elephant

my elephant ears are big and floppy even though they don't belong to me
they belong to my elephant, elephant
elephant's sitting there like he doesn't even care it's a snow day
and outside the world is white like a bowl of vanilla ice cream, the kind without little black pieces in it

but its not summer and we don't have ice cream if it's not summer
cause it's already cold out
cold like my feet which kicked off their snowflake socks cause i don't want snowflakes on my feet or outside

they say the snow is pretty, look how pretty, do you want to go and play , you can wear my hat
we can have
hot chocolate

elephant wants me to go outside, he's never seen snow before because he's from a place where there are
no snow days
i wish i was an elephant

i wanted to go to school because i was going to show nina to elephant
very secretly because i don't know if maybe nina is scared of elephants, because they are so large
but i tell elephant all about nina, mostly because she smiles so much and elephants always like smiles

i like it when nina smiles at me
i like it when she laughs, and i can see the space in her mouth where she lost her teeth
i like it when she thinks i'm funny, like the time i told her i pretended elephant was a dog

which is silly really because elephant's ears are too big to be dog ears
(nina smiled when i said that)
i told elephant all about her after my bedtime story

he had his red scarf on and i jumped out of bed but the floor was so cold
they said i wasn't going anywhere today, it was too snowy and wouldn't it be fun to be home and
all i knew was that i was sad because today was special and i was going to show elephant my favorite smile

then even though i just turned four i cried
privately, in my bed, with elephant
who was very quiet

we eat breakfast and i play with my favorite train puzzle
elephant looks at the whiteness and he says we should play in the stuff that looks like ice cream but
i am busy being sad

then i say well just for a little while and i get my red jacket and my mittens and elephant sits in the window then he watches while i slide and jump
then i go inside and elephant gets hot chocolate on his trunk and i think i will tell nina about the snow tomorrow and i remember that i was smiling the whole time

Go

Rush
with a flushed face and a particular brightness that electrifies
past gray, past drab, alongside the most swirling wind
dash toward the
iridescent white, diamond-faced,
leave behind
what'd you forget
nothing
pass swiftly by yesterday and
run with frozen air in your lungs by those hunched in improbable misery
through faded streets and let eyes snap open again,
take a long long breath of around you
which possibly could be bad it's real so enjoy it
take it in
and go

Knowing

Traced
I can see the faint outlines upon the shiny desk
The notes and hearts and wishes
I know well
the trappings the hints
made by hands over the years,
the simple curves of the letters positively bursting with the effort poured into them
are a reminder
still hear a sigh as a dream hits the floor, and
Then the one metallic shard of the mirror
        that still held hope
                 hurts you a little
I know well the wonder: does it matter?
I know well the wanting
Arching a broken back to hold onto residual dreams
though the gold stops glittering
I can still taste the longing, still see the last trace

Scattered

He
Writes
Words all across himself
Strews the alphabet painstakingly upon his skin
Lets the sentences fall from
His one ballpoint pen, a gift from a guard who needed to do some thought of good one day
This man
Sits, stands
Twists like a cyclone into any shape
Careful not to squander
His precious canvas
He gives each word, each syllable, a
Caressing attention as a mother gives a child
(He forgets what that is) 

He writes
Not as a man who needs to remember the milk
Nor as one who, bored, doodles upon their smooth skin
--Would he had that ink to waste--
But as himself, spilling his very soul onto his wrinkled, weary self
Pitch-black ink marching words the
Only thing to keep him chained and fettered here
In what may as well be Hell
He improbably longs for a staying, a purpose, a legacy
And he never goes out in the rain
He does not want to be washed away.

It's Time

Scent November in the wind, 

the darkness can envelop us now. 

Think back and further back, and 

to a different smile and a different thought 

what were 

we thinking 

and are we right now... 

Is right now right now? 

