hello, it's winter now. the first grey sun has come, purple in the evening, perpetually foggy. it snowed! a lovely friend hosted a poetry reading in the trees. feeling thankful for the encouragment to focus on nature, as a presence of comfort and love always there. it was a beautiful afternoon, and as our friends gathered in the crisp wind reading laminated papers, ana had hung mirrors on little strings from he trees, and all of the bodies, of mostly young women coming together to make and appreciate art, reflected eachother and the setting sun.
here's what I shared. the last fragment is the beginning of an new communal art project. more to come... but i'm trying to bring people together in writing a modern epic, a sort of generational manifesto, for new york, our generation, our time. please contribute to the poem here!
okay.
Tree poems
At the end of a long rope lies a tree felled.
It (like you)
Is compelled to braid itself into the earth
But
Like you
Must wait for forces beyond its control
To help it break down.
Strange branches
reach towards me in the night
In this, grows on me.
Sensing i have felt love,
Craving my knowledge,
Which might not be vital,
But is the reason to live.
I cannot give it.
In this easy, split second,
The world speaks to us as it makes us,
So let's just listen.
From my window,
which is the 9th floor but given the building is on a hill is actually thousands of feet up,
things pass in mid-air.
It is easy to forget how much space there is in the sky
a single leaf flying past a window
Might be the most poetic –
Nevermind.
Yes, that’s it –
The single leaf passing the window one thousand feet up
is the nevermind.
IV.
In the myopic blossom of Right Now
The moment is folded between us.
In an instant we’ll say
The end was right then,
Motioning with our hands
as accordions.
The play ends with prologue,
The morning ushers us away.
Stage whispered in haste
No effort is wasted.
V.
The subtle feeling,
That something is missing.
The other feeling,
That everything still carries on.
Who are you? You who
answers your name like an owl.
VII.
The stories we tell ourselves in order to live, exist
under the larger story of erasure.
Our Gods only the particles left over, dropping breadcrumbs on universeless man
Our philosophy is to return to an empty page
get free from the past, to be new.
Louder, faster, denser. Bigger better bargain banging body babies booming but
Something is in the air.
Salvation will have to be crawled to, through the grass we mowed, the soil we drained, the water we tilled.
Destiny will have to be remade
Without the westbound train.
The lucky will take cars,
the unlucky will pack whole lives into trunks.
Once,
if you can remember,
We said the world was paused.
A large quilt lies over the world.
From each corner, a naughty wick is burning inwards,
unraveling the edge captioning.
Your hearts go out to…Who?
The young whisper, angrily.
For a moment there, breath held, we peeked through an opened seam.
Threaded the eye of the needle of the world,
And stood poised with a weapon.
Through every windowpane,
the wind blew a widow's lament, a wolf’s howl,
But no one was listening then.
We are now, we must.
This is one continuous story,
some of them real,
all of them true.
Training for a turning point
Traveler runs headlong towards transient.
Chasing the next and the next to
the nexus you thought you
discovered.
You have not yet found a sense of home,
but you hold onto yet.
You tell yourself it is all one continuous motion:
A sweep of arm
One long and true sentence,
All the chaos kinetic energy
the pain just potential
And no effort is wasted,
No time is lost.