Stuff

What is it with Americans and stuff?

Does capitalism bring out the worst in us?

Would socialism make us be better people,

Renounce all our greed, and care for those weaker?

What if the problem's much smaller in size,

Not the invisible hand, but mine?

Metamorphosis

Perform for us, the world it cries

An audience with ever-watchful eye

Make us laugh, cause us to think

The spectators yearn, they plead, they breathe

Like a single organ, a pair of lungs

Respiring together in unison

The wrinkled performer behind the mic

I’ve lost that way, that soul, that might

The money’s spent, the piggy bank broke

Not a coin is left in the pockets of my coat

Those nerves have deadened

That fire waned

No longer want to stand up on that stage

Inciting some lips to smirk, the others to praise

All I want is a wink of sleep

Of respite from the work it takes to please

To lie there next to my dear friend

Rub my old bones against his

Transcend the mouth, the teeth, the tongue

The tools of language I never mastered well

Intuit instead the rhythm of the heart,

Merge together, and expire in the dark

The House Call

The light barely seeped past the windowpane, so weak were the rays after pushing through countless elemental barriers: clouds, rain, fog. It traveled just far enough to make visible the limp and lifeless form draped over the back of that old wooden chair in my living room. I stood in the corner opposite, hands crossed over my stomach. “This looks serious,” I thought, affecting agony in the tone of my inner voice, which clanged and clattered against the interior wall of my hollow body, creating an unsettling echo.

For some unknown length of time, I’ve been rushing past it. Its lethargic shape now gathering traces of dark grey dust in its creases. Every day it has become a little more deflated and, I am realizing just now, smaller as well. It used to be as tall as I, but now it’s barely larger than a paper bag. I have kept telling myself that I will get around to it as I hurry out the door for another grueling day, but no appropriate solution had of yet struck me.

On this particular morning, I found I had been staring at it for an unusually long time and for some unknown reason, perhaps it was the dreariness of the day wholly permeating the empty room inside, I could take it no more. I determined to try to find a remedy for this mere remnant of a substance.

As if solution followed need, it suddenly dawned on me that my physician made house calls, and before I knew it I was fumbling around for his card. After having just finally located his number, somewhere in my peripheral vision I noticed a subtle movement from the back of that old chair. Perhaps a wind had blown in the atmosphere outside, perhaps that invisible force set off a chain reaction of events, as wind sent clouds gently shifting, allowing that tiny shard of light to charge into my living room, which in turn fell onto the nearly deceased, arousing it ever so slightly towards the warmth, a movement that subsequently sent a shadow cascading across its folds, which then caught my eye as I was rummaging around for the doctor's business card. Who can say precisely what it was I saw?

Dialing the number, I realized that with each movement I took I seemed to become further enveloped in a sense of urgency. I heard my voice gaining momentum until it finally culminated in a desperate pleading over the telephone, as I tried to explain the condition of this poor soul hanging morbidly listless over the back of my living room chair, “This is an emergency. Please, come quickly. I am beside myself!” The doctor, much calmer than I, asked if now was a good time and within thirty minutes, his knock rattled my front door. As I rushed to answer it, I nearly tripped over the edge of the form in my chair.

When we walked into my living room, that figure which had been a mere pitiful scrap of a thing had markedly invigorated, as if someone had blown into it, like a balloon, with air. The doctor nodded a greeting to the patient before groping around in his bag, his arm nearly disappearing in that enigmatically deep cavern, before pulling out his stethoscope. At first I questioned his judgment. What on earth he would hear in that corpse? This was useless, a lost cause. But to my utter amazement and joy I saw what he most certainly had seen, a rhythmic movement that could only be attributable to respiration. I nearly hopped in place as I realized that things were looking up, and more so with every passing moment.

By the time the doctor rose to leave, he didn't even leave his patient a prescription. The prognosis was good, a full recovery.

Both of us walked him to the door. The doctor tipped his head again, signaling his departing salutation, as he stepped out underneath a cloudless sky. We closed the door behind him and returned to a brightly lit living room and an empty chair.