Wind swirls 

it has arrived, that certain sigh and certain caress 

and back into dim times we can hardly remember remembering

minds drift, buffeted back into the present

To the reality of retrospect and hindsight

And the warmth of today

Dynasty

Born on some faraway rugged shore
You cried and
harmonized with the shrieking birds
Fled to a tower monolith, locked in dark for a crime you couldn't explain with toys
And flourished there as you began to understand
Thanked your father on bended knee when he showed you
the deceit and lies and threatening flirtation
Shattering the innocence you never could have had anyway
You grew with an empire built on splintered principles and trying to be more
Grew into the glory and fanfare that was your inheritance
Took ahold
(when the leader could no longer stand that fateful morning)
Grasped the strength and power and bloodstained steel of your birthright
And rode,
Always forward
To satisfy the need for those things you never really understood
Looking for approval from some
god you didn't know how to believe in
And fulfilling a craving,
                   not your own
to keep the lines strong

Falls

Tired autumn clouds lie 

Underscoring the too-vibrant, don't-waste-a-minute sky 

As breezes with a familiar tang crumple another leaf corpse into 

Cracked asphalt, 

Suspended in auburn 

                              A wine-colored, brusque syrup of 

Waiting hunched in a halfway 

For the last piano key up-down fanfare of frost 

And no more of the matte-finished summer farewell 

We wait here, a poised kind of stable

Would you refute the irrefutable? 

Try to rebuild as the original Rome, stressed and stretched, finally falls? 

But as we wait for our empire-kingdom-russet

to drift to the ground and for the painters to retire to craving vibrancy once again 

Feast your eyes on this gleam, this harvest, this splendor,

and look out at how blue the ocean is 

Just Right

Argent pours like rain 

Remember your smile and 

I feel like lightning 

A Minority of One

Anyone can tell you--and trust me, they will--that a minority is a group of people smaller than the majority (the larger group). And yes, the minority generally loses because of sheer lack of numbers. Take elections, for example. Those who bother to vote sometimes do not get what they wish: they are in the minority, and the majority are the winners, simply because there are more of them. That is the point. 

HOWEVER. 

Anyone can tell you--and trust me, they will--that any large group of people who are oppressed, or who are not heard or recognized, are a minority. Because those people voting in their election? Yes, they are a minority. But their opinion is recognized. Again, this is the point. When a large group of people is downtrodden and cannot be heard, their opinion is not even recognized. They do not even have the opportunity to be a minority, because they are not counted. To not get what you wish, you have to wish for something. 

Roman women. Majority (yes, majority) victims of genocide. Any racial minority (yes, minority) anywhere. 

The word "minority" is not simply a way of counting. To many, it has connotations of oppression, of unfairness, and of dehumanization.

Anyone can have an opinion, and as long as that opinion is recognized, they have the chance to be heard, however few their numbers are. It is groups, of any size, who are seen and not heard, obeying and uncomplaining, who are minorities. If one small person is heard, they have made a difference. And if an enormous, or tiny, group is not heard, they cannot make a difference, and are silenced, made inconsequential. They are a minority, in a deeper way that transcends the power of numbers. 

Enduring

Old man weary across the sand strides
Muddy up to his crusty waders
And one mournful seagull cry his face falls but
Wait
--There is more (Not the end)
Dull coughing engine in the distance coming close closer still he
     
       Leans his shoulders against the coming fog
Unconscious
He
Trudges deftly among the grime and listens
(Waiting, waiting) The sound of his dreams, the sound that
He does not dare (wants)
To believe even though like a fresh breeze in his cellar it is taking him back far back to an apple orchard (her, yes, her) and the light (yes, the way it looked when it hit her face) and (her laughter, her smile, just for him) the sound of warm wind in warm leaves, warm green

Crashing splashing waves he is tuned to the sea tuned to it now for many years (such a long time ago)
Look up!
Now the prow hits the strand and
Now there is a crunch of exhausted pebbles
And a greeting slow-spread grin (old friends)

Climb through the brine and the salt and
The improbable lucky accumulation of age and rime
Look to the east, look to the day (hope hope hope how familiar)

And as we face forward, follow a pointing finger
Back, back and straining eyes see (did you know it, did you trust it all the time?)
She is waving from the window.

