Poem 14: 7/7/01

Anemones and Algae
It is a difficult job to begin the recuperation of the lost and insulted word… Added, coupled word, not against the grain, soft like the slime that aids the sliding of the waters.

               – Canon de alcoba, Tununa Mercado

For a second
ideal flashes
lustfully brighten
the darkness
in which
the ether
of thinking
hides

In such blinding universe
inhabited
by
red-white-and-black
inkwells
spilling
on the pupil
of
my imagination
I enter
into not quite chivalrous duel
with the armor
               of well-armed nouns
I wallow like a sow
in a perfumed pigsty
               of muddy adjectives
I coarsely knead
the curdled clay
               of unrisen adverbs
and
without anesthesia
I sew my poetic flesh
with a rough thread
               of cutting verbs

Covering the world
with my panting
I
attempt to
hold on to
vanishing
arris and
       nervous
       eels and
rushing
river currents and
                      broken
                      flows
                      of sandglasses

My impatience
slides
downhill
and
uphill
in
the serpentine syntax
of anemones and algae
that
inhabits
the worlds of my dictionaries

Resorting
to the solidity
of the useless
keyboard
I attempt
to nail
the
gelatinous
multipresence
              of the
verbal
                     quantum
that
explodes
in the
neuronic depths
of my being
       but
              the only
                     remains
                            are an
                                   im
                                          perfect vision
                                                 of its magical vibration

The paper
ends up
covered
with
fuzzily
       in
              exact photographs
smudged
in the impervious superimposition
       of
       letters
       in irrepressible bacchanalia and
of
wandering words
lost in the
heathenish whorehouse
of meaning

This is why
I ask you
misunderstanding
reader:
if I say
"slidingly green lick"

                            ¿will you picture
                            a rushing Castrol racing car
                            a congealing line of sea cucumbers
                            a lovingly gloved hand of minty fingers
                            a forlorn desert tree falling in oasis water
                            a culminating striptease gyration
                            or the spilling of 100,000 dollars?

                                                        ¿will you grasp
                                                        that the image dancing mapalé
                                                        on my neural sands
                                                        is that of
                                                        a paint-covered child's hand
                                                        tracing
                                                        an alligator?

¿will you know
that
with
a lone wolf's
determination
I write
specular Rosetta stones
greenish fuchsia Maya stelae
scratched San Agustinian inscriptions
awaiting fortuitous
decipherers
to translate them
to
the representative
impossibility
of their own
languages?

© Rino G. Avellaneda

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