Permanence

Throughout each day, I pass through countless curtains of time

Behind each, a new theater on whose stage I see moments from my past acted out before me

Each in vivid detail

As I watch, I re-live what I thought had long been lost

This mysterious camera I lug around absently on my shoulders

Constantly throws images up to the forefront of my mind

Memories I could not recall if I had tried

I’m beginning to realize that every moment matters

Because once created, it becomes permanent

I carry with me through each new decade every scrap of the past

The load ever growing

Now in my middle age, burgeoning

As if I were the mother of the angels

Drawing all the countless stars under my wings

Subtle Activity Just Beneath the Surface

For all silently hidden housewives, book learners, farmers

Interconnecting every age and stratum

Adolescents and elderly, pilgrims and stationary, elite and destitute

For all loiterers in life's foyer

Who invest in days unseen

Hands cupped over ears

Poised for the moment when the drought of silence is broken, as predicted by the trembling and strange lexicon of the prophets

For vibrations not yet rustling eardrums

Though haunted by mirages and their subsequent disillusion

Band together--shall we?--in the fellowship of behind-the-scenes inhabiters

Of those who, expending all muscle fibers, brain cells, passions

Wait

The Chronophage

The chronophage swallows time, terrifying his appetite

My past, like Jonah, is consumed

But not dead

It sits in the belly of another being

Alive in a parallel place

And I am filled with dread

At the way life slips overboard, past my grip

Into a void which I can only visit through my imagination

So in the abstract I become a traveler

Crisscrossing through the vast seas of hours

Forwards, backwards, then circling the present

A chaos of invisible strings mapping my movement

Until I am all tangled up

A hostage of the interstices

In my stillness, I hear a patterned rhythm

Coming from some form of the living

Pounding on what sounds like a huge, hollow drum

Sending messages in S.O.S.

About the collapsibility

Of our purportedly fixed three dimensions

Genealogy of the Artist

A disclaimer to my readers: Because I am computer illiterate, I don't know how to fix this--in a Word document, this makes the pattern of a tree. In these too skinny margins, though, some of my branches are bent. Oh well!

Artists

In our family tree

We find a multitude

Of characters, a motley crew

I search to see if I share resemblance

To any of whom I count among the giants

If I can spot underneath the microscope’s lens

That the chains of my DNA strands bind me to them

I clearly identify on my face the nose of that surrealist

Bretón, who sniffed something more behind the curtain

Of realism’s staged reality, its mundane props, and its structure

I recognize, from an angle, the sagging shoulders and, perhaps, big head

Of those romantic prophets and seers, who carried the burden of difference

Am I of the same breed of people, the many revolutionaries in these branches

Who believe the artist responsible for both speaking truth and acting upon it

I sing to hear if my voice resembles Dylan’s, if I can speak for my generation

Under my eyes, I wear the dark circles that brand insomniacs, like Okri

Who resists the somnolent hours, standing guard, and listening

As did Rilke’s, my ears hear the befriending of lofty Night

For the most part, though, I see myself in the masses

Of unidentified artists, who namelessly

Continue to create

Day after day

Despite

Fame

Often

Lacking

Vision,

Words,

Images,

Muses

Yet Not

Quitting

I am all

Of these

As I look

In the mirror

This is what it means

I see, to be born an artist

Miyazaki and Me

A note: This is a new poem which I plan to submit to a women's poetry competition next month. I'd really appreciate any constructive criticism- likes, dislikes, areas needing clarity, etc. Thanks!

- Kim

As the wheels on the bus lurched noisily forward

The stranger sharing my seat and I exchanged awkward greetings

Our hellos contrasting sharply in their dissimilarity

I expected nothing but a mundane journey home

But as the bus gathered momentum, so did our conversation

Blowing flimsy, external difference out the window like litter

Left fluttering in the void between here and nowhere

Those around us may have wondered

What in the world we had in common

She, the granddaughter of Japanese rice farmers

I, of Texas cattle ranchers

Yet quickly we arrived at the plenitude that would bind us

Both of us this year had slipped suddenly into decade number three

Each distinctly unsettled at the way twenty-nine so suddenly becomes thirty

At the chasm that can separate one day from the next

At the way life metamorphoses over night

While we are yet not ready

She, upset to be still unwed

I, still to be childless

Lost were both of us in the labyrinth of family and career

Alone each seems such a perfect objective

Yet combined, irreconcilable

She tells me that she represents a multitude of her countrywomen

Back home in Japan, new families have been added to endangered species list

Inducing stern statesmen into sorcery

The government is waving bills in front of bellies as if feminine bodies will round by magic

Sha-zam!

