Alphabet City

I’d once written
Why write a sonnet when a scream will do?
and now I am thinking that an opus is unnecessary
if a mere aside can convey ample poignancy.
Such uneven lines but they’re scented. Where is the real?
I remember Mary even through the haze, how steady and rock-solid
she was, I could hug her and nestle deeply there for hours, or days, spent many a lifetime contemplating her most heavenly face and rubbery delicious lips and cheeks and long stretches along the neckline; I need meaning in each moment – I suffocate otherwise. I hesitate to take the time to narrate a deeper story for fear of failing to convey anything and therefore would regret having wasted our mutual time. hers and mine. Shouldn’t we simply abandon our search? Nubile rubbing of the nubs is how angels beget – it’s allowed there within the confines of wingspans, celestial light like champagne ices me pink from head to toe, I’m a garnish to her night on the town, I dance and rock hard like the fourth horn in the section, I am simply sunglasses and quinine water atop bitters and rocks, I jiggle my shoulders in beat sometimes rather than my waist and hips, or sometimes just a nod, a tilt of the head like this – see that! Hear that? Oye! Oye, Marie? The figures are jade, intricately reptilian, self-referencing, Escher-like in their wrap-around. There are older turquoise figures that you would think would be younger. She once made me a hot drink of sweet white maize water and freshly ground cacao, sugar, without chili.  I sipped the thick chocolate while she unbraided her hair and rubbed scented balm on her breast.  I remember the desire to write and to play music, to create in a world so filled with creation, a desire so intense that it overwhelmed me and incapacitated me such that I was unable to respond with anything meaningful.  Ambition birthed and squelched.  In her presence I am inspired to leave behind some remnant, an artifact memorializing my having been here, a monument that captures the light of this day, the song of this hour, the perfume of the tilt of the sky, the spray of life from her lips when she cries out in joy, my joy is her.

© Chagall 2017