The first fire
comenzó
desde adentro.

Have you felt
the river exit your body
after a long storm?

Have you noticed
the mouth
where the water
drains away
touch you like
the mouth
of a dangerous lover.

These pieces of you
they don’t need to be
destroyed, by the way.

They can end
without having to die.

Every city
becomes its own city
in me.

Clogging the wheels
of the mind
with waterfalls,
one of our
favorite things.

This is complete.
Sweep like the clouds
over a clean sky.

Even if I’m
devoured
when it’s over
I will still fall in love
with the ocean.

How to grow a forest
inside you:
imagine it so.
Include the sun
and the moon.

How cold it feels inside
when the body breaks
and you are alone
and alone and
alone again.

To notice the smell
of agua, mar o lluvia
o saliva, es un gospel.

The mind doesn’t start
screaming
like a crowd in the dark
after a gun goes off.
It starts still.
It starts quiet.

Pain also glows
like a myth
of creation
only it’s re-creation.

In the soft beating
of their wings
listen
you can hear it
that they used to be
an army
marching by foot
on land
before this.
How easy it is
to forget.

Every year is a migration
marked by much more
than just a number
where the wings
of all the birds inside
have led you.

This chair on the side
of the mountain
looking out at the sea
is perfect and
not nearly enough.

For some that are milk
love is pure not luck
and feeding feed
just as free

Love is a pequeña planta
growing in your forest.
Pero
you can not survive
from love alone.

The circumstances are hearts, etc. Also
how dreams originated, pushing us toward
don’t we wish we knew. I’ve heard
don’t worry, worst case scenario
isn’t even that bad. I’ve heard of sitting in the rain
until it no longer feels like water.
He told me, yesterday
that’s life, infinite doubts. Clocks, knives.
Or perhaps it began with another thing
before hearts. Diamonds,
spades. There are so many questions
yet, when to hush them for awhile? Somewhere else
it began with spontaneity, owls, branches.
There is a Center where we stabilize,
beach, wine, blankets, darkness,
yeses? Fear of end. Fear of the search
ending. Wedding, anniversary, verses. Midnight
in Shanghai, five years from now,
or anytime. So, we’ll talk about it
later. Lighthouse.  Worst case scenario is
we float and we float, waiting to feel
things we’ve never felt before. Boats, boats,
duende. The moon, my favorite flashlight
illuminates the narrow bridge suspended
between certain moments.
The impact. He says
no te vayas
and it knocks on me from the door inside.
This time, I’m afraid
it will end. The bridge.
I want to talk about it now. All the things
that come with planting a tree.
Night, tools, patience. Hearts, etc.

 

It will flow to you
like the soft waves
in the bay,
each bit of clarity.

I saw a pearl in the lake
floating miles from its home
that’s you, eyes all milk

Am I the narcissist,
am I the wolf at the shore,
or are you with me on this one?

The magic of all this,
all this,
is enormous; which
magician am I?
I want to know.

The sadness, it will wash you,
the anger will chew and chew on your heart
until you let it go,
love will open you high and wide
like a firework,
and fear, it will crush you
like a flower in a fist.

I am the boat
on the water
inside of truth.

1.

There is a flute playing softly
in the canyons of my winding
psyche. I know
it is that sound
that has led me here.

2.

Fasten yourself
like a jungle root to a dream
and a forest and all its life
will grow throughout your soul.

I heard that while you kiss
the ocean lives inside you
its waves pushing up
onto your bones
its salty tide driving your lips
so you don’t have to think
and even its darkness
reminding you
how beautiful too it is
to have another side
it could not be itself without.
As for love, well some moments
will come
where you’ll find yourself wading
past the shallows
to the darkness
where kissing will come
willingly
to guide you to the other side.

Where we felt home
is a plane
of such thin glass,
not
always there
when we return.

Loose strand of sea grass,
beached bit of sea glass,
we inhabit a small piece
and we inhabit all of it;
the only contingency
is becoming a ship
and unlocking
the porthole.

A forest
appears
in your heart
from where
the apple
fell,
every apple,
every heart.

My flower sent
my body here
to be an explorer
of living,
so I live and I live
and I live.

Don’t forget about the first eye.
The interior world may not exist
without the exterior one.