I shared with her my search for a nesting spot on the rockface of career climbing

Where I can hatch my unborn children

My imagination already crowded with their presence

Statistics give me five more years before my body decides for me

Each birthday I mourn the clock’s tick-tock-ticking

Clearly, we had turned the corner of casual politeness

Things were now too personal not to press forward

So with an hour to go

We scooted closer

And began engaging in that transcendent language of storytelling

Holding the present up to the past like glass prisms in the sun beaming through bus windows

Refracting on the seats our dancing rainbows

We crisscrossed through dizzying years and distant generations

Until arriving, finally, at the crossroads of the present

Where it is our turn to make choices about our families’ futures

The continuation of traditions, memories, facial features

But before we arrived at any solutions, the bus slowed at my stop

Where we actually hugged goodbye

Stuffing pockets with scraps of paper

Marked with bumpily written contact details

I felt the loss of parting with someone kindred
This was such an unexpected sisterhood

Discovered in a single afternoon with the woman who was

Only an hour-and-a-half ago

Merely the stranger sharing my seat

Miyazaki, with beautiful round face and almond eyes

And me, with skin milk-white and eyes blue, just like my mother’s

When Silence becomes Torture

He'd been wounded by words

Not their utterance

But their absence

If the Word becoming flesh is salvation

Than their delayed embodiment is hell

And the father who refuses to incarnate love in language

Some kind of tormentor

Of the boy who wanted nothing more than his approval

Memories of silence torture adult-child

Long after father has grayed, lost ability to walk, stopped breathing

Death eternally forestalls those words from coming

Compounding pain upon pain

Corrie ten Boom’s words ring like that bell which must stop ringing

He listens to the deafening gong

Identifies his own paternal shortcomings

Discerns mercy that’s divinely been offered him

And in the quiet left by his father’s failed lips

He moves his own

In what at first feels more difficult than Atlas’s burden

Filling with the power of his own voice the silence

I forgive

The Birds and I

On the limbs the birds perched, as still as the tree itself
Their voices were quiet, unused for the moment
In their sleek, feathered bodies

This was the cause of my weeping
For the sense of solidarity I felt instantly with those creatures in that moment
For the gift of analogy they gave to me
The ability to put into form what has been formless in me
The plaguing feeling that I, too, am perched on a limb
Which dangles over the earth
Silent

Of course, singing is occasional
And it is silence that connects moments of joy, lament, and other times worth naming
Worth singing about

The anonymity of silence wounds my illusions of self-grandeur
Twisted together with the dreams of my youth

It purifies me
Nurtures humility
Feeds dependence
And for these reasons
I hear my vocal chords vibrating together again
Generating song
And to top it all
My new friends have joined in

Cycling to Work, November 1o

She fought the gales
Riding valiantly on her metallic steed
Shield slung across her back
She did not hide her face
She pressed in
With courage
Towards her destination
The wind like the arms of a giant
Pushing her backwards, sideways
But she had to go forward
Until she arrived, safely
Where she would spend the day
Using the best of reason
In an effort to conquer riddles of intellect
Knowing full well that none of us will ever conquer the seasons

The wind humbles us
I ponder this with reverence
While outside the fortress of my window
I listen to nature's defiance
Against humanity's Napoleonic complex

Al Anon

Left standing drenched and helpless again

In the wake of your violent, unpredictable waves

Slapping vengefully against the shore
The borderland where I can approach you, but go no further

Yesterday, I was sailing upon the water’s smooth surface
But today the sky is stormy, grey, silent
Except for the sound of your waves, beating down on top of each other
As if you were in a war against yourself
As if you hope to destroy yourself

I know not how to love you,
How to trust you,
Or even how to know you
You bear extremes within your nature
That have no regard for those who share this planet with you
I’m beginning to grow numb after so many cold, wet nights of being submerged in the tidal waves of your outbursts
I wonder at the invisible sources that agitate the dark expanse below your surface
The forces that conjure up the unforgiving fierceness of your rage

Long ago, Jesus spoke and the ocean storms subsided
I pray today that miracle will be repeated