Petrel

Saw her today
hunched
A grey fledgling against dull blue
And I thought she might be migrating
But then I saw there was no smile

And behind those grey walls the same color as her feathers
A wrench is heard
A deep crack
That thinks it is hopeless
The loss of hope that comes with
              forgetting

The fleeting moment
(And who remembers fleeting moments?)
The fleeting three moments she was alive
And her wings did not just flap
They pulsed with a gratitude and a sense of wonder
That the wings of her mother
        and her mother's mother
Are too tired to recall

Weak current
wafts as her wings just barely
keep her in the air, improbably suspended in the most natural way
And a song without words
                                       (nearly drowned out by the shrike of some predator)
Unwittingly keeps her afloat
Until the day when she is not just surviving,
But living
             --Until
she is flying.

Judging The Cover

Today I saw a black girl and a white boy. One was probably African-American, the other probably of European descent. I'll leave it to you to guess which one was which.
To me, it feels odd to identify people as "black" or "white" (or even "yellow," which nobody does). To me it seems wrong, somehow, to describe a human being firstly by the color of their skin. Because we all know there's much more to a person than the color of their skin. Shouldn't I say "Today I saw a girl wearing a green shirt" or "Today I saw a person carrying a large backpack?" Isn't that more accepting, somehow?
Or is it better to say "She will be waiting for you; she has a green shirt and she is black?" In a region or culture that is predominantly white (European? Of Caucasian descent?) it seems better to describe the person so they will be recognized; isn't that the point?
Somehow, though, I cannot reconcile myself to this. When I tell someone to meet a friend I don't describe them as "white" or even "Caucasian." They simply ARE, and then I go on to describe them ("They are carrying a large backpack...")
If I was in a planet inhabited by goblins, and there was one wooly mammoth, I would describe the wooly mammoth as different from the others, even if aforementioned mammoth lived exactly as the goblins did. For all that humans sometimes like to avoid differences, aesthetic ones are very often used as a primary way to judge a person.
Should we take the most obvious thing about a person, though it may be completely insignificant, and use that as a defining characteristic? Maybe we seem as though we are not recognizing that person as who they truly are, because we see what is only right in front of us. Whether it is shockingly perfect proportions, large amounts of orthodontia, or whatever ethnicities we happen to be, it's hard to figure out how to think of and describe someone when the human eye and brain are confronted by aesthetics that can, unfortunately, be hard to get around.
I don't know if people prefer not to be described by their ethnicities (I certainly don't) or if they like to be, and describe themselves proudly as  Brazilian, or Aboriginal, or German-Scottish-Cuban-Austrian.
Even if we all looked exactly the same, or if we all have varying hues of bright green skin, I know one thing: In almost every way, humans are perfectly identical on the inside.

Halfway to Blackness

If

at the quiet beginning of tomorrow 

we wake and there is nothing but blackness

what will we do?

because I don't think that even the druids with beards and prayers could

bring back the light 

the hot August light that we pray for all year

and you and I, together we make a spark but 

there's really nowhere for the spark to go without the sun and 

even if all the lovers in the world exploded in ecstasy like summer fireworks 

it wouldn't be enough 

even if we wake up and there's nowhere to go and we blunder like hypothermic bison through the night 

even if someone somewhere like makes a machine of warmth like da Vinci and 

even if we thought about it and someone told us it would be black would we listen 

even if we all stopped on the subway and faced Mecca or even if we all asked a wicked witch 

we would be wanting for 

a bigger light 

but we, you and I, can hope and 

half-guessed, divinely realized

maybe the sky will turn gold again. 

concentrating on the sun

it's really hot and sometimes
she just wants to lie down and look at the scorching light and
inhale the sharp air that isn't even summer anymore
it's just there now that she's used to it
and anything that moves is really lazy because
it's hard work laying here in the
sunshine
(it's the divine and perfect and therefore very annoying kind that makes you want to stare at it and run
            away at the same time)
anyway anything that moves really doesn't hold a candle to her
concentration on the sun
even though you or i would walk by and not look twice
and the beating blue sky and the tumble of the achingly bright leaves on those tall trees are lost on us
and we do not know
what we are seeing

