Thanksgiving

Today is Thanksgiving,
so, tonight I’m drinking Wild Turkey
in the minutes before I hope the world explodes
like a pheonix of sound
born from the ashes in this air.

All this smoke’s been filtered
through humanity’s lungs and desires for clarity. All this
smoke’s been waiting since the start of time
to ride the currents of this cafe’s breathing.
All this smoke’s becoming more than the invisible
patterns of turbulence churning away
from Kawasaki’s tenor.

I am the sort of monster that imagines
a single particle of this smoke
through its formless and formed and formless play,
all the ways it finds for being. I imagine
its undying float through infinite lies
and the other words I love to call towards it,
as though the shapes of my lips
might make me love it more than absolutely.
I am the sort of pleased beast that pictures
a crystal of smoke tearing off from an embering leaf
grown in some sun-soaked landscape
and watches that molecule of exhaustion rise
through light and contrast into arabesques of visible language.

We must know the desert Arabs loved to light fires
and contemplate the cursive. The Sanskrit calligraphers
had rites for inching their lips close enough to flames
to burn their quick kisses into acrid flashes of peeling chap,
watching how briefly they would ignite
and become evident as line against ceilings of carpet.

Yes, I am the sort that is willing to concentrate
deeply enough to follow, fathom and chart
a single bit of smoke’s progression through to its rest
as residue in my hair.

Pungent spike of tobacco, here is where you have become.
You rode the riot of sound tonight and have sewn yourself
into my intimacy. This is not your end, nor mine.
This is merely our bubble-burst of meeting.
Next time it may be me who drifts past your eyes
while you stir a rock of ice floating in Thanksgiving.
And it may be you who fills a stolen page with scrawl.



by jerry gordon
11.27.08
common cafe, nakazaki-cho, osaka

Fall

The permanent
willingness to fall
apart, to become
undiscovered and
through that loss
of what isn't and is,
to be at hand
in all
available
here.

by jerry gordon
11.25.08

Wind

Ever abundant,
ever fulfilled,
this wind I feel
at the nape of my
throat, tapping as
present as my
pulse, making me
within its temporal
gusts and
subsiding.
Leaving what
to remain?


by jerry gordon
11.25.08

On the Nankai Train to Tannowa

My subtle fantasy of lasting
beyond the bubble-burst of this thought
flash.

My straw hat of these last
three years is woven
of a certain number of stalks
that grew from a certain green landscape.
Their history is now part of keeping these
particles from the sun from
hitting my face. Their distant
seeds contribute to me--
today--
looking like a dork.

Toward the middle of this train car,
a man in pink socks beats his chest
and maintains an angry soliloquy.
The rip-rapping rhythm
of his babbling chant reminds me
of my urgent drumming this morning,
of the cymbal riding the crossing stamps
the snare and bass put on the moments.



jerry gordon
8.18.08

Beach Party

for Mare

Pleasures give the gift of dopamine.
Pains exchange something she has no name for.


A step in sand away from the fire.
Then, another. The path
appears in my effort towards nowhere.
To follow me you must connect
the dents in the earth
before the wind returns everything
to its nothing. To find you
in this dark, I look into your shining eyes
and follow the shapes your lips behave
as you explain how the brain knows
what it isn't.

A touch reaches
beyond the immediate.

Who are you becoming before I know you?
Your smile's echo; the speed of this light
enters my eyes from the fire
and on it rides these arriving angles
of your mouth and brow.

You touch my hand to demonstrate neurology
and more information runs the pathways of my mind
than an object's awareness of an object.

Memory remains and pours the senses.
Your index finger at the skin
beside my knuckle.



by jerry gordon
3.1.08

The Mouth

How many words
and spoons heavy with curry
pass through?
How many screams of joy,
surprise and pain?
How many shapes
do lips discover to express
the textured nuances of life lived
through grimace, grit, sneer and laugh,
of mouth wide in holler across a distance,
of the pleading call toward those gone lost,
of the micro-sonic windscrape of whispered secrets,
of the kiss,
of the pout,
of the babbling
confusion we learn in doubt,
of the ease Self feels as it flows and finds form
amidst the words, sobs, giggles and grunts we invent
with those we love and trust?



jerry gordon
11.10.08

image by Amy Farkas

For Now

With more than exhaustion in your voice,
I read your eyes for signs of limits on eternity.
From across the ocean
of our bed, I watch a wing of sparks
fanning off from some purpose your mind is grinding.
Falling as soft as gravity welcomes ash,
each sliver of light glows
bright enough to illuminate
the clutter of curses and caresses
that have piled below our history.
We have given each other all
the details needed to deceive, despise,
demean and deliver.

We don't know the future,
but for now we trust
each other.



by jerry gordon
2008