March 1-7, 2004: T.L. Stokes and Angel Uriel Perales

T.L Stokes and Angel Uriel Perales

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Bio (auto)

T.L Stokes lives in the mountain region of the Pacific Northwest Her work has appeared in The 2River View, Stirring, Ancient Wind Press, Pierian Springs, Ludlow Press, Taj Mahal Review, Comrades Press, etc Upcoming in Snow Monkey by Ravena Press and a few other places.

The following work is Copyright © 2004, and owned by T.L Stokes and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

A Length of Phone Cord 1 I’m holding another bowl of worry The white roof sinks down on lids I’ve propped open while out the side window I hear the band throwing warm breath from horns into the rising fog, like wavy hands around rows of field lights The sky is lit in creams 2 If you knew how lost I am you’d come running and talk until we figured it out of me You phone, we talk Actually I do, complaining a length of phone cord from here to California I want to lay my head in your lap We figure it’s hormones and it all makes sense so we laugh at the strangeness of living between the Pacific and the moon; one moment I’m a nest of red clouds and lullabies, the next, a puppet hanging from the abalone above us in the purple night The mastiff and the deaf cat play The sound of everything is too big, I’m hungry for quiet Peace comes only when monsoon begins to drop her red petals.

Angel Uriel Perales
Cinearte@aol.com

Merry Christmas, Mr Hemingway So the writer steps out unto the curb to kindle a lung in the city of lights, not Paris, never Paris, just another urban vanity in the endless series of conscious similarities Well, maybe Paris seen in the dull sheen of seasonal gloom, handmade toys and silken scarves, festive boughs sagging over speckled streets of honking cars, a fine gray mist envelops eyesight, pantyhose perception, fogged-up lenses suffocate a viscid postcard vision of electric Christmas trees glimmering and sparkling on windowsills and rooftops like numerous sprinkled tiny Eiffel towers Wait, don’t believe, maybe this Paris is my Paris or yours truly, the sidewalks endure the same scars of the ragged rabble, dust the same soot from crumbling chimneys Incinerated carbon residue settles like dandruff snowfall over hunched up shoulders, the ashes to ash of continual living, the black breath of industrial air, the unfelt pulse that binds those faces created for murder in the banks, the factories, time squandered gossiping in restaurants, machine lust polished over burnt oil, opium incense, flaked rust, offered by the malicious masochistic Magi Fidget on the corner and smoke a lung, Mr Hemingway, the men of action dance the flirt of death, the writer genuflects the genuine bullfighters and the women of the Tarantella flaring a ruffle of skirts and flashing bandied legs for the leap of the tarantula and the snap of the tempting red cape All is memory in the dearth of winter Scarce photographs remain: Poor Julian kicks up his feet with crazy Zelda, ornaments hang haphazardly behind them in their favorite holiday pose, a full library to their left Celebrating what results to celebrate, the repose in the eye of the storm, the stillness between two cataclysms, sea bass gulping for air in a mud puddle, not so much a generation lost as left stranded by the Gulf Stream and all things eternal, the immortal sanguine fisherman caught deftly by a journalist’s terse laconic hand, a tough prose, an ink and paper rose Which will not survive intact, the young banderilleros thrust stilettos into the withers of bleeding knuckles already usurped in scabs of criticism and praise, not what you meant to type at all The false nobility of a fake Nobel summons you to Ketchum, true speech waxes profane, true love fucks pornographic, Emerson and Thoreau lied to you, these lights cast from these cities spill over and transcend into your sacred mountain, dragon fire, a perverse jetliner aurora streaks across the northern skies, a tinsel of torment, even blind Tiresias gets blinded by the rapidly encroaching glare, and the gleeful are dazzled by this brilliance of ignorant hope and wish peace on earth on earth, in Spain, a horse in Guernica,  Goya’s soldier up a tree in Madrid A legitimate measure of a learned span, an ambulance in Italy, first love in Milan prior to the opal opulence that book-ends with the whores and the profiteers of a liberated Paris, the original city of continual luminance Key West callused fingers that can no longer write A lifetime of priceless possessions seized from a finca in Cuba Feigned interest in phantom Nazi submarines and six-toed felines, a legacy and myth, your legend longing for the deep darkness dreaded no longer, disdainfully desired Do not fret, Papa Hemingway, here is my Christmas gift to you- My pen, not as agile or nimble as yours, I cede to you with all the aplomb of the poetaster, a homage from the homespun, when the words dry up, fade, and cannot be recalled, when language, finally, becomes my last treasonous deceiver, when the vinegar crusts and festers in the self-inflicted wound and I laugh at such absurd metaphors, I will stomp out this cigarette on my corner of my city beneath the luster and the splendor awash in the harsh agonizing grainy spleen of communal existence, my accumulated hell of halcyon nights, I will slouch off towards Idaho, much sooner than you ever thought.