August 17-23, 2015: C.P. Aboobacker and Melissa Parietti

Poetry

If your heart is not hurting
Friend, you may not’ve poetry in you
When you revise to stretch a line
Or edit to break up a line
Poetry is far away meandering in a field
Fed only by tender grass and spring water
Poetry is slender and polished

But friend
With a broken spine
Your poetry is chopping onions in the kitchen.
Sweat like a lake
And sigh like a meadow
Are adding their life stories
To the blood of poetry.

Before butterflies
They were pupa and larva
Words and alphabets
An invisible touch
Somewhere under the udder

Let’s not insist that
Dreams should take wings into the sky
There are many many of those on earth
Like huge losses
Feeding on tears.
There is no need for words
They are there in a sigh.

Poetry does not open out
In devil haunted lines
Is not crushed
In the embrace of god
Glass bangles do not shatter
Does not die out
With a lament

Friend,
Poetry needs no pen or paper
Needs no brooding over a keyboard
Poetry wells up in hurting hearts
Just ladle it up.

Pompeii, Revisited

tender-footed boyfriend has lust unlike a
hurricane’s eye toward wife Melissa; prison-seek
takes the day, shores his lusts, but he cannot be
kept away from the most desirable woman in the
world, his wife. Her’s smells like a flower ripped
from a child’s dream of Christmas, Thanksgiving,
Independence Day rolled into one distilled moment;
The ache of love trembles neath this brow,
He must erupt this volcano to create ash and
visions of Pompeii, ripped from time, to satisfy
his quaking emotions – there is no answer
other than, all ideas are bereft; to dine on
immortal fruit known as Melissa’s breast and body,
the pleasure destroys the entire world if they have
eyes enough to see it – only a drop of this
union births the ecstasy of a thousand years,
monks and virgins die to feast on the
sweat, the ground shakes with our promises,
our union is the future history of the world.