Una Poema

El campo verde toma mis ojos.
Y con su belleza, lo duerme
Jadeantemente
La noche está viva

Un cielo triste de morado
Se dice de nos verano
Y el viento de sada canta
hasta que la belleza
se muera.

Mañana,
vivimos otra vez

Vivimos

Happy, Repressed

Within those embellished walls
They sing of mirth
& having nice lives
Houses on hills, big & nice
Flowers & a lawn,
With a picket fence, white
Seeking out the world’s glitters
Painting pictures of a life

Those lonely souls are anxious
With raging insides, dying
“Good morning dear!”
“I love you,” and the show.
Growing old and cracking,
With their sidewalks
Contempt in quiet desolation.

Untitled Poem

***If you have any suggestions for a title let me know.***

In walks the music,
Upbeat and mellow
Like a sad saxophone with sunlight
On a cool piano’s Midnight Movements,

And out she walks
Swinging hips stride sexily
In her red dress, leaving perfumed intoxicants
She goes to my head, discreetly

Sweet satin skin
Like brown sugar, in black coffee
I’m killin’ her softly, and tenderly
Sex and love are poetic clichés, —I know.

Late night lovin’
Sleepin’ in all day,
99 problems; minus my 100
I should care more. But I won’t.

Untitled 1

“Life is a beautiful struggle,” she says to me.
“I like how you balance your optimism and realism,” I respond.
“But… don’t you think so?” she asks.
“It’s a nice definition, poetic at the least.”
“So what do you say it is then?”
“Life is… I don’t know. Se la vie.”

I roll back over to place my arm around her, enjoying the coolness of her flesh against mine. We had spent another night together after she had sworn that we wouldn’t. Many of our nights were like this, spent in sweltering stints of passionate sex. We would get lost in time, and lost in each other; then cool off with verbal intercourse of casual philosophy, exchanging our thoughts on love and life.

“This is the last time I’m coming over here!” I recall that angry voice of hers in my head. At the time, furious, but I knew not serious.

“We can’t keep doing this,” she had told me.

It was because she said she had someone now, a serious relationship. She told me about a week ago. I tried to act as if I couldn’t really give a damn. It was the way we men try to do, play it off as if we were emotionless; stoics in the stern face of love. But it was a mask, and I knew this, but wouldn’t let her penetrate my blank façade.

My lover and I had a history that went way back, about two years ago I think, long before her and Mr. Nice guy had gotten together.
“Yeah, he treats me good,” she says as her embrace conforms to mine. “He has a great job, a nice place, good conversation. I couldn’t ask for anything else. But I miss you.”

Tonight we saw each other again. A night that began in innocent conversation, and presently resumed in pillow talk; after our fits of lust had been satisfied. I heard her phone vibrate on the floor. She lazily climbs over me to grab it and falls back to my bed.

“Looks like somebody misses you too.” I say.
“Hmm,” she hums with a humorous smirk.

She flips open her phone to respond to him I supposed, with fingers tapping away rapidly to a text message. ‘Wait a minute, what the hell?’ I think to myself. ‘Is this a hint of jealously I feel developing in the pit of my stomach? I don’t get jealous. Why should I? I can have other women. What she and him do is none of my business, it doesn’t affect me.’

Yet, by some involuntary choice of my own romantic sub-conscious, that little touch of jealously was incontestable. I lay there and gaze intently at the perfected light brown visage in my presence. The pale blue tint from her phone made it visible, surrendering to her beautiful air a luminous glow; a radiance that complemented her present prettiness. An enticing creature she is, my Nubian Aphrodite. She is the opiate of my eros; my lustful power, my --?--, and a deadly flaw of mine. I loved having her, and I needed her. But she was not entirely mine at the moment. For she is his too; and my knowing this minor piece of info was enough to devastate some small, repressed part of me. Our attractions were growing fatal, and fated to resolve in a star-crossed heartache.

My stare continues through the duration of her message. She flips her phone shut and tosses it.
“What?” she inquires. “You’re just layin’ there staring a hole in my forehead.”

