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Originally uploaded by eluem_blyden

Sweet Mountain Pie

I love your sweet potatoes
fresh dug earth smell
condensed milk
and red Carnation label:

The danger of your warm cinnamon
your too unflinching eyes
round as your breasts,
your mountain pies
adventuring into my senses

Unchanneled
you defy reality
and so define your own:
make mother sweeter
make gray skies blue
etc

Where are you my love?
Where is my brown skin girl?
My Southern Belle lost
No longer ringing?

No Skype
no urgent cell phone
no sound of San Francisco buses
in the querulous warmth and
straight-ahead light of
only San Francisco

I miss your troubles
and concerns;
long unburdenings
of your little girl
over the echoing line
our two-city cyber-room half green
half log cabin

You packed, I know
You left and are on your Great Journey;
I hope you're safe!
It is a wild world out there.

Is that you
Sue?
Can't believe the easy
like you never left
just yesterday,
now sun-bleached and pound-less;
Third World girl,
complaining that your man
won't go fishing!
That there's nothing here
your missing,
Not in THIS nostalgic space!

I hear you girl!
Your free spirit makes me ache
warms me celebrate
That you still you
And not a heartbeat's worth of bravery
is missing between you and heaven.

Now two minutes later,
I wish I had saved our AIM-full
conversation and the way that proesy
dropped from the misspellings and urgency with which
we typed our exchanges
jumbling the sequence of the lines
into novel stanzas
and humorous allusions.
You made me realise how much
our journeys since we last met
were similar,
you made me realise how much I was free--
not that cliche hippy irresponsible freedom
But the freedom that comes from taking responsibility for the
world AS YOU SEE IT!

If you and I had not in our separate ways braved grief, pain
and separation
there would be no world out there today
I am sure.

Early, Sunny Spring - Pike Street Market.

How are the afternoons?
What news of sunlit, streaming
Cafes.
What the white people like so much,
Are they still intact?

It is saying goodbye to another day
As absolutely gracefully as possible.
Enjoy a beer-- a $3 reward
For clawing back the $26 I mis-spent yesterday,
On tea.

It's welcome spring again.
I'm thankfully over-dressed
Ready to shed my sleazebag armour
And join a new army this month.

Shaving Ruminations

Yes, good morning dear!
You know, I think of you every morning:
Everytime I consider whether I need a shave I remember when you said
with so much absolutness:
"You should shave every day!"

But my beard is a tropical plant:
A walla full of December rice.
It needs sunshine and high temperatures
to rise beyond a stubble.
Shaving in these northern climes
is like gleaning.

T. Rex Soup for the Soul

T. Rex: They finally did it!
Pulled collagens from some ancient bones
(All 65 million years of them in Montana)
Boiled them up, and hey presto!
Chicken soup!
Dinosaurs are, after all, like birds.
And frogs.
A hypothesis becomes a theory
For all brave scientists.
And for T. Macbeth
Eye of newt and tongue of frog
To keep the virulence at bay,
Fight the seasonal flus and coughs
On the molecular battleground
Thundering across Gondwanaland:
Today no virus can manifest its presence with THAT roar!

You remove me from the experience of the moment;
Into the past.
Doused like dirty laundry in a soup of sudsy water
We deny each other our lives.

Collage.


Blue birds startle
And wrack the fields
Of swaying voices.
Great swathes of air
Blowing up into the sky:
Morning.

11/03/02


Here's to the foolish man
That looks to dry memories
And mementos
While the warmth of those
Who love him
Cools for waiting

11 September 2003

The flutter of autumn leaves
And women that sweep by
Leaving an enigmatic whiff of scent
And a half a conversation
With someone else.

2/17/01

Laxmi the Vanquisher!
All your warriors lay their burnished swords at your feet
Hoping to catch the reflection of your smile and thereby kill
More enemies!
But I, unready,
Caught the electric glory of those little pearls in the glow of ultra-violet
When you smiled beside my chest
And I squeezed your delicate hand.

2001

One lost moment is enough to make me cry.
And yet we throw away
Whole hours, un-wrapped from
Each others arms.
Wondering why fate threw us together in this
Too short life to totter between each other's
torment and salvation.

2001

A poem for today.

I am thankful for another day
Yet it seems that it is another day closer to dreaming.
Coker flew to Freetown today, winging her way across the blue while I paddled my dugout canoe in the cool water of the Back Bay in Portland, Maine.
Could anything define us more radically?


8/14/02

You are so unlucky!
We are both in the wrong place
At the wrong time.
Any other time and we would have
Become lovers and used
my sperm and your eggs
like brush and palette
In the making of a love child
One who could emerge from my thoughtfulness
With your irresistible giggles.
Yes. in some other universe that
Fire blocks from us like astronauts in space,
I am in you, enraptured,
And kicking myself for
Loving someone so faithless
And so pink!
I am not sure what the
Inevitabilities are in life
But we seem so much like one.

I suffer your has-beens and
The cracked and soggy patches
on your soul.
I drain or water
As you show me your need.
And for me I guess you need to
Be-a-bitch
So that I can stop waking up each
Day more naive than the day before

Eros.

Silly Eros!
Always forget to put labels
On your diskettes, don't you?
Then poor buggers like me
End up worshipping toes or
Odd corners of bodies
We're hardly supposed to look at
Start getting my desires tangled in wrinkles
Or neat shoals of dark hair
Swimming up a spine
Or forearm
With the same determination.
As sperm.
Oh you leave too much for celebration!
I could lie for hours
watching these little hairs swirl
against your dusky skin
Their pink-edged pores
Stretched like Cadillacs;
Watch them wheel and turn like
Small fry in the tidal pools of
Summer

28 May 2004

I am at sea
with nothing left
to hold on to but this flotsam
of youthful longings and their
nostalgic regrets
Help I'm drowning
and that's it
the end
anyway, what
help do I deserve?

2004

I am no longer certain of my connection to the earth. Rock cliffs, screes, and trees in the crisp morning air of New England. Those places I would never be buried, I now don't know or don't care- I just feel the crumbly edge of the cliff-face, smell the chalkiness, and sense the blue sky.



2/17/01

So much heat engendered by so small a flame,
Thrown into the volatility of my loneliness.
quick like lighter fluid, and as uncontrollable
Flowing down between every crack
And burning with that blue that sees
So cool and yet consumes no less than
The blinding red I cant suppress.
Am I shouting against myself?
And if I don't know, then why
Should i expect my 5 year old
To know?
That is the pathos of where I am.

Summer 02

Proesy.
A kind of poetic, rambling prose.
Mindware.