Could the warmth of lips be illusion?
Electrons repulsing each other.
The breaks in my heart but contusions?
Not loss of loves but of lovers.
Your arms, my subconscious solution?
Biology claims my protector.
I want to believe in lightning
That is more than electricity
Passing through a finite amount of synapses
Of a brain wired by accident.
Could you pretend with me?
That we are more than what neurology
Has stacked us up to be?
Even when we don’t believe it
In the dark hours between dreaming
It still makes quite a lovely story.
The walls ripple where they stand.
Green leaves reach, a little,
From drowsy potting soil,
Sleeping breaths almost still.
Copper roses flirt with lamplight
Making eyes but too shy to make a move.
The open window looks to the sky
Even as it sits, it sighs.
When I close my eyes to kiss you
Laughing, pushing, pressing
Pulling and running and fighting with you
And when I sometimes cry for you
The darkness behind my lids
Teaches me the meaning of motionless.
Bring me into the blizzard
With you as you flee.
We’ll press dark uneven holes
In the unadulterated snow
Behind us as we go.
If I’m simple, if I’m slow
Forgive me, but I do know
That monsters carve you hollow
Called hunger and called sorrow
Leaving perfect emptiness within
So each frail snowflake
Is preserved on your frozen skin.
You need me, where you travel
To your silent place of shadow
To retrieve your discarded smiles
And store them safe from snow
In a bottle of precious gold;
Maybe one day in this storm
They will help you remember
What it feels like to be warm.
The gruff slaps and rings
Of slamming typewriter keys
Might be what I need.
A rift in the clouds that only opens long seconds after the machine itself vanishes past my window edge.
The tear gushes silky blue fluid. It clings to pale tendrils of vapor that drift silently, unbound.
Even as it methodically heals I find it impossible to miss certain odd edges, humps and bumps and shadowed shallows that define the passage of something now missing.
When I stop looking for the smallest moment, what my eyes studied before has disappeared. Healed?
I know you’re keeping your secrets but there’s one you can’t hide from me. Run away all you like but I know what you don’t want me to see, it’s that you live in a world all gray that feels safe and warm like sleep, but can’t help remember that once you liked his eyes and ever since you’ve been dreaming in green. I walk toward you and you back away so I stop, mired in your swamp of gray, and don’t you have anything to say? You stutter, and you stumble, and you wring your pale gray hands; I roll my eyes and I sit before you’re scared breath blows me away like sand. You putter around the house for a while and I can’t help but secretly smile, and finally I see you look over at me with an aura of red ― blushing, I see? You deny it furiously with a shake of your head, belied by the whip of your hair: bright and golden like stars. I leap up in an explosion of dust and you harrumph as if you don’t care, but I can see sapphire sparkles in your glare. I take a step forward and you take a step back, but purples and blues trail from your shoes so I know your gray world’s been cracked. Easily I catch up and you stand there confused, finally meeting my eyes: blinded by the blue, beautiful but stark, and you sadly say, you know with pupils so small it will be impossible to see in the dark.
Could skin hold some flame meant to persist
Forever? Could air sustain what remains
After? When the lungs in your shattered chest
Fail, could escaping breath, nearly forgetting,
Remember? Keep its form, like an echo dyed
Amber, or would it dissipate, nothing more than
Embers, purple coals whispering meekly of
Sleep? Will you think your dreams pathetic and
Weak, when you finally lower your lashes;
And where you seek fire, will you find only common
ashes?
One thing I like about an atemi that never lands: it peacefully serves its purpose if uke has good enough reflexes to avoid it. Something that most practitioners are probably familiar with… in the avoiding, uke upsets his/her own balance. You can ground them before they have a chance to recover it, with a simple kokyunage. I take pleasure in watching this, because it’s as if nage is using a tangible, yet invisible force to move uke, without needing any physical contact. I had no idea something like ki, what I used to think of as nothing more than vaguely poetic and conceptual, could become so concretely manifest in practice. My confession.