I laugh, “You know what,” pulling her naked physique back closer to mine. Her brown eyes fall into the darkness of my own and we stare, burying our pupils into each others’, as if we thought we could make the substance of our minds meet; like our souls might experience an ecstasy and conjoin somewhere outside of this physical realm. She kisses me, with soft and moist lips, relaying a tantalizing quiver through my nerves.

Childish Idolatry

Unlike many of my peers at the time, I never had the luxury of believing in a Santa Clause. Nor did I ever truly believe in a Tooth Fairy or Easter Bunny or any of those other magical personalities I’d argue about with my fellow 1st grade classmates. I can remember pondering the concept of Jolly ole St. Nick one Christmas Eve. “How can his reindeer fly?” I thought “if they don’t even have any wings.” This was my reasoning as a very young child. I could have been no more than 5 or 6 at the time, while some may say this premature rationality has robbed me of my innocent and what I’d preferably call the ‘gullible’ stage of childhood.

I can remember one night sitting at home on the kitchen floor with a pencil and piece of notebook paper. At this young I age I can remember attempting to express my artistic abilities, usually with crayon sketches of a favorite cartoon character or some fascinating car or truck. Yet tonight my youthful aesthetic had been focusing on a different genre. “What can I draw if I wanted to draw a picture of God?” I pondered. I had often heard people discuss this “Heavenly Father” in church. Therefore I had concluded that he must be a man, a very big man in the sky. But what did he look like? I remember constructing a visualization of some gray toned cloud-colored man flying among the clouds. Is this what I should draw to illustrate an accurate portrait of “God?” A word I had heard so often in church, or spoken of by my family, and I had heard this name mentioned on T.V. So what does he (or she) look like then? I had never seen a picture of him before. And a new thought occurred to me; I had never seen him for myself, nor had I heard his voice. “So, how can I even be sure that there really is a God? Maybe this God is something like Santa Clause, a Santa Clause for grown people? Maybe he doesn’t even really exist at all? What if he’s just another one of those stories they tell, like Santa Clause or the Boogeyman, one of those stories to make people act good.”

This is the philosophical pondering of the young David Russell. I was left perplexed, baffled at a religious reality and its ideals. I wanted to know how I could draw a portrait of God, something I had never ever seen. Then the thought hit me, “I know, I can ask my mother, she knows a lot of stuff, she’s a grown up.” She enters the kitchen not aware of her agnostic 1st grader’s inquisitiveness. “Mama, what does God look like?” an unanswerable question thrown at her out of nowhere? The next few minutes she tries to explain to a six year old child the concept of an omnipotent, benevolent, invisible, and unfathomable higher being; how people believe he is up there beyond the sky, but no way to provide a young inquisitive mind with a simple picture. No way to provide an elementary student with an elementary validation of God. “So, why would anyone think he’s up there with no way to see him, or touch, or hear him?” I ask.

My mother, her following actions, the wisdom presented in this response, is a memory that I can never forget. For, at the time, the picture she’d draw, God’s picture was beyond my understanding. There, at that age, and for years to come I’d try to figure out what she meant with this simple, untalented, but well drawn portrait. “What do I think MY God looks like?” she asks rhetorically. “This is what I think my God looks like.” On this notebook paper, with a black pen she sketches the picture of a woman; a woman who wore glasses and had long curly hair. “A woman” I responded, “but I thought God was a man.” A woman, as a God? And she said “Her God” at that. But I thought there was only one God. I thought he was THE God. I thought he was everybody’s God. How could the portrait of this woman be her God and only her God? I look down at the picture again, not professionally drawn, but the resemblance of this womanly God to my mother is obvious. The hair was the same, and the glasses; and she had even drawn in the details of those three little brown dots my mother has around her nose.

This answer leaves the young David Russell even more confused. How could God be a woman? A woman that looks like my mama, and why does my mama say that the lady in her picture is her God? Now, being as old as I am, I thought I had a better understanding of what she meant by drawing “her God.” Yet, my mother’s drawn riddle is still not completely solved. Was this a hint at some kind of metaphorical agnosticism? Many of her religious associates would call this act blasphemous, an act of idolatry. Yet, my mother is a regular attendee of our Church. I wouldn’t call her anything near blasphemous, and definitely not skeptical, or agnostic (or at least not openly). So what does this portrait mean? A memory that lingers in my head and still leaves me somewhat perplexed. I’ve never asked her what she meant by drawing a God that looked like her, and I doubt I’ll ever ask her. I think this is just one of those mysteries that will go on throughout the course of history as unsolved, and it may be fitting that it does.

