There are no dreams
Or dreamers
Nothing
Nobody
Nothing
The moon is a carillon
Of my voice which is
Made of every voice
Earth is a chipped glass
In rain’s dishwasher
Since you are everything
I am nothing
I am forged from you
You who arrived from nobody
And lived in everybody
Nothing
Nobody
Nothing
In the depths of your life
Everybody knocked
You were a clutch of eyes amidst my blind heart
my love wrestling with the anchored hours
departing the land of childhood
i was born in laughter’s river
severed among starry garlands
my love grows thirsty, without any bottle
to encapsulate the moon and feed rustic echoes,
Our mouths are hungry to no avail and veiled
in my misery, flowering into kisses for nobody
you are like nothing since i created you
not of scald or metals but rather aromas,
i am nothing because you are everything
the moonshine, the sunshine
mother of pearl, pearl of mother
mother, daughter, sister
gardener of frost
queen of voices
nothing, everything
i, you, the world, my emptiness filling you
street sweeper of dreams
ruler of miracles,
My heart
showing you the way to
the archipelago of nostalgia
originating in the sea of people,
the battlefield of kisses
where ringed hands
Bring silenced mouths
to drunken, daffodil morgues,
the world laughing, you are weeping
The world weeping, you are laughing
The world surviving, you are dreaming
To survive inside a dream,
My dream of you,
My winged eyes
penetrating your flower
Rising
from the sunken
Isle of my lips
every hour, day, dream, destiny
Snowfall, dewfall, nightfall
you are the flower that rises,
rises, from the isle of my sunken lips,
Wounded by a wandering dream,
Adrift in the glint
Of my grey, wet eyes
As if moths seamed to the thread
of your rose undressing
beneath the land of spring
adrift in a haze and abandoned slowly, suddenly
Somewhere between my silhouette
and your mouth something goes wailing
Of the childhood road peopled
with flowering kisses
And rustic echoes
I owned every star but your eyes
The universe is yours, but my heart is ours
And we are two moths
Braying, bankrupt of dreams
In the net of autumn,
A fall solitary
as if a stray dog
on inhospitable tongues
but
guided by the butterfly of your name:
Mariposa and its little wings
of laughter
Underneath your feet
The road’s dynamo
Of white butterflies
Electrocuting bleak isles
Where women of the sea
Treaded on velvet, machetes
Here, my people
Emerged from a poppy
Wingless yet in flight
There, a shadowy mountain
As if the star’s saddle
Beneath the winepress night
Grinding their moon into quartz
Here, my eyes’ net
Of maritime days and
A dove asleep
As if the earth at twilight
That adores
Our little bees
Seeping, seizing, sieging:
From the honeyed pubis
Beyond, nights
Go on drowning each other
And the sky is
Overburdened with dreams
On your lips a crane dies
The paper crane is born in my palm
Here, winter climaxing on spring
And stars chasing
One another for crystal-laughter
We are all made of rain
Shadows under the guise
Of humans
Selling voices
In destiny’s marketplace
Buying ourselves from
Ourselves
Dreaming
About shipwrecks
Earth spins
The tin moon
Between:
Phony
Stargazers,
Nocturnal
Suns,
Sleeping
Dreams
The earth is a cape of lamps
Of the mountain bride
Everything mounts
On shadowy vessels
Of smiles
But my voice:
Digging graves in
Life’s depths
Drowning
In twilight’s
Bed sheets
Sweet leaf,
Leaflet
Neither the crystal tides
Nor the quartz moon could submerge
The night’s most luminous souls
Or the sunrise line of your brows,
In hours unfastened like roses
And spaciously divided into seagulls
My life grows thirsty
Without your laughter,
Your feet running through the
Gates of my oceanic eyes
Into the shadowy mouth
Of my dream
As if dew,
I undressed your words for
The world to revive
And I planted five flowers
On my chest, on my glass chest
To kiss the earth and sprout
Through your eyes,
To mill honey into
Kisses
If Steinbeck wrote Chapter 33 in “Cannery Row”
33
Henri drank a gallon of wine, stretched out on his mattress and skimmed a passage of Rimbaud “But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.” with an indecently decent accent. The rain: undressed and barefoot, slaughtered poppies. Girls came and went like the waves infiltrating the masculine, decrepit shoreline. Henri dozed off into unbridled consciousness and entered into a bizarre ritual of Alice.
He dreamed he was the captain and she: the figurehead. Cannery Row was devilish, and deadbeat, and dark. The ocean was depleted of vastness and loneliness. Alice flowered in sad songs. Solitude pecked at Henri and the oddest personnages sprung into his reconnaissance: his possessive mother, his glacial father, his aloof sister. He recalled never leaving Cannery Row till now. His sister lived in a blue house on the brink of San Francisco with her sickly daughter. She gifted him a forked compass during a long awaited reunion. Henri left abruptly with maritime madness and bitter nostalgia.
Further along, northern California was deciduous, and rocky, and bony. He never found his parents (his mother, wasted by tuberculosis lived beneath the cerulean house and his father, sold into battle and anonymous, slept under a cross; both fertilized daffodils). Fisherman were on the prowl for shadowy schools and a train full of spirits swept past the atheist meadows. Alice was asleep in a bed of foam and singing silently.
In each Oregon hamlet they moored and ate haddock and happiness. Alice came from this hopeful despair, from wedlock, mares, sluiced wheatfields and no men. Some nights she was brought to life and they waltzed, on others she was planar, and lunar, and solar, and angular. He read too much Rimbaud and too little of himself.
Henri remembered his daughter stolen by fortune and the road. He recalled his wife beguiled by fate and the noose. Malvina floated, sweet, white and flowery with golden hair and a compass. He never lifted her fearing she would crumble and that angsty rendez-vous overburdened him more fiercely than it had thirty years ago when he immortalized them in pastels and acrylic. Washington was too regal.
Hazily, they docked in a foggy, forgotten Vancouver and seduced a park in the interior. Three autumnal flowers seized Henri and then he esconsed this unreal surrealness. The roses were wilted on the sill. The sea howled like a lost child on the cool maternal coast.
The orphanage demanded retributions and he ate another plum and drank a gallon of wine. In a journal he scribbled “the world laughing, you are weeping; the world weeping, you are laughing; the world surviving; you are dreaming, to survive inside a dream” and went back to sanding his vessel and exalting the wooden girl.
The rats scampered back in their cages, the vessels were moored to the evening and the gopher met a butterfly in the gutter. Three hours, three months, three years: the boat was nothing but a bad dream.
Ideas with Ink 