A Desert Poem In Ternary Form

Flies mount one another with enthusiasm, the vocabulary of the desert enunciates and a shark cannot help but wither.

I

I seem to be a verb An integral function of the universe The dawning recognition of itself always moving always investigating The curiosity that extends beyond is limitless Life is regenerative therefore conformity has no meaning It is the rawhide texture of fear

We are capable of doing more with less Seeing is believing is a blindspot The flies here are fertile virile creatures They mount one another with enthusiasm I see another scoop the fibers of my jeans into its mouth it senses through it and rubs its hands together at the perceived success There is a still image of a Pompeiian body in the magazine I hold which is also a film in a screen outside my own The next day I pick up a rock with the construction of a face a large bulbous nose and two indents we find meaning in remembrance On my phone all people are happening now and forever now now and forever more But here they are separate strings of light that coincide only when the shadows hide their exhausted faces behind the comforting shoulder of darkness The rest is silent Silence finding itself a soothing rhythm to contemplate to or towards Out on the periphery of Joya are cave paintings you walk long hours to find them in the desert in the middle of nowhere Toon said that the paintings looked quite contemporary Will raised his thin eyebrow so Toon produced a photo on his phone a photo The color was of burnt terracotta beams blended into the stone Later on my walk with Indigo I recognized the shade to be iron core agitated by friction and rubbed possibly with a thumb or the palm of a hand to produce that particular sfumato It was blended into the stone as if made by the natural contrasts Reserved some of the chemical markers of previous years of history no time immemorial The breasts it was the breast that made it seem contemporary Rounded globules accented by a small undulating frame Beauty standards that prior to the 1800s weren’t so clearly ingrained or delineated Nothing else the style of drawing the colors the placement on the stone or even the subject matter seemed out of place Only the silhouette of modernity It’s outstanding the minute details that tell a story if you listen to them if you look closely Indigo the name the name that suggests parents that love nature that thought in alternative ways That too is a secret unfolding

II

This morning I couldn’t get up The air was thick a strong thicket in my lung it drowned all sense of alert The slow crawl of it subsumed and stung my retinas further to sleep This was necessary I’m outside now with a cup of coffee and the strong sensation of vertigo The Earth is pale and drifts quietly within itself The air is soft a gentle caress down my skin almost tender What sounds are gentle I think to myself an S P F A closed O an Mmm This is the vocabulary of the desert The mist blankets the summit cascades down it with the breeze Everyone’s left to some point on the mountain where they paint or draw or find reason in the fracturing of clay I wish I wasn’t constantly consumed by the thoughts and responsibilities I feel towards others The land leaves you space to breathe I caught a stone picked it up from the ground its jagged edges each a separate shade of orange Even the grey which is the most alive grey I’ve seen is tinged with warmth As if a liquid translucence was doused over it The lacquer produced by a generation of hyrax returning to returning to the place they’ve always been Another has a red stripe running though its centre with a yellow top mimicking it seemed the hierarchy of the sun over mountain over bedrock Simon showed us his work his layers of stone or pigment they too followed these rules A woodpecker finds the circumference of a tree in the distance There is silence here marred only by the workers miles off that are paving a pebbled path into something attainable Civilization’s endless reduction producing surface producing fractions The sun breaks through the thicket The mountain parts a sly duck to introduce the rays The distance commands the eyelid I want to shirk off all my responsibilities what do they matter when land like this lays before me Life is not a dull drill hitting concrete over and over but bathing no basking Watching the shadows extend beyond their natural point of expedition The shadow-play of exposure complete exposure to Earth’s materiality A bug blackened by sun and rigor mortis A small shell with a perfect spiral Two shells two perfect Fibonaccis Their shadows extend on my page into elongated ‘I’s Two selves two beings circling within themselves further and further along The spiral congested only by the desire to continue I am interested in the minute because I am minute

III

The shadows of the day stretch their long faces eager for the night where they hide in plain sight in the subconscious of trees of their vast and immense heredity We were burnt by the affect of melancholy We seek it like a child does the warm embrace of mother We find comfort in its sincerity I sense Misa’s shoulders swoop at the thought of the day of another day without her son The desire to house to relinquish to let go in tandem tantamount The tension in our teeth mulls us down into dust The back is the curvature of the Earth’s spine of our original draft We counter pain through pain through the idea so restless and convoluted of Being Don’t lose the drive to move forward the hourglass is palpable on my skin it forms canyons One day we will return to Earth slowly resemble it with time a restoration driven by the body’s desire to cycle We become more and more aware of our indistinguishable nature and place in the universe Through us it sees itself The silence engulfs me I am made aware of every nook in my body every creaking inch The ache I drive with me into the day to self-sooth at night I am a shark afraid of stopping for fear of stagnation of the bloodletting of death by proxy by truncation A code that produces error after error I

am My

heart beats to the

rhythm of cicadas out in the horizon chiming chiming to the eloquence of clay crumbling under my feet in patterns I can continue on trying to comprehend through my body A pinhole in a vast land.