Dithyramb

But behind that exterior smile
I say there’s sure to be found,
A masked and disregarded frown
I ask—can it be so easy for all?
To simply smile—just a lift of the cheeks
At all of the world’s menacing wounds

Well.. is it, so easy?
Though, we’ll say no,.. no
It cannot!

For the smile is something different
It tries to cure the unfairness of pain
With its lighthearted teeth…
And thus—its laughter endeavors to….?
Whisk away all of last night’s sorrows?

Or how… How does it do it with such poise?
And precisely
Like an anecdote for impending pessimism

This Charisma must be from Dionysus himself!
So you should extol it more than any
As the most godlike of your sentiments

It’s like demonic Love, who conquered all
But left destruction in its passion…

While your humor leaves no trail
But only a heartfelt amusement…
And some happiness
And smiles comparable to the Absurd
Like it gives a clue to true Meaning

Hinting that it’s only really like a comedy
When asked what it all meant.
So try to laugh yourself to tears
At spectacles of misery and tragedy!

Spend your nights in carefree chaos!
While drinking yourself to an oblivion!
And laughing away all of your sins and pains!
Yes! I prescribe that you do just that!
Let it be your new philosophy!

So when old or new troubles do arise
You will now just… laugh them away!
It is the most amiable—and most admirable of lifestyles,
To simply smile
And laugh
At life.

Hinterland Jazz

Summertime
The heat soothes muh sweat—somehow.
At dusk, our sun makes a hazy sky pink, and gray
as he makes his way to rest fo tha night;
somewhere, back off in a distance from the Delta.

A humid breeze blows lightly,
Like the calmin breath of the South.
And then stops
Leavin a stifflin’, eerie stillness in the air,

Right across from the green fields of cotton
That ole white post fence needs a tackin’, wit more fixin
But it still ran its distance, along that ole dusty road
The one where ole Miss Zora trods along,
like she does about every evening
Hummin’ & singin some ole-timely soundin’ slave spiritual,
Hummin’ and singin’ like she was hurtin something awful.
She sounds like her soul had been hurt, but she could still find joy in it
She made it swell and die sorrowfully in my ears

It sounded so terrible,
Listenin’ to that ancient lady sing about pain.
Terrible but beautiful—revealin' to my soul some of her woeful wisdom
Every note had it’s own peculiar type of grief, too awful for words

Slaves used to gather up cotton in that same field
The same one Miss Zora walks by each day.
& she neva looks ova there, no—neva glances its way!
She just walks along, wit her nose up,
just enough not to make her seem proud, but not haughty.

I thought I saw the blackness of a field hand’s ghost
like it was tremblin’ under the whips of deadly work
and cryin’ fo a spirit at the ropes of Reconstruction’s lynchins’

The wind stirred up again, offerin nothin’ but more mugginess,
While we sat on that rustic front porch
Sippin our booze and reminiscin’ back,
To those good old days, and the bad ones as well.

Sachmo’s sharp trumpet pierced the background
With a little more raspiness in that next “summertime”
We listened to the piano dancing along with his voice

“One of these mornings, you’re gonna rise up singin!!!
Yes, you’ll spread your wings, and you’ll take to the skies.
But til’ that mornin’, there’s nothin’ that can harm you!”

Miss Ella’s pretty voice came behind his:
“Oh, your daddy’s rich, and your ma is good lookin’!
So hush little baby, and baby don’t you cry!”

The barefoot children ran around the house
Jus’ by their laughin’ you could tell they didn’t have a care in the world.
I lean back a lil’ more, my rockin’ chair squeakin’ and sayin something else.

My ole friend beside me had drifted off to sleep now,
lettin' the winds and times lull him to it.
I thought I should do the same now,
I was growin tired....