It was the light that told Vincent,
the one which always told him the truth
reflected his soul's desire,
the glistenings of his mind,
...
(In homage to William Carlos William)
Outside was my red bicycle
leaning against the wall
...
Perfection can only be seen in the descent,
the glow of spotlights colliding to true whiteness,
the realization that grief touches the ground.
...
Ariana, adopted the old Greek ways,
when Nikos died diving for sponges.
She encased her curses into two lead stones:
smuggling one into his coffin,
...
I asked the haberdasher
to make me a new soul.
something inexpensive
and lighter than 21 grams
...
When the giant bagel fell from the sky
everyone complained when it blocked the road.
Even when children cut it into pieces
and passed it out, lathered with shmear and lox
...
There once was a race of cake men
equally divided between
birthday and wedding types,
each born into whatever flavor
...
The seed planted with our small help
becomes a crop.
The flame carefully kindled by us
ignitescivilization.
...
It's in the shading.
It's the way the light is written.
It's the way the observer takes it all in.
It's the way it convinces one that the world will last.
...
. am not a sailor.
I am meant to die on land,
ashes spread above sea level,
or in a coddled urn above the hearth.
...
The soul is not a drip-dry thing.
It's needs constant washing and wringing
to function cleanly.
It needs to tumble on high heat
...
The poet makes his gun out of any old thing:
sticks of words,bird song, the swish of trees,
the pitter patter of the growing city around him,
...
Up
A seed is a forest-to be.
A rock is a mountain-to-be.
...
What is the land
but dust
but mountains
but forrest
...
Her name you may
or may not recall.
It was Chrissie,
the body in the sand dune.
...
Jonathan Moya lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He is a former businessman, and an aspiring poet and avid moviegoer. Sources of poetic inspiration include his wife Kristen, his dog Sharma, and the beauty and injustices of the world.)
Washing The Corpses
- After Rainier Maria Rilke
The washers have lived with death
as they have with the lamp,
the flame and thedark,
the nameless rinsing of limbs,
the even more unnameable nameless.
without histories relative to them.
Their sponges dipped the water
then the silent throat,
trickled rivulets on their faces,
waiting for it to absorb,
to convince themselves more than anything
that the body no longer thirsted.
They only stopped their toil
to turn their head to cough.
The older ones unclenched
the hands of the dead
that refused their final repose.
Only their shadows
jerked the quiet walls,
the net of silent life
extinguishing to last existence
that ignored their shrugs
as the last now antiseptic corpse
was finished and the window shut.