(for children)


(1)

I heard a big word once. 'Armamentarium'.
It's a word with old parents. It means things
like medicine and how doctors feel your chest
for beats that don't quite fit. It means red
and the things inside your body that need
hands to help you. My hands help by wandering.
I tap my hands on tables, I comb my hair,
I pick up flowers, I hold up faces
of people I love when I feel blue. But my favourite
is red, because it is inside me, beating.
I learned a big word once. It was my name. I said it and it sang.


(2)

If you peel me you will find songs
as thick as grapefruit. I am red inside.
I take some time. I am always late.
I am best in the mornings but at night awake.
I'm from a place that is not as green as here.
Our grasses are yellow and say so with the wind.
My mirror is both my best friend and enemy,
sometimes a lover, often a bully, either way
hands are caught. I like to read. I read
so much that I think of my skin as grapefruit.
I don't even like to eat it. I just like the red.


(3)

Planes have mouths. They swallow people.
They fly them away. They spit me out.
Sometimes I do not know whose stomach I am in.
Inside the planes I dream of reds as dense as
roses. When the planes land I give them to
me as myself. Let me explain this better:
my accent is a grand liar because my
country is blue. It never rains there
but when it does you will find my mother's throat.
I croak with such dryness that the sounds turn to words.


(4)

When I see me I see soil. I grow roses
in my skin. People who don't look like
me first brought those kinds of flowers
to my country with ships. Kind of. We do not have
oceans. They must have walked so far for me
to speak with things they then planted. People think of me
as oceans reflecting the sky. I say I want the sunset
petalled perfectly into soil. My skin. When you see me
you must adore me because of your planting. I am not
your garden. I bloom.


(5)

When you hear words do not forget that someone
taught them to you. Maybe your mother
who read books about cats in hats to you
at airports. Maybe your father
and his stories of his childhood with feet
twisting through thin sand as roses dancing.
Where I am from we do not have soil
for those kinds of flowers. My father still grew
and my mother still grew me. Peel my skin
and you will find that sort of red beneath. If you ask me
where it came from I won't say. I will sing.

There's light outside. The blue-blazered man speaks
and I listen with my pen. All the warmth within
my head emerges as if called upon
by private hands. Wind whistles through the large windows. God
is singing low-mood like hormones like a child's recorder practice.
What is literature? we ask.
I don't know but it looks a lot like me.

                                                                             He says
the earth is lost in the future. Predictive
post-apocalyptic longing. Fragile
bones as flower-stems within us. We walk
like jelly. Strange to think of it now,
stranger yesterday still-- and tomorrow, the eyelids
slip away to the night: closing bud-codas.

        Repeat-sign, where are you?

The earth will turn to fire. Our revelations
are gas-large, cow-heavy, burning engines
zooming across cliffs. I drink
because to think of this is not the sort of stumbling
I need. I need arms
and wine-fog hiding them (as children's games). I need a mirror.
And I would want the birds. Them too.

the wine-singing ceases its crescents as the grasses' leaves' small leaves are blown/
by wind. the wind paused by sunrise. airless and plum-coloured. my fire runs grey-dry. i'm drunk./
and well? doesn't poetry arrive here then? imagine my wordliness!: i know things!/
claiming them on some soft days as if the end of time will not yet have happened yet, grand/
as big children in bell-towered schools and the word that is taught to them there. meaning that/
the affront of the word is not something that should compel a throat opening. my throat opens/
without expectation of an other entering. through. and then what if not surprise when they do?/
and after when my tongue turns sarcophagus?: a song?: singing/
black! like mirrors and black! within it saying how here we go again with how the sun did me/
before i was born. how sturdy and taut this sunned-skin is. how apple-mouthed and coffee-bean. here we go again,/
i watch the cars go by my window with great longings of elsewheres. and fear. the red, white and blue flag-flashes,/
passing by glassily and hologrammed in front of me as the question of when, the question/
with the gun, here,/
horizoned./

click. icarus./

Go, small song. Make yourself
known. Stretch your arms as sunlight,
glow. We humans’ leaves’ greens need you,
so, will you love us as our ears do you?
Wonder with me, throat, as you say
your notes and lengthen their dull to
soft nevers. The crowd still hears you
tomorrow, the last song before the final
closing of the eyes before godless sleep.
Coffins vibrate with your enthusiasms,
corpses know remorse, finally, like a
cracked ancient bell with some something
left. String me as *******
screaming in pillow fields. String me
as hazardous Lazarus sinewed neck-string
plucked as flowers, as slave-ships docked
upon the shore with gentle endless thud. We’ll
keep singing spirituals forever, we’ll keep
saying things about skin. We will win. Win
like mirrors lastly seeing smiles. Come with me
as stars die and are still witnessed. Inscribed
as pride in a mother’s voice with small
black boy joy, with tears, first cries, blood,
water
and the mother’s song mountain-heavy
and living.

Nerve cells are assumed things seen
       assuredly. What then are our
eyes? Thinking things
      whispering maybes with
light, guiding
      us towards hopeful
touch, threaded
gently with needle through an other's
      slivered eye: we
return to looking. Silk-curtained. Through small science
glass I have you. Here,
let us speak with colours. Blink for me.

I am a quiet poet! Which is to say a frog
without a croak. Imagine a huge stone
leaping from space into our air without flare.
I'm like that! Did you hear that? No.
Punctuation doesn't speak. Professors sometimes
say "space" and "time" and sometimes "heart" in
reference to the bed the clock the beating. So
I have not much to say of the sky. It's blue
and sometimes not. I am surprised with grass
and here how it isn't yellow. The mirror
and my blackness in it shouldn't make me blink. But I do
click refresh. And where I am. Is my mouth
closed? It matters very little. Well, the ground on
which my feet step. It is also quiet. It screams songs.

Hey there, white pill.

Can I swallow you?

(If not

let me know how

it means

to sing a song as sky-mirror).