No Ordinary Love

NO ORDINARY LOVE
“Didn’t I tell you what I believe . . .”
Helen Folasade Adu

How many moon cycles has our earth spun

since I leaped the ravine of No Return

to enter you as a sommelier

would a wine cellar,

since the bright crescents

of my fingernails

lit up the black sky of your back,

or these guitar strings bent

under cinnamon fingers

rhumba enough to evict

tenets of any religion?

Tonight, say a loose moonbeam

butterflies into the room

behind my ruby stung eyes,

mean a quill of light tries to inscribe

how nearly calligraphic kisses

could spell or dispel

lunar letters of despair.

Learnèd astrologer

under which bright constellation

might dreams cease

to summon those Calypso lips

glossed to lapse all logic,

if logic could even survive

your tresses

curling darker

than the drums

of what I prayed 

you could save me from.

Should I recite twin legends

of your razor swung legs,

but paint your skirt teal

as Sade's pleated lyrics

woven from shiver thin sheets?

Say doubt’s darkened cave of mouth

hid sparks of wildfire

to fell a forest entire,

then if all our nights

were spent like coins

glazed in the glare

of prayer’s fountain,

who cares?

Some wonder if we’re freed

or fried by the lightning inside

a theorem of thighs

that ignite five types of feral,

this time as the thin edge

of teeth on a low hung ear lobe’s

suspect rim,

that time as an ankle’s

brassy passion for police bracelets.

Let’s try to pretend
dawn’s first daughter,

danger’s onyx angel,

never snatched our head back,

hummed “Forever” into an ear,

or skipped our river rock quick

to spawn the sufi songs

of dragonflies that now seize

our pawns en passant.

Yet who else craved

an Old Crow moan

to throb their own throat,

or learned how vows

feel mouthed tho they sizzle unsung

in the cast iron marriage

of sly catfish & cool cornmeal,

between a first flame of bud

& that last good buy?

If his halo dipped

to kiss the curves

of Magdalene’s ear,

could even Jesus

have denied her Gospel

of touch?

Beloved,

how many Luna moths

need flit into old flames

while we burn coal hot

trying to unlock

a mystery like magnetism

with keys found under

the tea rose carpet

of your tongue?

HURRICANE WITH A WOMAN'S NAME

As if god stuttered the seventh letter or
in the queendom of quickened candles I smell
the pretty want preserved in her blackberry smile you
never can tell if the haze of love is grill smoke or fog burning off
I hold the scented feet of her chrysanthemum sonnets
in my mouth like penny candy until they melt
into a pseudonym for epidermic skirmish that feeds
the knocking of legs like needles knitting French novels
made like marmalade into movies starring Hepburn staring
out of desire holy as a moth-eaten hat but never
kissing like two planes crashing into a sparkling
tiara of her morphined memories unless somehow
they curl like calla lilies in the humidity pouring
as an alto aria from old pitchers of illegal aliens
like my naked hope swimming to the Atlantic shore
to avoid Customs of kissing on both cheeks she
shorts the electrical systems of my fingers
until the gaps fuse into black eyed susans and
maybe one night I lick a truth simple as egg salad
from her lips or caress her almond eyes they open like a 7-11
and serve every synapse loaded as a doe-eyed dog
with a carbonated big gulp which goes flat as Bobby McGee’s
indigo EKG after eight hours I hear myself singing
the blues to her Savoy genes and turn into the spiral
arms of a Tropical Depression that wouldn't hug a homeless
vet in 1972 falling like a barometer collapsed on itself or
slant lines of liquid silver precipitate from her stormy eye
still dream under the gaps in park benches because
my OCD makes me count every antecedent crawling
the luminous length of the concrete floor of this longing.