Falling

We stand at the edge of the terrifying blade of rock. Woolly white clouds drift in the atmosphere below us. Chocolate-colored mud slips beneath my feet as I lean farther over the sheer drop. I don't even want to think about how high up we are. Then I see it: a small rock ledge jutting into space some ten feet beneath us, hollow and full of crystalline, still water.
"I'm going down there," and I stumble down, backward on all fours and carefully holding on to anything I can reach. But suddenly I can't reach anything at all. I'm holding on to a single outcropping with both hands, but there's nothing else. I try to haul myself up to another handhold. I'm too weak, though, and now I'm shaking and my fingers are flooded with adrenaline as the reality of this situation and my stupidity catches up to me.
"I can't hold on!" I'm panicking now. I want to look down, but I force myself not to. It'll only make things that much worse.
"Don't move," he says. "I'll be right there." I can't see him, just hear his voice, and I wonder if he's as terrified as I am.
After an eternity he's right above me, hanging on tight to the rocks. He stretches out a hand and somehow I grasp it, clutching myself to the outcropping with my elbows and shoulders. Our hands are slippery with sweat and fear, and I can feel my fingers sliding from his. I pull at his hand to get a stronger grip, and then he's next to me, not above me, and I am no longer clutching the rock, and I can't feel anything but wind in my ears. I see a chunk of rock--my rock--falling down, down. It dawns on me that I am following the piece of rock, and so is he, and we are falling, freefalling, through the woolly white clouds I never dreamed I'd see the inside of.
The wind rushes cold in my face and whistles in my ears. I hear a shout of tenor from somewhere and realize he's not next to me anymore just as I see a curled-up shape in his black and red jacket hurtle past me, downward. I try to shout something--an apology, a shriek of fear, a call for help--but the vicious wind rips the words from my lips and nothing can be heard except whistling cold all around me.
The initial shock dies away, and it seems as though I drift through the air aimlessly, gracefully swinging this way and that way in space. I look back on why I am here now, plunging through nothing, and sigh inwardly. What a foolish thing to do, I tell myself. What an idiotic, pigheaded way to die.
This brings a new idea to my mind: Will I die? I don't want to die.
I push that thought away and concentrate on now, on falling. His form is spreadeagled below me, and there is nothing but whirling grey and white. It is almost relaxing in a perverse way.
Until I see the green. A green so big I can't believe I didn't notice it before. But then it is the only thing I see and there's nowhere else to go and except the green and it is looming in front of me and I don't register what that means until it hits me.
And
        then
                I
                   am
                         floating. . . .

Awakenings

He woke up with a sort of glaze over his eyes and a bleary taste in his mouth. The brash sun cut into his eyes, and he shut them again, trying to remember the blissful night and escape today.

In his dream he was holding something—he did not know what it was—well, he had known, in the dream, but now in consciousness and daylight he could not remember. He wandered, aimlessly, through mazes of attic rooms and kitchens with women and angelic children and smells of meatloaf. He strode through towns, sleepy and idyllic and timeless.

He held this, this thing that was something, and he walked. He strolled through an emerald park and looked at ducks paddling in the fountain. Alone, he walked through the middle of the road and into another park, also emerald, but with two fountains and swans instead of ducks. He missed the ducks.

He was looking for something, he knew. He was not searching in the frantic searching way of a man in desperate need of something, but in a suspended way, a way of searching where one is always walking and always looking and never stops. But he did not know what he was looking for—no, he did not know, although in the dream he was sure that the longing for it had permeated every fiber of his being and consumed him with this longing.

Again he walked through a park, devoid of both ducks and swans, but he did not mind anymore, or even notice. Maybe (he thought now, in waking, in hindsight) he had known he was getting closer, closer to this thing that had no name or purpose but the object of his search. But still his search was calm, his legs in their even stride were tempered.

Dreaming in a most un-dreamlike state, he crested a hill. Alone on this hill he stood, standing and surveying what should have been a vista but was instead a patchwork flatness that did not impress or repulse, it merely seemed to be. Here, in this dream, he looked down at the object in his hand—this object that now, in waking, had escaped him—he looked down at it. Here, above the patchwork flatness, in pink half-light, he saw it (whatever it was) and knew he had been looking for it the whole time. 

