Music

The facetious nature of touch and listen

is born here

in musician’s hands,

in the strum of that string, her taut pull

Two words,

they flash and fly across the gray

and one finds in here, this small space,

between gap, pause, and breath

the distinction between touch

and listen.

One is the taste of a hand

the other a line of pedantic tone

written on the strings of a violin,

Begging the fibers of breath

from your chest,

into the air,

into your heart,

by passage of ear.

Manifested on soundboard,

stroked by the fingertips of lovers,

these hands,

at once with joking smiles and serious songs

do they glance and shy and tease,

the facetious beauty of these wild horses,

my touch and your listen.

Beautiful

I am your beautiful whore.

I greeted you with smiles and sweet soft words.

You were comforted.

I have a checklist.

It goes ankles, hands, breasts, lips, cheek, smile, stomach, pelvis, thighs, calves.

Feet not required, as they tell you to run away.

They get insistent, the small sole heats,

and they burn for you to run, run, please, please, run.

Feet aren’t required.

I am the foul slattern who patterns your doorway with my gypsy scarves.

They linger there and stain the air with their sadistic half-slashes of color.

There used to be this space.

Where holy feet fell on prepared ground, like worship.

And her toes, they were blessed.

And her heart, it was gold, with soft touches of white.

I used to be a laugh,

and it was genuine and fine.

There were seeds of promise in it,

they are gone.

She will laugh to find fault.

She laughs at her weakness.

She laughed for softest illusion, love.

She is your beautiful whore,

bought with promise, time, and fear.

she weaves and bends where you’d expect,

though opaque fabric hides well,

the truth is no more than your willingness to search.

Her tears will mingle with your feverish demand

Her struggle, not physical,

the weakened acceptance of this time, that touch, this push, that hug.

She doesn’t blame.

No points, no denouncements,

you are sweet, and lonely, rich.

These things, she understands.

The rub of the soft white muslin on inner thighs and dead closed eyes

She tore at the beautiful skirt, the birthday gift

It came off in a strip of red rose

and impatient he seized her

and weeping, she turned,

and mocking, he split her soul, half for whole,

out and down and in and up and bleeding,

sob, flung into gravel,

the coins that bought Jesus,

scattered about,

and rocks softly ripping the air,

“Whoever is blameless shall cast the first stone.”

Lying Flat on the Dirt Floor Basement of Your Heart

"Like every believer I know, my search for real life has led me through at least three distinct seasons of faith, not once or twice but over and over again. Jesus called them finding life, losing life, and finding life again, with the paradoxical promise that finders will be losers while those who lose their lives for his sake will wind up finding them again...You do not have to die to in order to discover the truth of this teaching...You only need to lose track of who you are or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live."

 - Barbara Brown Taylor

Treasure

It's not about trinkets or plunder.
No, this is simply about those things, like good coffee and vests,
that seem to define all you do
In the simple, communal ways
that sepia and antique furniture define old postcards.
We are not the sum of our pieces
But our parts tend to leave little room for excess.
Somewhere, between your love for the people
And the people you love,
I was kicked out of the in-crowd.
It never ceases to amaze me how you can care so tirelessly for the causes of others
they have dog-eared pages from your ever-present hands
And yet feel so hopelessly lost amidst the mess of yourself.

You love...baseball,
and simplicity, black tea and lemon meringue pie.
There is this bookshelf in your house,
filled with sculptures and photographs, things-learned and remembered
And the books are clever-bound, and the medicine hides on the top shelf,
And sometimes, like when the front tire is bent a little
The bike sits there too.
You stood there, gently leaning, and told me, quite calmly
how the acquisition of knowledge doesn't equate to the proliferation of joy.

You love...girls with mousy hair,
political discourse, and physical labor.
There was this time that I was looking at the counter, flour-covered,
and you kissed me, behind my ear, next to my heart,
and it was simple, it involved your arms,
On my hip, around my waist,  and somehow,
between the brush of your lips and the soft, quick speeding of my pulse,
I felt safe, and suffused
With the proliferation of joy that defies knowledge.

A complex cerebral network controls emotional regulation
It processes faces, body language, and pheromones,
It notes the kisses in the corners of people's mouths,
And the soft feeling of one hand in another.
It catches you in its meanderings,
It mesmerizes you with its promises of a short life lived sweetly.
Our ties to one another rest like ghosts there,
neural paths that maintain firing even when the stimulus is gone.
Memories echo in those small, simple spaces, one dendrite to axon, little codes,
softly sighing, across the arm of its brother.

In their flickering signals, I watch myself,
Once, and again,
As you say, "Now? Not now. Maybe later."
You shut the door,
but forget to say goodbye. 

And I've come to the conclusion,
Standing as long as I have in the shadow of your dismissal
That since your heart lies with your treasure,
Never have I been so jealous of jewels.