NaPoMo 30/30 Haiku and Senryu

Long dawn shadows
Booty stretch
marks morning Tai Chi

subway rumble the subtext of her half-smile

April darkness pocketing my phone to follow tweets

Because a Tomahawk is not a bird we pray

Winter leaves a calendar's last days curl around us

At the top of our stares Stars

Open bedroom door Oscar Peterson's fingers on 88 keys

Low winter sun The glare from a truck with a Rebel Flag

October breeze the puddle unruffled by a V of geese

subway rumble the subtext of her half-smile

Something old, Something new, something borrowed, something blue

PUZZLE PEACES
(For Miss Prissy)

When you toss the dark
mystery of your hair,
why are the almonds of your eyes
suddenly so sienna?
How do your lips
always seem to glisten,
ripe as a rain
kissed apple?
My hands may have trekked
from Australia to Zaire,
(although not yet Cabo Verde.)
Yet the topography
between the soft shore
of your forehead
and the smooth beach of your feet
leaves them befuzzled,
grasping at perfumed air.
They may have kayaked currents
on the Silver River,
rambled up the mythic rocks
of Mt. Rainier,
or even delved the subtext
of the Mediterranean Sea,
but encountering you
they lack any compass,
nautical chart or North Star.
Let me not notice
how the purple
of your pout
may harbor more treasure
than any ocean’s sunken chests
or these hands
might never cease
their hunger
to wander down
the coiled conundrum of your spine
and up the twin exclamation points
of your thighs,
eternally seeking to solve
each brown skinned riddle
the country of your body contains.

After Pablo Neruda

The Orange Antichrist

Over and over again The Orange Antichrist sighs matters

The crystalline ego
of The Orange Antichrist
glitter of glass shards

The Orange Antichrist
longs to be hailed
like a taxicab

"Hail to the Thief"
The Orange Antichrist
hums along

The creek rises
is god unwilling
The Orange Antichrist looms

Look
between one headline and another
The Orange Antichrist

GAMBLERS ANONYMOUS

This may be about the cravings in the mouth of a man with few front teeth standing by a Wizard of Oz slot machine for three or more hours, staring into the darkness. Or about what desire crosses the faces of people seated at nearby machines or the wheel of patter between them. Maybe someone once said that chocolate is just desire barred. This isn't about everything happening for a reason, except the things that don't, or about a human brain always finding patterns in the numbers of a roulette wheel even when there might only be the illusion of one. Roulette means “small wheel.” This could be about reasons being patterns in the small wheels of our minds. This could be about the divine grace of a certain waitress, dipping at the knees to serve a Chocolate Martini. Or about the darkness filling the glass she serves, but this is not about the darkness in the skin of chocolate. This might be about melodies made by spinning reels or tinkling bells or a pattern that could be encoded in the sequence of the lights. Perhaps this is about the all night party streamers of the waitresses' hair, about what inflates the life rafts of her lips, what taunts in the dark sea of her skin or what spins in the small wheels of her eyes. But, this is definitely not about the darkness in the center of chocolate. Not about how many degrees of heat could make it liquid between the lips. This wants to be about a woman walking past and checking her side view mirror to see if he's watching and is almost about which mixed drinks he may or may not sip behind the darkness of sunglasses as she swipes his debit card in the register of longing. This could be about a bar or what resembles candy in her smile.. This is not about the darkness in a sentence of chocolate. Not about how it melts and sticks. This may be about how the arrows of some eyes narrow if he doesn't speak or the mariachi band of laughter from certain lips when he does. This is likely about a no name man standing in front of a bank of thieving machines dreaming of bars lining up in a pattern on a reel, probably about a progressive jackpot. About how we invent goddesses to explain the patterns of darkness in our luck. This is not about the darkness at the center of chocolate. This seems to be a smile through reclining eyelids or a soft lick of the lips afterwards. But this can’t be about what gets wagered on the tip of a tongue or about being lost in a bet, and definitely doesn't involve the name of a goddess dissolving in his mouth on the slow cab ride from the airport of possibility to the dark shadows at the center of the city of half sighs.