by Daniel Brophy | |
Published on: Nov 15, 2005 | |
Topic: | |
Type: Poetry | |
https://www.tigweb.org/express/panorama/article.html?ContentID=6593 | |
It is humid here, producing a heat-wave trance in me. I do not mind the heat, I love the heat. I love to drip with sweat, the swelling of my pores, the glaze, the shine on a woman's leg or forearm or neck. When I walk I swipe the people that I pass, gently, just a little, to feel the flesh or the silk material or the burning metal of the jacket zipper on my shoulder. I just want to smile at them and I want to be smiled at. I want to look into EyEs. Columbian Eyes. Peruvian EyEs. Italian EyEs. PoLish Eyes. Irish Eyes. I wAnT to stop them, kneel down, and tie their shoe for them, or shave their legs for them (if they wish), or kiss their feet, or dance with them, there in the street next to the sweaty Mexicans who mix cement and build a 3-story house in 3 days. The old man who asks me for a quarter, I want to give him 20 quarters, I want to kiss his face on both sides, walk with him to his porch that chips with lead paint, boards broken, rails dislocated, windows shattered, and listen to the story of how he lost his teeth, listen how he ate too much sugar when he lived in Panama. I want to drop a pencil at the feet of a woman or at the feet of a man and raise my body up, my face at their face, face to face, and say, "Let me carve you into my mind forever here at the teeth of this cheap paper." I saw a young woman across the tracks and found something out of the ordinary. She waited and waited there, neither hopping the train or leaving the station, just sitting there reading "ANIMAL FARM" and scratching her thigh every so often and letting her hair down. A young man was talking with her, twice her size, and I wanted to talk with her, too. I wanted to talk with her more than that man that was talking with her. But I just watched and heard the laughs and witnessed the exchange of phone numbers. Somehow I thought her to be an artist. It was in her posture. The way she sat. The way she crossed her legs. The shoes that were patched with tape. But I didn't. Something in me is painfully satisfied with just observation from a distance, I look until I can't look no more, not with lust, maybe sometimes, but more with the desire to know and be known, to explode into another life and at the same time being a target yourself, but wanting to be blowN to bits, having the other glue you back as you observe the way she knits your skin that eclipses the souL. « return. |