A Non-Ode to the First
In the meantime, she steps
between the curtains and, O needle of my shredded
days! sits at the shore
– César Vallejo
1.
Nature opens her petaled door for you
to step your naked feet through.
Early afternoon gathers its brush –
when it colors the hillsides,
it imagines your hair
weaving through late morning’s fingers
as your waking self trudges through
the downpour of half-twilit consciousness.
By the time evening shyly
greets you as a necessity before
giving itself up to demanding darkness,
your bedroom is already full
of inventions. The forests
offer you their tools. The street gives away
someone else’s forget-me-please,
which you transform into the
holy tree of your personal myth.
The wordlessness of the sharp horizon
offers you a plateful of clouds.
You drink from them like honeyed tears.
2.
Almost in a kind of desperate
and lazy haste, C. takes down
all the hours they spent on the living
room shelf, and replaces it with books
and other masters’ constant and
troubling times.
This place doesn’t feel like
home anymore,
they say. Really,
they say they feel as if everything
was rushed into place, like someone
forcing a whole track home into the
centimetered ventricles of the heart.
It’s no wonder the wood splinters
are beginning to fall from their eyes.
They bend forward, to take down a
concept, and their organic being spreads out
before me through their black-star
emblazoned pajama pants. Though this
is a serious labor for them, and though
they need my presence to okay the
manifestations of their thought bubbles,
a more alien part of me dreams of
animals in the wet hardness of a cave --
stalactites making natural curtains for
God’s water-carved and echoed suburbia.
And I can’t help but realize, though
they flail to find a comfort in our own hovel,
I need no home, but for the comfort
of their body, and the places my mind
settles into as I watch their contours.
However, especially in this advancing age,
it’s hard to know if this is objectification or love.
Brian Sheffield is a performance poet, editor, and educator in the Central Coast of California. He is Co-founder of Mad Gleam Press, a French-American small press based out of California, New York, and Paris. He is also an editor with Boukra Press, a radical small press based out of Monterey, CA. He has performed and been published internationally among predominantly independent circles.
In the meantime, she steps
between the curtains and, O needle of my shredded
days! sits at the shore
– César Vallejo
1.
Nature opens her petaled door for you
to step your naked feet through.
Early afternoon gathers its brush –
when it colors the hillsides,
it imagines your hair
weaving through late morning’s fingers
as your waking self trudges through
the downpour of half-twilit consciousness.
By the time evening shyly
greets you as a necessity before
giving itself up to demanding darkness,
your bedroom is already full
of inventions. The forests
offer you their tools. The street gives away
someone else’s forget-me-please,
which you transform into the
holy tree of your personal myth.
The wordlessness of the sharp horizon
offers you a plateful of clouds.
You drink from them like honeyed tears.
2.
Almost in a kind of desperate
and lazy haste, C. takes down
all the hours they spent on the living
room shelf, and replaces it with books
and other masters’ constant and
troubling times.
This place doesn’t feel like
home anymore,
they say. Really,
they say they feel as if everything
was rushed into place, like someone
forcing a whole track home into the
centimetered ventricles of the heart.
It’s no wonder the wood splinters
are beginning to fall from their eyes.
They bend forward, to take down a
concept, and their organic being spreads out
before me through their black-star
emblazoned pajama pants. Though this
is a serious labor for them, and though
they need my presence to okay the
manifestations of their thought bubbles,
a more alien part of me dreams of
animals in the wet hardness of a cave --
stalactites making natural curtains for
God’s water-carved and echoed suburbia.
And I can’t help but realize, though
they flail to find a comfort in our own hovel,
I need no home, but for the comfort
of their body, and the places my mind
settles into as I watch their contours.
However, especially in this advancing age,
it’s hard to know if this is objectification or love.
Brian Sheffield is a performance poet, editor, and educator in the Central Coast of California. He is Co-founder of Mad Gleam Press, a French-American small press based out of California, New York, and Paris. He is also an editor with Boukra Press, a radical small press based out of Monterey, CA. He has performed and been published internationally among predominantly independent circles.