[unfinished]

A fifty year-old cherry tree
in the middle of a living room.
Strange,
this doesn't seem strange here.
It's petals build the sky between us,
filling the room
to its paper-door horizons.

On the far side, a woman sits.
Her face drifts in this cloud of
the faintest pink. Her eye-brow appears.
Her lips vanish. Her fingers are
wound into a spiky heart.

This Road

I've traveled this road
from where the hills
talked of torture
and the misbehavior
of rivers. The rise
of sound in an underground.
A voice in an undeterminable
tongue, like all thoughts
worth conceiving whisper
of rooms behind Mexican doors:
dreams.

It's been lit with candles
floating in milagro tears
and saxophone shine.
Its walls contain all
the memories of music
interrupted. Their color is not
of smoke. It is of vowels
voiced as song,
stretched until visible
on the expansive walkways
of the inner ear.

How else to explain
my dizziness?

I speak and watch the road
flash red. I dig the ground
with my teeth
and leave it as a map back
scratched in sand.



by jerry gordon

Mirror

Each time I face this dusty pane
it feels like I must
take up the tools of memory
and carve my portrait
from this rectangular ocean of chrome.

The duty to make a me
along some semblance of self
and in that cut and file the world
to make sense as what I see.

I imagine the ease of one day
freeing the dust of form,
of simply meeting the beast
without name, arriving unrecognizable
amidst the evaporating droplets
of chromium rain.



by jerry gordon

April 20, 2006

Fifteen years ago
I saw you for the first time
and heard your voice.

You could fit in my two hands
and I could not understand
what you were saying.

So much has changed.
So many memories are between
the baby, then,
and the young man, now.

You are not any of them.
You are more than all of them.

Everyday
you become you,
larger than my hands can hold
or my eyes can see.



by jerry gordon
for Mirra

Blue Spot

You're always becoming
new, now
with this blue-black drop of night
spilled across your eyelid.

A tear's weight of ink
is enough for a four-word poem
or can spread down your cheek
into the shape of Kyoto.

You look out through the darkness.

No taint of disease stains your eye.
Each glance contains all
the sky's confidence.

Like some distant sun
burning across the time of night,
your sight shines clear,
with nowhere
for a fog to form.



by jerry gordon

Ghost Story

You, the ghost
and me, the sheet.
Chatting in this flapping
wind of winter,
can you guess why I make
all the noise
and you look less like smoke
each moment?

It's the danger of becoming
as we are
along with everything
else.

Lost.

Your eyes have always been
louder than your voice. They echo
through the night
like the candles you fed
with clumps of your hair--
offerings the wind wouldn't take
until we sat
inside that pungent cloud of your hatred
and made small talk
serve as prayer.



by jerry gordon

Safe House

Meet me there
upon the projected wall
beyond
the shadows of our reflections
riding the whirling
horses of this carosel.
Time is our revolution
like a picture of the ocean
nailed up on a theater door.

The magic of a film
is in its flashing:
the betrayal of
how the light dies
before the eye
forgets.

I didn't touch your face
that morning in the bamboo;
what would be impossible
if that were possible?

I have seen our house
within an earthen pot;
everything we need to be
safe, from TV, books and coffee
to news, a bed and jazz.



by jerry gordon
inspired by Fred Wilson's Safe House II, 2003

Andre Breton's Apartment

Oh, Andre,
as always this is
your day;
the peoples in the peach
and all their lovely furniture;
when we have this time
it's nice to climb the walls
and to sit there
in two-dimensions beyond gravity
like all your native masks
with their Kachina hair-dos.

Oh, Breton, I long
to sit down and disturb
your dinner, where every guest
will get
an apple,
and to stare into the blacks of all
the poured paint hung
up on your walls.



by jerry gordon

Kawaii

The girl with the purplest tongue
yawns
and takes us all
into that world of pearly shine,
where we stroll between the castles
of teeth but huddle
inside her single cavity.

For there is danger
in the thrash of her chit-chat
and out-bursts of cute.

There is no way to measure
the sonic terror of the "KAWAII"
scream. It's impossible,
and thus we must live in fear.
We must risk all's destruction
with every penguin and puppy
and candy-eyed mascot
that flashes from the TV screen.



by jerry gordon

Cougher

I look at you
and I almost don't believe
the weight of prevailing
evidence. I dream
that death won't slip his hand
up your skirt and unfold you
from within. I imagine your eyes
always blinking beyond my sight,
behind this ghost of smoke
you inflate my lungs with.
It is as though
you'll always have another
exhalation.

Considering the alternative,
your cough is so full of life.



by jerry gordon

Inside the Guide

Who’d suspect
the beauty of following
the random
inside the guide of trust?

The pattern that is
only evident after entered.

I glance and meet your eyes.

How deep need I stare into you
to find what I didn’t know is necessary,
to see what I couldn’t imagine
the world can’t do without?



by jerry gordon
inspired by Sigmar Polke painting