ravished face from above.
TJKG