Mirrors, Eyes

Wandering waves manifest an image

rendered as unreachable

This is the first time I don’t see you

I see me

dubiousnesses timidities

catoptrics

Even as you reach for me

skeptic speculations –

I feel my heart thumping

We said

expectations are disappointments unhatched

How could this not hold true now –

make mirages

of implicit simplicities

So lost in reflections

that while I feel your eyes open

taking in my image

Dare I stare in?

Arachnophobia

In the stale sweat of night, I bite at the silky
corners of the dark room where sleep, woven 
upside down, is a crouched moth waiting  to leap
in the first flame of morning and turn to ash 

A shadow shakes the white wall in that stuffed room
 where your father once heaved stiffly as his young
laughter sought its way out. It is no wonder  I came
spilling out as if a white hope inside you,

closely clutching  the sign above the bed
“Recovery is a Masterpiece” 

That  summer morning, humid dominatrix
lashing the house,   wet silk gown, hot
and white, splatters on the kitchen table
 I’m waiting for a breeze

through this  house and its pale laughter
You’re squeezed in the covers of a book,
shelled in a tight carapace of sweat and silence 
 A spider crouched in the corner  above the sink

wanders slowly across the throbbing yarns
to a pinned moth sweating microscopically.

Isaac Casey’s At-Bat

 One late-summer night,
over the field, a host of buzzing angels,
the high white lights, presided
and cast over the infield diamond
a heavy halo.  The umpire fastidiously tidied

the corners of the plate and fell into pose
over the catcher, figures in a stained-glass window
all hanging over the chancel of the tattered
batter’s box  which jailed calm Isaac Casey, iconoclastic

threat to the home-team victory. All eyes fell
on the would-be altar, on him,
and added to the burning white light, angelic
wattage.  Just before the pitcher began the elegy
being right then written, Isaac’s bat drooped like ripe spelt

as he spotted his dad’s truck pulling in beyond
the congregated crowd. One foot withdrawn
from the box, “Time, Blue,” he called.
All Spring, his father with such urgency taught

him the core art of bat and ball, the rudiments,
preached on sacrifice, and instructed without abstractions
unfondly, as if the balance of his soul would depend
on the soaking up of those sacred skills. Indeed
every Sunday, Isaac gobbled up the sermons engendering

in him a lust for attacking grounders, and smashing
fastballs, for crushing curveballs and snatching
hard liners from the sky.   So now, he returned to the box
pocked by cleat-craters, anointed in stadium-light, eyed the opposing octet.

One voice cut the summer’s night, gruff as an embattled
captain. It was Kyle Spalding, Shortstop
 rallying the troops, “Two down boys! Let’s hear some chatter!”
 The defense, following orders contracted,
 chanting like scripture, “Hey batter!”

The strikes, deadly blows, fell one, two, three,
defeating young Isaac, leaving
his little hopes in a slain heap,

 bitter tears.


By: L. Raymond Andrews

http://khqtoday.com/sports/2014/08/28/2014-little-league-world-series-recap/

The Metamorphosing and the Moirai

The Metamorphosing and the  Moirai

Does the caterpilling Painted Lady

engorged as if by ponderous thoughts

ever tap together her antennae in entreaty

to Clotho for exuviation  

from the spinning thread of uncertainty

as the last running stitch sews

her into a chrysalid mystery?

My scattered head is packed

with the leafy detritus of life;

inside the grey loom unceasingly darns

the mind’s fading threads into a wingless

pupation, a dark enclosure

from which my destiny will emerge.

I’m holding my hands together

 hoping it flutters.

by: L. Raymond Andrews

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Senescence

Senescence 

I watched these two kids playing  all through the humid juneday
twisting, shuffling, jolting, just as freshly as yesterday,

 catching their own laughter with mason jars
The purple curtain spilled from crowded clouds

over their hopscotch boxes  and drained the chalk
from the sidewalk, swirled skylight fallen into dusky gutters

I thought about how life has wetly erased the lines
I’d never cross while I stayed up through the adult

night and howled a symphony into an emptied jar:
in the slurred morning, some misbegotten tune.

