Sunday, June 10, 2007

In the ruins of your balcony (for Joni)

I look into the eyes she painted,
The eyes our creator created
Eyes of nausea
Eyes of peril
Eyes of violence

My lips sealed by the kiss of a blue butterfly
My nose smashed and repaired by a raging bull
She stands close by a white silhouette doing her best
To remind me we’re both human and wanting

The remains of another prescribed day
Looking at your yellow railroad warning us if we breathe in
The air around Tom Paine there will be nothing left but our
Imprint and impassioned souls

She’s not painting anything less than my real face
White shafts of paint and plaster shoot from my head like
Greek or Roman pillars and I’ll never forget the way her
Antiquity smelled like wildflowers

I study the remnants of a portrait she breaks down
With every fire stroke of her bewitched fairy tale
And I’m both horrified and elated

I’m still a young lion, a novice savage desiring
Sinew and space to consume or take sanctuary in.

Charles
June 10, 2007

Saturday, June 09, 2007

Fragmented (Portrait of Charles Cicirella by Joni Soule 2007)




Life is
Too short
To think
Too much
Or not
Think
Too Much
Ocean (Part Two)

She was the first
Mermaid
I ever met

She asked if I knew
How to swim
I did my best to lie.

Charles June 7, 2007
Ocean (Part One)

I met Jesus on the beach
His hands
fish hooks

He asked if I knew
the fishmonger’s wife

Charles June 7, 2007
Extrapolation (Part Two)

I believe I have a greater purpose
I refuse to tell you what it is
The one & only time I talked about this
I was looked at like I was crazy
And I never want to feel that way again

Where there is life
There is hope

Someone once told me hope equates fear
I no longer choose to believe this
Fear equates fear

Out in Nevada at a rest area reading Thomas Merton
Waiting for God
I must motivate myself to act
Waiting on God
The drive & willfulness exists inside of me
God has always been right here

Charles June 5, 2007
BIRTH (Part One)

There is a poem fighting to get out
I feel it moving around
When it starts to scream and kick
I will attempt extracting it

I am not your father
I am no one’s father
What I write is often not
What I am feeling and still
I attempt wrestling
Supposed genius
From this starved,
Unyielding intellect

One word leads to the next
Haven’t I seen you here before
One line begets another
Didn’t we once attempt
To love each another

There is a person fighting to go in
I can feel him beneath the surface
It makes no difference how much you resist
He’ll scratch out your eyes before surrendering
To this endless diatribe

You are not my mother
You are no one’s mother
What I believe is not often
What I cop to and still
I’m praying for something

One poem possibly leads to the next
Haven’t we already played this out
One poem like a watchtower admits failure
Haven’t we seen better nights and days
One failed relationship will hardly end your life

Or so it would seem

Charles June 2, 2007
Template

Must swim out of here
Find some other place
Emptiness never ending
Loss of hope a cold chill

Did I make this bed of isolation
Construct it from childhood memory
Remember calling myself on the telephone
How I never picked up until the last ring

So self conscious as a kid
Before I began writing never felt comfortable in my own skin
Martyrdom created from ancestry and failed attempts at discovering peace
Both my inner and outer selves screaming for autonomy

Must light the fuse destroy this fortress of solitude
A kind and benevolent doctor prescribed poetry
Must get back in touch with synchronicity and sacred trust
Tell myself the secret withholding nothing not even reverie

The template of our lives forged in silver and gold
Blueprints checked and rechecked before granted wings
Read the syllabus convinced there was nothing left for me
How wrong I was as my beginning and ending became one.

Charles May 28, 2007
Heat and Flame

Standing next to me
I feel her heat
Reminds me of summertime,
When I was a child
Before I was born

Standing next to me
I witness her flame
Reaching fever pitch
Revelatory in
Primal speech

There is another plane
Beyond borderline and
Graveyard, a smiling desert
Filled with living souls
And roving gamblers

Our existence the gift and the promise
Heat and flame directing us toward
Inner strength and declarations of
Independence.

Charles May 26, 2007
Alphabet Oxygen Soup

words untie the noose
tell right from wrong
pull down the curtain
last longer than breath

We must fight sickness
ghosts in the machine
hopelessness
God killers

does your skeleton possess the key to the lock
walk through walls unscathed
believe in magic
understand we’ve been sent
not abandoned here

words tie everything together
are closer to me than my next of kin
I wore an oxygen mask for the first thirteen years of my life
then I sat down and began to write and have not once looked back.

Charles May 23, 2007