Thursday, March 24, 2011

Me

I am quite the ordinary person. Ordinary being, by definition, nothing spectacular. I am, as one would say, unremarkable.
I am a shadow with no gender and no form. I am a voice that makes no sound.
I am vertigo.
I am a stone that bleeds when cut, a priceless gem of useless dust.
I am Mother Teresa's gnarled fingers.
I am the Pope's abandoned robes.
I am the raging half-life of a teenage girl.
I am the smothering pillow in a would-be widow's hands.
I am, by virtue of my skin,
glass
made from the wind.
I am an iced ivory face
in an Iron Maiden's embrace.
I am a ghost that knew no life.
I am life that knows no ghost.
I am a mirror at my best,
and a reflection at my worst.

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Glassman

Yesterday I met a man sitting by an ice-glass lake.
I didn't see his snowy beard
and I completely ignored his face.
All my attention attached itself to his fingers
And all my thoughts--my vapor thoughts--condensed and settled
as tears
before my eyes and there they froze
most stubborn
stillborn
Till they became glass, ice-glass, organic lenses to focus
my sight--
--my insight and foresight and hindsight and true sight,
on the glass man's fingers.
They were mangled, the fingers, and gnarled
like charred stubs
of a paper tree--
--paper that had once held words
and memories
but is now
scoured
and chewed out.
And I watched through my marble-tear lenses
as he held up a pipe,
a solid affair of iron wood--mahogany--ordinary
and blew through it a ball of molten fire,
and, as I watched, the fire hardened,
into light and a heavy orb
of cranberry-orange ice.
But then I blinked,
and the vision shattered,
and my tears broke and the ice-shards clattered
as they hit my face.
A moment later they melted and the world dissolved
into marmalade skies and apple liqueur,
Because the glassblower had
fashioned, from ice, from sugar-dusted air,
and fingers broken and unrepaired,
the Sun.