I wonder if those kids ever wake up
to find their brimming  jars gone sour—

by: L. Raymond Andrews

The Microcosm of Texas; The Lone Star Sestina

When I close my eyes, I swear I feel everything rising and falling in Texas

as if my head rested on the broad, sleeping chest of a couched dragon;

the thunder is itself the deep,  a rumbling growl from beyond soft scales,

a stone block dragged across cement swallowed by an echoing belly; the Night

is one continuous breath, drawing everything in, even the wailing of a train hiding

just beyond the horizon, and watching the day rising the way a fox acutely eyes

a hapless calf.  The trees rise and the hills rise like the green rinds of watery eyes;

the wildflowers haughtily shrug  off the weighty hooves of sun—I am in Texas—

half in winter, half in spring, tiny scrawling mysteries exposed and yet hidden

and rising among the thrushing, feral hills, the vertebrae of a dragon;

the cindery jowls of the day drip thin lashes of warm smoking into the night

like the glistening descent of minor scales;

the vast blue bulwark close enough to reach out and palm, to scale

should proud hands grip the first cloud and in a head-back stare meet the sun’s eyes 

whose pupils are quiet as the dark dance of truth, the shadows of the night;

the rusty hillocks the virescent knolls, the widening irises of Texas

at once outside of the cave of the great sleep-sighing Earth, dragon,

and yet inside next to its heart, the softest spot of its hide.

When I open my eyes, the full sun falls down on the leathering, hacked hide

of a slain mythos, off the beaten backs of cave-workers balancing harvested scales

on their shoulders, down on the bony hills decaying like teeth in the jaw of a dragon

long laid dead, the endless breath of  acidic war having boiled away its eyes—

this is how the sun falls when I am in Texas—

dead, like all its ancient sisters, in the blind swill of an eternally fallen night

the bold heart falling and the clear mind falling together like the Night’s

lashes falling from bucolic ideations (also dead), as determined thieves hide

their fled footsteps from the unblinking eye of Texas,

itself as chimerical as the organic balance of Justice, their praetorian scales

tipping for the existing order thoroughly entrenched like burning salt in teary eyes,

for the bureaucratic binds as difficult to uncover as the fossilized bones of a dragon,

holy dragon,

for the militant gentry and their thoughtless slayers, black knights

and other tincan machinations of war, for the piles of trash and plucked eyes

and fallen bees choked on the plasticine lies of Monsanto legally hiding

amongst the wilting truths, for the stunted bud scales

and the fecal brown hills of moneyed, moneyed Texas

oil, exports meant to line the leather wallets made from the hides

of kirin, dragons, quetzals, and nymphs, the eyes of Americans pondering the scale

of the heist and calling for the knights to defend microcosmic Texas.

by: L. Raymond Andrews

http://www.totalfilm.com/features/the-making-of-the-hobbit-the-desolation-of-smaug

Beautiful In My Country

After Kevin Prufer’s In a Beautiful Country

One way to be beautiful in my country

is to stand on the halfcourt line in the pubescent

stink of a dodgeball game

Another way to be beautiful in my country

is to leave your house without using the bathroom

then go stand in line

The lines were drawn before the game was known

The foul lines and the hash lines forgotten

the waiting lines, the slaughter lines full

the lines that matter separating sides.

Chain

an unfed tiger behind you and only talk with tiger-owners

if you want to be beautiful in my country 

commiserate on how it’s hard to find affordable housing

outside of the zoo—

 the beasts of the fields are brought into the streets—

cut off your hands

and try to hold down a job at GM

you’ll be beautiful then—

yes, even my brethren—

They have put us to pain

and they profit from it

They have put them to pain

who cannot profit from it

We put ourselves to pain—

A good way to be black in my country

is to suckle your newborn on the black tit

of a beretta while overhead spins

a white horse a white diamond and a white Barbie. 

by: L. Raymond Andrews

The Dance of Four Elements

The Dance of Four Elements

I.

She was a stone

figure carved  

out of a marbled

rock mountain

or in the walls

of an ancient temple 

Every movement

was so sturdily

organic, fresh

in the way that tilled

up wet soil is fresh

It was at that moment

the long instant

of the yogi-like pose

she rigidly held   

that I forgot  

she was a person

indeed the same  

(at least genetically)

I had cradled

some time ago. 

II.