Stuck Here Now

Tumble down and down
Shatterglass breaks then the
Sun rises (praise be)
apricot and cerulean swirl of hello,
Filter lemon light
Low, low song
Rap rap and a building crescendo and a
High
Note
For
Them
Before descending back to the
Monotony of vim and verve
When we wonder why
Again and again
Ask and ask and
If the question is important then
Why do they only teach the answer

Born This Way

I'd like to think that most people have accepted the fact that homosexuality (or heterosexuality) is innate; being LGBT is not something that can be converted or beaten out of you. But then again, I'd like to think that people could just sit down and talk about their issues to solve them. When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense...

But I digress. In my opinion, the idea that an individual has "changed" their sexual preference to irritate the government or just to "stick it to the man" is offensive and narrow-minded. For example, I cannot change my race. My genetic makeup dictates my ethnicity. I could act like an Inuit or an Italian, but I cannot BE an Inuit or Italian. Anyone who wanted to could act as though they enjoyed homosexual relations, but they are not a homosexual. Sexual preferences are not only a personality trait, they are an essential part of biological makeup. 

And so some ask: nature or nurture? Is a child raised away from all thoughts of homosexuality still going to be a homosexual? And conversely, would a child raised by gay parents become a homosexual automatically? 

Sexual preference is not contagious. Yes, a man raised by a minister and his wife may grow up, get married and have two children and a successful career and not discover his true sexual preference or come out for many years, but at some point he will become aware, publicly or privately, of his sexual orientation. For various reasons having to do with prejudice, stigma and religion, this man may choose to stay in the closet. But his preferences will not alter; they will merely be buried. 

At some point, people will wake up. They will realize that as long as there has been life, there has been sex. For as long as people have been on Earth, they have reproduced, and for as long as there have been men and women, there have been homosexuals, heterosexuals, bisexuals and transgendered persons. This is a fact of life. And marriage of two people who love each other should never be a question, whether it is religious or political. 

Any religion will say that love is essential to life. I doubt that God cares what sort of love it is.  

Here

Blue expanse

stretches yearning for the 

horizon, 

inconsequential sun specks dance on cerulean canvas 

and tangy salt coils wind around the clouds. 

Can you sleep now? 

Rocking melody waves are holding you.

Fixed here what if it was forever but 

why do we need forever when we have now and 

infinite gold pours down to kiss you and 

I rise up to meet you

for the first time. 

New Material...

Maybe, says the cynical part of my brain, materialism makes people want to make everything more complicated, more intricate, more involved. That’s why staring at “New Document” on my computer screen is frustrating—because I am innately materialistic, and therefore do not like blankness. I want something tangible, that screams “Color!” or “Love!” or “Blood and guts!” like a bad movie. Maybe my senses have been dulled and I need to have as much sensory input as possible, to keep my 21^st century, technological, beef-guzzling faculties interested. White is simply too subtle for my Westernized self.

                Humans are innately creatures of progress—we want more, and we want to produce. There are many things that prove the worth of humans and their ingenuity, although increasingly this need for production and the idea that “more is better” is proving to be diabolical and, some would say, humans’ downfall. Maybe it stems from this idea that humans need to produce and make better, but sometimes the things they—we—make or improve make hard work, and therefore this same ingenuity, a moot point. The decrease in demand for hard, especially manual, work, allows people to become lazier and put all their trust in some form of technology. And, as we all know, technology is not foolproof.

                But I digress. This need for production makes me subconsciously want to fill a paper, or something bigger, with ideas or marbles or whatever the receptacle was meant to hold. Is this want, or need, product of social materialism? Is it an innate craving that is part of being human? Or is it just me, accustomed to meeting deadlines and being frustrated when the words don’t automatically craft themselves into an essay before my eyes?

                Whatever the reason, I know that many people feel the need to complete things. However, my discussion of blankness is not yet complete.