Who knows what you’ll find
on the edges of cards
used to scrape up
the mess.
© Chagall 2015
Tag Archive: Alphabet City
My numbers are all messed up.
You’ve denied me twelve times,
monthly really and three times I’ve risen,
leavened, refreshed. I’ve but seven left.
© Chagall 2015
Builds in cascades of sound – phonemes,
by feeling little bits of life fly off of your tongue
where open fields find rest on hallowed oath, an appeal to the people,
notwithstanding the people, assuming only the best for those
who be so gathered. The speech expresses
the significance of that, that the moment
in its utterance, for the speaker
and for the listener,
is inevitable.
© Chagall 2015
Oh my god people
if you only knew
how nuyorican
chagall can be
on a friday – listen:
I’m dancing
to tito puente!
© Chagall 2015
Once as a girl I was saved
shaved in many directions
to the point, rapier wits
poised, ready to please
left me breathlessly awaiting
a pulse, passion and reasons to live,
to fly was all I could do, would want to
lose myself in long walks, warm downpours
would slowly trickle and seep, my heels on the bricks
echoed in alleys and fine halls, sounding better, much rounder
on marble, I’d love how the glasses tinkled while laughter
rang out then simply faded and died so quickly
so easily lost though fingertips touching
forever so lightly, ever longing
fine starlight, these prisms
of stars, I’d wonder, I’d ask myself
why go on irresistible time, place really matters doesn’t
matter so I choose to leave, to stay, to go, to exit flamboyant
when I was a girl once, combed in elusive fashion
© Chagall 2015
She told me half the time she doesn’t listen
I told her that’s OK since the other half
I don’t say things she thinks she hears
© Chagall 2015
The butterfly landed, I said
Stay with me, there’s nothing out there
but genetically modified milk thistle, what’s left of it
here it’s all good, all pure.
She lifted in a breeze, traced a crazy pattern
as Monarchs do, and for a moment I thought . . .
she got steadily smaller in sunlight and was gone.
© Chagall 2015
The nudge that you feel, that bravado,
is your margin of error. You are mistook,
it’s really not a bad place to be.
© Chagall 2015
They say less is more.
Huh!
© Chagall 2015
All I want to do is merely erupt in so many ways as you’re thinking,
I need more of me to go around to surround her singularly.
No matter how hard I try I cannot conceive nor convey her essence in this space.
She was asked once if she always flew
down or preferred instead to land, to which she replied:
It’s merely the flying, what more could I want,
what more would one wish for?
I’ve broken my mind and my wings, so many times
wondering if she’d rather be elsewhere.
Her ankle and calf traces the cumulus cloudy nimbus that rains on me,
then it pours on us, ending as a cold-blue drizzle.
© Chagall 2015
Alphabet City 