She is the light;

the waxy sun crawling

through the window, writhing

around her ankles becomes another smoky

shadow: the useful but minor kindling

 of  poetry captured

by flaring forms.

III.

Anyone could see the haloing auras breezing

around her head and shoulders as if she had danced

right out of some Victorian painting and wafted

onto a stage on some otherwise ordinary afternoon

And will we ever see first the connection instead of the contrast?

IV.

The brightness and the blackness

the firm and the fluid

the near nothingness sound of silent

bodies that are yet conversing, moving

in soliloquies and discourses -

a communing that can be heard over symphony pumped

through the loudspeakers: the music becomes the crackling

rain of a stormy night’s dream.

See how she leans ever so slightly?  

She moves aqueously:  splashing into herself

ringleting with virulent grace

rippling on and on

by: L. Raymond Andrews

Lying On The Deck In My Sister’s Backyard

Ah

the aria

of any singing pajaro!

    moving—

without thought

from refrain to refrain

    —enriching

without thought

of remuneration,

    singing for Science-still-knows-not-what

and pausing

sometimes— a measured rest

 … space

for the complex

    inflections

to echo

   in the distance

and be echoed

in sentiment by others:

life

as it should be praised—

     a skilled, continuing jazz,

dipping

and soaring

  towards white bars

on a blue sheet of sky

  and a bright clef of sun,

      before it alights

to renew its chirping,

flight of music 

What a fearful, unthrifty quiet

I have made of the few short measures given to me

by: L. Raymond Andrews

Sestina on Developing a Drinking Habit

We’ve been stuck in this dive, unable to drive, as if in some dream,

a paling vomit just on the lip like the ghost of a lemon twist—

     something, it seems, has been forgotten in the glass.

It makes me a little sad, the filthy juice

on the floor and the sound of whimpering keys when they shake

against all the others in a jar underneath the spirits.

We’ve been sitting here staring at the blank spirits

all bottled up and out of our reach like secret, tiny dreams

huddled under Stay Sober or Surrender Your Keys, the sign that shakes

 like a whispering flag. How unnerving, the way Barkeep’s eye twists—

 polyphemic— while on the floor, the last of the color fades underfoot, the juice

 getting sticky like elbows and the bottom of my glass.

I wish the sun would slip its fingers through the  glass

 and reach for me like a benevolent spirit.

Should my sleepy, gray ghost ever find enough juice

 to move, cool-handed, as if meeting a childhood dream

 I’ll meet the future the way the night and morning twist—

  but Barkeep, smiling, caps the tins, shakes…

and Bob, like the frightened poor, is hoarding the last of the peanut shake

and I am again vaguely wandering  the sea in my glass,

lost or looking,  following the path of Barkeep’s twists—

beguiling how Barkeep tinkers with the spirits

             like a tiny voice moving quickly,  a dream

to the pale. Everyone’s watching again, like when the juice

spilled out and its color brightened everything for a while— Was it just juice?—

and waiting for the miracle, rousing up shake

but they are lost, whatever little fabricated dreams

he hoped for. Back to idling in our Ogygian glasses

ashamed at being given over to such childish spirits.

Like strands of rope, wet rings  twist—

footprints of old cocktails— like spun legends twist

until the enthralling pulp of that juice

is no more a memory. We are all fallen to the fiery spirits.

Better to pull the lid over the glazed glass

by: L. Raymond Andrews

Always Near

Dear,

To the point, I have been absent—there is no denying.  Yet the more absent, the more nearing.  You say I have not been with you, but many mornings you brushed me aside like a breeze snuck in through the window over the headboard.  And you have not been with me: though I held you, you held onto only your own warmth—you odd particle, you strange matter.

But we are so close now, and everyday closer.  In the times when in the still water of night, you yourself ripple because of a breeze or some thought striking beyond the surface and sinking into your core, and you move in the bedside lamplight as if pulled by some taut invisible string—on nights like those I am so nearly pressed against you that my breath raises the hairs on the balls of your shoulder, raises your skin into tiny altars awaiting little breadth-less sacrifices.

Collide into me! And react as atoms do—release your heat!  Remember again the days we were close, when your innocence became mine! Unzip yourself from this world where we are separated! I am here next to you and always have been.  Let me truly touch you and you will fall asleep in my arms and we will dream as if forever.

