The Last time I Cross-Dressed

My mother sewed three makeshift
worm shaped duffle bags out of a sail’s
canvas the day after three men in
uniform walked away from the front door
of the old Spanish house in Havana
my family owned for over a century.
They came on the very night my father
dreamt they would. They carried our permit
to leave the country. They said we were scum,
said we betrayed “Fidel” and the revolution.

A week later my parents scrambled
to buy coats in the black market because
there are no department stores or winter in Cuba,
and Madrid (or any exile for that matter)
is always cold during winter.
All they could find that would fit
a six year old boy was the coat
of a ten year old Russian girl
who died in Havana as a result
of mosquito induced meningitis.

A month later, I walked through the airport
wearing an oversized dead girl’s coat
with big square buttons, and carried
my belongings in a worm shaped canvas bag
branded with a blue partial race number on one side.
They confiscated my mother’s
wedding ring, and said that a six year old
boy dressed as a dead ten year old Russian
girl from the Moscow sailing team,
should not be traveling wearing
his grandfather’s gold crucifix.

That was the last time I cross-dressed
and also the last time I filled a sail
with something else other than wind.

DQ 7/20/07

Rarely used (or failed) poetry forms

1. Falsonneta
The Falsonneta consists of anything else other than three quatrains and a couplet. The usual rhyme scheme is a-a-a-a, a-a-a-a, a-a-a-a, a-a and recited in an artificially high voice such as a shriek. In addition, Falsonnetas are written in amoebic pentameter, meaning that there are mostly 10 small single cell syllables per line, and that every other single cell syllable naturally divides.

2. Pantouhmmm…
The pantouhmmm… is composed of a series of quatrains whose lines are forgotten once spoken; the second and fourth lines of each stanza cannot be repeated as the first and third lines have been forgotten by this point.
Since there is no real structure to this form, this pattern continues for any number of stanzas, similar to a political address.

3. Balladiarrhetic
A balladiarrhetic is told or written in the form of a story, usually composed in a hurry in a public restroom. Any story form may be told as a balladiarrhetic, such as historical accounts of how pants were stained or rhetoric for ineffective pheromones. It usually has foreshortened, alternating four stress lines and simple repeating colic accents, often with a refrain.

4. Prosethetic
Prosethetic writing is usually adopted for the description of non-facts or the discussion of fake events incorporated in free flowing speech. Thus, it may be used for corporate newsletters, political speeches, tele-evangelists, love letters, debtor's notes, or famous quotes. This form is often erroneously credited to the signing of casts, or to the unusual fetish of writing free-flowing poetry on fake limbs or strap-ons.


DQ 7/28/7

Three Rings

For five years I filled a light green
three ring binder with poems about you.
Each sheet chronologically archived
and dressed in clear plastic covers
to avoid the paper from being stained,
or damaged, or wounded by the bite
of the three hole punching machine.
Poems describing stares, kisses,
and the taste of sweat. An anthology
of lovemaking told in color and scents.
Poems about your hair and your breasts
and your thighs and how each of them
felt on my skin. Poems about fire and
dark nights filled with moon and stars.
It took five minutes on a night like that
to set the light green binder on fire.
Only the metal rings remained,
all three equally black and welded shut
small symbols of dead lovers moving on.

DQ 7/18/07

The Sky is Dark Orange

The sky is dark orange,
the grass is red violet.
I walk my bicycle
with square wheels.

Blood is blue green,
my skin is light blue.
I stand awake
on my bed all day.

Oranges are dark blue.
Blueberries are yellow orange.
I have forgotten you
and I no longer love you.

DQ 7/12/7

Prayers

The waters of Biscayne Bay turn darker blue
with every inch of sea displaced by shoulder
with every stroke of paddle dug deep into the wave,
each breath breathing the pride of ancient sailors
who charged to sea by mere wonder of what
lies beyond the threshold where the water falls to the abyss.
A quest of man and 14 feet of durable plastic that will end
right back where it started, on the roof rack of the old jeep
five blocks away from home right before dinner.
But for now there are hours between dinner and horizon,
there is distance between horizon and dream, and there is me
between the dream and the reality of the jeep’s roof rack.
For now there is no asphalt, no work, no money
or street lights, no red x pin-pointing my location.
For now there is only motion of arm and wave
only the traveler’s pleasure of an unknown destination
only effort and sweat, only one breath with every stroke,
chest rising and falling like the tide and the rain
and the woman giving birth, and the meditation of the Buddha.
For now, there is a man canonized without a rosary or nails
a visionary saint without papal decree or Vatican council,
a threshold seeker displacing water and salt by shoulder,
sitting in a 14 foot cathedral made of durable plastic.
For now there is me in awe before the teal vastness of god
a small moon on the liquid ring of a distant planet.

Red Giant

They say in future eons the sun
will enter its red giant phase as
hydrogen fuel in its core is depleted.

They say the sun will swell
large enough to overcome
the orbits of all the inner planets.

Earth's water will boil and
everyone will call god’s name
before being consumed by fire.

I remember you came like that
one night in September,
and it seems to me that

dying while screaming engulfed
in the luminous swell of the fire’s
combustion won’t be so bad.

DQ 7/10/07

STICKS

A poem is friction between two sticks
the by-product of rubbing poet and subject.

Example

Stick two: Me
Born on the feast of Vesta, goddess
of the hearth, patron of torrent and rush.
Lava, combustion, and lust.

Stick one: You
Female. Long hair, preferably dark.
Breast size unimportant but firm.
Ass not flat. Likes to kiss.

Poem:
Hips imitate the hammering of molten metal
heads tilt back, mouths shaped like howling.
Smoke rises from the flesh pyre.

DQ 7/8/7

Point of Arrival

When I arrived at the side of your bed
like an answered prayer, you asked me
where I’d been all night and I said
“keep your eyes closed”

so you could not see the wooden
wings attached to my wrists.
We spoke about the magnetizing force
of moon and the failing path of sunlight.

I reminded you of how light we were
the years we spent naked
and how suntanned your body was
from the fire that used to be my stare.

We spoke of the heated color of blood
and the sudden vertigo induced by lust.
Every dream has two sides
Yours, calling my name in sleep

mine, waiting for the dream call
attached to the cross of your voice
like a Daliesque St. John hovering
above the Catalonian shoreline.

DQ 7/1/7