5 minute read
Stephanie Macias, “Cocktail
Cocktail
Stephanie Macias
Biting my tongue is in vogue these days.
The taste of blood is a cocktail at the end of grueling times.
Hours of smiling and nodding, of being human—
no ice please, I take it room-temp then warm it in my mouth to ninety-eight degrees.
It is relief, the tiny taste of red staining my teeth pink.
The sure gate of my lips concealing my injured tongue where
I bit your name off the tip.
The Flavor of Water
David Leo Sirois
Whatever’s left of me.
These fragments I have more than the void. Floes holding clusters of floating ice.
My name a vestige of identity, that falsehood forever cocooned in mystery.
How far away my heart’s heart –my home & final destination, my other mother murmured.
I glimpse a verdant island there. Attempt to see nomad wind as it haunts these leaves & grasses. See myself untied.
At this moment I wish to rise awakened but this stolen boat holds me by the spine.
Wooden boards won’t let go of me.
Sudden waft of hyacinth –scent of purple scent of pink.
Everything is melting. Buildings trees people. In which world do I walk without ceasing? A little prince on my own planet.
A white-haired woman once attempted to instruct me –“Life is relationships.” Still can’t grasp it.
Don’t believe her.
For me, poetry –which is forbidden to discuss in a poem –is a planned flâneurie. Unnameable city of silence.
There are sounds, but they take no form inside this inchoate mind.
In these shattered rooms of mirrors I am nothing –silhouette seated at a cleared table.
What is separation but a split from everything one has ever known?
But I enjoy this strangeness called “alone.” Means a blur of wine time longing & song. Cocaine & countless cigarettes with strangers on a sidewalk bench.
Supposed poet porting an awkward guitar, secretly stealing Napoleon’s pointed black hat, symbolizing being the self-crowned emperor of performers.
I know good people at first sight, seeing sapphire in their eyes –then “Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by!”
Carved on the king of the Celtic Twilight’s tomb. In his heavy lifetime tome he reveals
what all conceal – “There’s no fool can call me friend.”
Who am I? Don’t know.
I press a strange tongue against my palate, & pretend to be.
This is the flavor of water.
David Leo Sirois
I appear upon your screen totally out of focus.
Help me arrive at where I am.
Even now, after 45 turns of kind chaos, still I fight to let myself be drawn by the natural magnet of my heart’s heart.
Negative & positive poles mixed.
Seagulls flutter in & out of my chest, in search of a fresh or salty body of water.
So often unfulfilled.
Midnight & where is my old mind? Slipped between the slats of reality’s trellis.
The head of one last gold rose dignifies this servile kitchen table, & complements my well-dressed skull –pulled from a closet of stuffed bears, snowy owls, & the 8-foot snake my mother sewed together for my 10th birthday.
Million, the bear I still clutch all night, worth a million dollars to me, its neck weak & fur falling out. Hard to hold my head up with this heavy ego.
Back & forth along the open window winter floor. The shocking kiss of tiles against naked feet.
Night’s rarefied silence.
An oversized plastic clock adorns the wall with a cartoon clown –the steadfast drumming of the two-headed damaru, with its stone upon a string, rocking between the fingers of one of the four hands of Rudra, “The Fierce Lord,” his tears taking the form of brown beads encircling my wrist three times – but at this hour wearing his meditative face to perform our never-ending cosmic dance –
makes me march in tune with time, or lose my footing trying to climb with both eyes closed this mountain made of dust.
Is there really room for lies when nature is so sincere? Bound to be myself.
But who is this monster fattening the mirror? Think I’ve seen him in some of my mother’s long-ago-lost photographs.
Who has he all-too-easily become, letting laziness & sleep lead his steps?
It is purest logic to replenish an empty glass, & fill it with a blood-red cure for pain as often as the atmosphere requires.
Darkness slips in slowly, almost imperceptibly, until eventually it claims its trophy.
At noon I saw a hunched grandmother rolling an empty stroller along a silent sidewalk –my so-called presence still keeping it vacant –by her side a girl of perhaps 2 & 1/2, pushing an empty pink stroller herself.
Perhaps in 80 years this blond child, in whose face I could already see the soon-to-be adult, will graduate to a futuristic make & model of a walker.
I saw that it was good to be held upright. I have seen so many things (forever remaining ignorant) & accomplished much less, suffered in little educational ways, & least of all had flashes of the light that lives in sidewalks & other living sculptures, pulsating power only seen by unfurrowing the brow, softening the gaze, & listening to the likes of William Blake –
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”
“We look not with, but through, the eye.”
Who, then, is this witness? It saw & remembered last night’s dream about wandering the streets in the dark, feeling that my cold winter coat lacked a Christmas gift wrapped up in its pocket for a generous artist.
This witness watches my messed-up mind’s blizzard of wayward words & letters. My other father said “Don’t even let the letters come together. . .Never become anything.”
Sometimes the countless seagulls that flit between my ribs find a ripple upon which to sit & rest.
