SoHar or "The New Harlem"

Someone pushed me against you,
and I think we may have danced.
I still wonder why they did that,
but in the mean time:

Being with you is like holding a dove in both hands.
The sound of your voice is elegeiac;
of great distance, color and mastery of the air.
While quiet in my hands,
There is the power of great distances  in you,
long, cinematic continuities, way beyond my mindscape.

And when it is over and you are gone
the signature of your heartbeat continues
to pulsate in my palms and fingertips.

II


You told me you are Aquarian and my smile is like the breadth of the room
and full of laughing confusion like the clothes on the racks and manequins:
Aquarians are my nemesis, I remember, no wonder!
(Run!)


III
Between 114th and 119th two stanzas:

Aquarians are my Nemesis:
Like the storms on Jupiter,
they last a hundred years, wreaking havoc through our several generations of manhood.

And:
Aquarius has crossed the Tropic of Capricorn.


To my delighted surprise,
Mocha Lounge has an open mike poetry night!
I ask and they offer me the overtime slot.

The MC, ready for the end introduces me as comedy by mistake.

I have dreamt of rising to such an occasion but I am only half-hearted.

Still I make them laugh, and out of a moments silence, I say into the microphone:

                    Being with you is like holding a dove in both hands.

                    And when you are gone
                    the signature of your heartbeat continues
                    to pulsate in  my fingertips.

I said more, told them about my Dad's passing, and Oakland,
But that was it.







 

Moose Mom.

Reminds me of the time I strode through a forest in New Hampshire with my daughter on my shoulders. It was late afternoon and late fall.  The leaves were thinned and mostly the matter-of-factly golden yellow and brown that ends the autumn glory for which New England is famous.

I always tried to get up to the White Mountains at least once in each season because it is just so beautiful whenever! The Kangamangus highway snakes through the mountains, and accompanies a river much of the way. At this place, the river was set back some way down a non-descript side road, but there at the end, the river meandered through a sandy, beach-like setting with a steep rising hillside of dark pines on its opposite side. It was only my second time at that place...

"Daddy, will we see any animals?" Amina asked me as we jaunted along a narrow path out into a lightly wooded area. Searching for a way to make her disappointment less painful I waxed lyrical..

"Well, Sweetpea, you know, most animals only come out at night when its quiet and there is no one around to disturb them-- I doubt if we will see any now, they hardly ever come out in the daytime."

"Oh" she replied,  clearly processing this information.

We strode on through the trees and light, stepping around fallen branches; me becoming more aware of my breath.

"Daddy." ( She still does this even now, pauses not so much for a response as for a moment of silence.) "Daddy, there's a big animal over there."

I felt a twinge of sadness that so many animals are nocturnal-- taking this to be her way of dealing with the disappointment by resorting to fiction.

"No, Sweetpea, I don't think so, they are all asleep this time of day."

We were leading the loose-knit procession of her Mom,  and a colleague from work who lagged several paces behind us enjoying the air.

"Daddy, look there is a big animal over there..."

It was so matter of factly that I hardly bothered to take my mind off negotiating a dip in the path. As we came up on the side, however, I looked up to see a fully grown mother moose with twin foals hardly ten yards in front of us!

She looked up at me and my daughter with the same calm, but compromised look on her face that I must have had. They are huge, and surprisingly elegant animals, notwithstanding the onomatopoeic implications of the name "moose". A full grown moose is the size of a compact car-- or at least it is proverbial where they live that the outcome of a collision with a moose in anything smaller than a pickup truck is almost invariably fatal to the car, and often the driver.

I looked about me but there was no simple way to turn and run with toddler on shoulders across the shallow ditch, and over the branches we had just gingerly negotiated.

We eyed each other, myself and the moose mom while our young ones delighted in the moment-- mine, eyes wide at the size of a REALLY big animal, and her's in the fresh grass or acorns they had found underneath the golden leaves of a scrubby oak tree.

It was a moment of revelation about parenthood I will never forget. We two guardians were both caught off guard and knew each knew it. I took one step back and she turned back to grazing, gently nudging the twins to make them more attentive to the situation. A few more paces backwards and somehow I got a picture -- I don't remember taking it, maybe my colleague did, but I had it for years afterwards and would show astonished New Englander friends as corroboration of my story.

"There are people who have lived in New England their whole lives and never seen a moose even once!" they would say to me. "Twins!. Now that's something special!

Quiet.

Quiet,
Quiet,
Quiet!
People want quiet.
Don't they realise
That we'll all get an infinity of quiet?

New York remembered.

In New York, I remember
this is a place so involved, so intricate and established
that it demands surrender;
commitment,
a willingness to forgo the outside world.
Even birds can only escape in orthogonal directions:
North, East, South or West;
straining in a steep ascent towards the jagged
trapezoids of blue sky
at the tops of the glass canyons.

Eluemuno.

My name is like a coiled spring:
and in those times when the rust
shifts and cracks to release an
energy -- constant and persistent,
gyroscopically focused on
the return home.

The rustiness is abuse; the "necessary"
time-out-of-spirit, time-out-of-land
which, left too long,
makes the uncoiling
Rebellion,
and constancy frustrating.

Baby on the BART.

If I am a baby,
is it OK for my to hang out with my
Drugged up mom?
Is it OK to travel alone with her on the BART?
Asleep?
Am I less safe than when I was inside her?
What if I crossed the line? I mean, went back?
Would anybody know?
Should I cry?
Should I be silent?
What if something went wrong?
Who are all these people anyway?
would they help me?

She parked my push-chair real well. R-E-A-L well.
She even remembered to put on the brakes.
You see? She cares!
But what if she changes her mind?
Tries to take me up the escalator backwards?
Should I cry?
Should I be silent?
She IS careful,
My Mom.


june 08

DSC00022

DSC00022
Originally uploaded by eluem_blyden

Doodle

DSC09688.jpg
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.