Provenance

By: Gabriela Anaya Valdepeña

Of an amoral moon
Of a sinister and seedless tree
Of an undeniable wound
A gratuitous plague
Of a small heart that dreamt
Too big not to fail
Of a sun that cannot endure
Of a great hole in God’s heart
Of indiscreet winds
Of love and its fragments
Of entire cities buried in tradition
Of pyramids
Ice hotels
Numbers, tusks, and dead end streets
Of super-surrealism
Water, forgiveness
The kiss you gave
Of loud flowers
False optimism
Of contrived irony at a moment that
Calls for direct speech
Of a mystic’s third eye
Of the blind, indefatigable reaper
Of your obscene handwriting
Well-formed brows
Your heart’s endless lending and my poor credit
Of Einstein’s red door, glial cells
Film noire
Of this voice that is not mine
Of these fingers that type
Of the world that starts again
Each time you kiss me
Of these beautiful scars that are all yours
Of empty cathedrals and impotent statues
Of my ability to change into everything I am
Of your sins
Of your past
Of a future in which war is a gross abstraction
And leaders negotiate at the poker table
Of your lies that grow like phalluses
Of the women who repent you
Of the magniloquent sea, the night of a million moons
That delivers you to my door
Of floral scents that feed nostalgia
The rook in your palm
The alleyways of love
Of the silver leaf of pleasure, this living death
The wish to move into your soul and displace all others
The need to be possessed, to be delivered, ex machina
Into the nothing that survives.

Our Wood

Our Wood...

Is a magical place
where I laid my head...
in your lap... and ran my
fingers through your hair...
I told you my greatest dreams
and cried my saddest songs...
where my dreams came to...
nothing

I dreamed of finding you
in our wood...
of birches and firs
of sunflowers and golden bumblebees
who buzzed and buzzed
around two ghostly figures
that sought to find one another
and almost did...

I cried for the peace of our wood
by a brook of crystal waters
formed by tears of...
anguished hearts who roam and roam
the valleys and hills of life
in search of ...
a dream too good to be true...
and it is.

The slumber of drunkenness
provides no relief, nor brings me closer...
to our wood, where we sought to join
in a place that time stood still
where joy would last...
but whose magic is short-lived

That I’ve resigned myself to a life...
of... dreams, slumber, dizzing heights
and deepest lows...is but a dialectical process.
A statue in our wood dries... ever harder
and harder... the plaster conforms
to fate’s unseen hand that...
shapes a mold it did not choose.
My contribution is...
the tear in its eye.

By:  Homeless with a Laptop, That is my Name