Eternally,

Azrael

by: L. Raymond Andrews

Losing the House

Losing the House

I.
When shouldering the rubble clogging
the caldera of the veiny underground
procession or when soldiering
at some stuck twig or toe
or crittering exoskeleton,
does the ant ever imagine
between busy antennae
what becomes of its body
when it is time
to at once repay
the great loan
of life?

II.
When lying on a small farm listening to the chicks pop like sizzling kernels in the setting sun, leafy greens hurdle infinitesimally over their brown bedding
like children forever rising in the slow morning, nearby

a butterfly, yellow with dreaming life, sniffs out a rock

to fan down while elsewhere in the same
ordinary instance hot, red life lurches forth to feed the brown ground
as the insidiousness of its own leisurely life is recognized by an old hen ah! too late.

III.
When the fish
having broken the cap
of its universe, for the first time
pierces into the choking air, cutting wind
and eyes its watery world fearing it may float
forever away, it finally sees the round
horizon of everything
like the scintillating
edge of a bubble.

IV.
Before
whistling
their bloody tune they are cloistered,
a frightened family,  until one makes
the short pop
to the chamber, loaded
shot irrevocably
into the world,
toward death. 
Created to be destroyed.

V.
When I was snatched up from my worrying daughters
and led into the judge’s chambers,  He spoke
with laser precision expressing something like sympathy
for all who similarly must stare
down the cold barrel of poverty
in this land of plenty, loaded
the room with deep condolences,
yet then let fall
the remorseless hammer.

by: L. Raymond Andrews

Le Debutante

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Le Debutante by Vic Lee

Le Debutante

After the painting by Vic Lee

It seems that even Batgirl was a victim of the fallout

left  in the wake of the inexplicable Honey Boo Boo--

an attempt by Commissioner Gordon to shield

his little girl Barbara with the vestige and trapping

of "every pretty girl’s life". Thus the Beauty Pageant.

Or perhaps, captured,  a young Betty Kane endures

the mad torturing hatched by the cackling Joker, laughing

over an unseen record playing Debussy’s Arabasque #1.

How else do you explain the subdued flamingo's legs flopping

like curtain tassels at her tip-toeing waltz around the checkerboard?

Or maybe a nightmare which woke Cassandra Cain, interim Batgirl:

an image of herself mid-pirouette, ponytail hanging as if forever

frozen, smoke from  a pastoral cottage sewing simultaneously

every frill on her country gown, her assassin’s eyes are softened

by the futile search for her father’s approval in the indiscernible crowd. 

Whether you’re Betty, Barb, Cassie, or Steph under the mask

doesn’t matter; you were made to boost ratings so stuff

yourself in a dress and accept the identity we create.

by: L. Raymond Andrews

Becoming Gray and Reliving

Old men move like rounded

rocks in a swift river and stare

with eyes like January--

eyes that look at what will be as what has been

From porches or park benches, reliving

They say,  “Seems like

yesterday I spun wings from the slender

dusky sun, and shattered the midnight moon!”

Today, piecing together a “Starry Night”

Yesterday, we, when the daylight trailed

into twinkling, pricked ourselves with spinning

stars or moon shards, slipped

into the myopic closing of spaces,

rendered fingertipping and gravity

into distended pulsing

Today you lie

dormant, dressed by scattered

sunlight and breezes

the cloudy pathos of yesterday evaporating

like rain from the sun-aged

sidewalks of our twisted minds

Today I am puzzled,

spread out on the table,

trying to pen our sheets to a line

hanging as whitely as regret hangs

on in the wind.

by: Raymond Alistair

Janus

From the Diary of Winston Smith (pantoum)

I’ve found it hard to live in this world;

I’m practically a prostitute,

destitute and in the direst of circumstances,

I give up my body and my mind.

I’m practically a prostitute,

and I’m not particularly well off for it.

I give up my body and my mind

for a few sweet moments,

and I’m not particularly well off for it:

there’s no space for love or liberty.

For a few sweet moments

I’m ashamed of what I’d sacrifice.

There’s no space for love or liberty-

ideas can be so very dangerous.

I’m ashamed of what I’d sacrifice

for my flatscreen.

Ideas can be so very dangerous…

I need more shows

for my flatscreen

to drown out the voices.

I need more shows-

I’m lacking the courage and compassion

to drown out the voices

of the currently empowered.

I’m lacking the courage and compassion;

I’ve found it hard to live in this world

of the currently empowered,

destitute and in the direst of circumstances.

by: Raymond Alistair

John Hurt in the film version of 1984

To Writers

A mosquito, chief editor

of the otherwise excellent artistry

of an evening set and stroll in a park

was deciding where on my sweet

skin to land having been forcibly arrested

by the long sigh of my content

breath, as I watched

the long trees lean at obtuse angles like handwriting

across a green and white page. Only the guiding

of the unseen wind causes them to sway,

causes their leaves to rapturously tingle.

I gave up my blood

to the mosquito who indifferently

returned to errant flitting, now as round

and black as the ballpoint of a wet pen, hoping

it would leave me be.

Two little girls, barely

old enough to even articulate

the idea, were plotting

how they could stay away forever

in the  park and never go

back home as they wrote

into the wood of the gazebo their names.

What if we never went back

and instead spent the night writing

our names in the benches we sleep

on? Wouldn’t the world get bigger

if we stopped

following the inky asphalt trails

everywhere everyday, commuting?

I waited for the girls to return, ready

to spend the rest of their lives

in the park listening to the time

being kept by the pendulating

of a swing groaning under the force

of a body kicking up and down up

and down and I knew the mosquito

would come back to bite me.

by: Raymond Alistair

In Neighborhoods Across America

round herds of houses

brick tenements crawled over by ivy

where babes and elders alike once spent

their sunshine on imagining

another life

There was always a big tree

knotted and tall, presiding

over crawling grasses, bent

as if daily brushed back

by combing winds

Where once the day was in its eld

daring to begin to sink into horizon

causing windows of spilled

starlight swiftly to close

on the grasses and dappled leaves

little eyes would look up

watching the slow spill

of floating foliage turning in,

the harsh rumble of the rush

hour of little consequence

to them the mere rumble

of wandering beasts,

cold hearts needing a spark

to start, lurking around loudly outside

the gates, beyond the boundaries

of their little Eden

What happened?

The wandering beasts have come and gone;

we, supposedly safe, watched from windows

our tall trees become toothpicks

for the toothy machine

Now we remain guiltily huddled 

beneath the bricks, closed

doorways securely fastened

against the imminent lurking

Danger, as diffuse as the winding

white threads that once crept

from the twin chimneys

where beneath the elders and babes spend

their little lives imagining

a big , knotted tree, an oak or an elder—

no fires for youths to dream

beside, to be freed by; no crackling

hearths only cold cinders waiting

for a spark

by: Raymond Alistair

What The Boy Said

Vamos juntos al jardín

Conseguirémos como muñecas escuchando

What The Boy Said

Look into the eyes

On a butterfly’s back

Then tell me about her soul

Not all eyes are windows

Some are  doors, closed

Needing to be opened

Some are hands, empty

needing coins to be placed on them

Nothing is free

Though we were all born that way

Perhaps the cocoon is the price

Of the butterfly’s winged liberation

Not all things can be paid with money

Nor should they be

What hot darkness would you endure

What stink of solitude

To reclaim what at once

You lost after your birth?

by: Raymond Alistair

Copyright 2013 Studio Tord Boontje

La Folie de Grandeur

Renee Magritte, La Folie de Grandeurs II

La Folie de Grandeur

He could have at least named it Phileas,

That contrary kook.  

Oh, but the French and their damned irony-

Right, M. Passepartout?

It was by rail! By rail! No balloons!

And what romanticism

That could have been portrayed by that buffoon,

Timeless imagery:

The subjugation of tonnage by torque,

Of wheel by track, of iron by steel;

The magic order produced from the suppression

Of the raw, black salt of the Earth

Via technology:

Firebox to cylinder, Valve and Regulator transmuting

Savage power into productive work

Like yolks over bulls.

I suppose I see the idea behind those gridlocked

Thighs, that engorging torso-

The ever-growing British Empire-

But how am I, the subject of this whole blessed business,

Reduced to that bloody blue balloon?
 

by: Raymond Alistair