You imagine you can touch her
strings, play her like a cello
until her bones glow
red hot through her skin
until her love is
the pounding rain on ashes.

My body is meant
to be soft and rounded
like a hazy moon
no matter what
ugly lies
my mind likes
to tell us.

The soul is dreamlike
which means
each one has an El Dorado
somewhere on its map

The heart
when it breaks open
like the earth
what’s left are
breathtaking canyons.

You can buy machines
that offer quiet
from other machines
or you can find a mountain
and sit on the side of it;
now it’s easy to forget
silence is free.

Tiras de una cuerda y canta una campana
contra un muro de concreto. Preguntas a La Muerte
si la vida es una broma contada por los gigantes celestiales
y ella derrama una risa suelta y te deja entrar.

+++

You pull on a string and a bell sings
against a concrete wall. You ask La Muerte
if life is a joke told by celestial giants
and she spills a loose laugh and lets you in.

Listen as the white moth
listens, with her wings
riding the sound waves.
After all this time
her instinct is nearly
indistinguishable
from what arrives
through her ears.

One of the gates
into the garden
is never locked.
Let’s go.

She said, kill me in my sleep,
a quick spray of bullets
that are so quiet
no one will know I’m gone
for at least a little while.

He said, kill me under the veil
of my favorite song
played live in the desert
just a bit after sunset;
as the darkness sweeps over
the orange land, let it sweep
over me too.

They said, kill us invisibly
from the sky
so our spirits may rise
in wonder
of that very rising,
of the rest
that is up there.

Me? Kill me by the sea
please, for that is where
I have found
paradise, paradise
in peace, from inward,
the only kind
that can exist
from now on.

If only we could just be.
Instead we must be brutal
in killing old truths
that were never really true.

Your mind falls pink
for an hour and before
you know it,
you’re not the same
as you were
before.

Freedom is a choice,
that must be made
by all of us.

The world is no
rounder now
than it ever was
before we knew
it wasn’t flat.

We’ve been owned
for every millennium
until this one.

A flashlight
illuminates
the narrow bridge
suspended
with ropes between
certain moments.

Climb in my
river.
A fantasy.
Scale across
what dreamed
me alive.

Tonight is screamless.
I am an island bathing
in her shallow seas.

You bring up the wind
without saying it,
knowing
you’ve been the wind before
changing directions at the will
of the sea; and too
you’ve been fire,
but the one with soft hands
in the heart of winter.

Like a visceral compass
the ladder
was always there
no matter if
we saw it.

You throw the pebble
then you are the pebble
then you ripple out
on the glassy lake
like a nimble
kaleidoscope.

Sing me a song
at the rocky coast
of my philosophy
that all of this
is beautiful
without being simple
or easy.

Floating like a loose strand
of sea grass. What is it
when we can let go of
ourselves, our unphysical
parts, the ones that expand
only as far as the questions
we ask.

On the horizon
of restored jungles
and cities already eased
imaginary in origin
are your realer realities.

I wonder sometimes
is love’s absence
stronger than
love itself. Is that
of relevance if
we inhabit a small piece
and we inhabit all of it.
We come and we go
or not. Perhaps we are
and we are and we are.

When I was a mountain I stopped
dreaming as often, the thing
about intimacy is that the sky
is not watching, and proximity
makes us lighter or more
dangerous depending on
how many moons we’ve
brought into our orbit, water
water kaleidoscope daughter,
teach me love and steal
the anchor, drift us low
in these leaves landing
like undreamed
dreams that collect
in the forest’s corners from
when I was a mountain.

Antes de Convertirme en Nube

Cuando era una montaña dejé
de soñar tanto, la cuestión
con la intimidad es que el cielo
no está viendo, y la proximidad
nos vuelve más ligeros o más
peligrosos dependiendo de
cuantas lunas hayamos
atraído hasta nuestra órbita, agua
agua hija caleidoscópica,
enséñame sobre el amor y róbate
el ancla, llévanos a la deriva
en este embarcadero de hojas
como olvidar
los sueños que colectamos
en las esquinas de los bosques
cuando era una montaña.

I don’t wish we were blind
to color or shape or diversity or
anything else
to cover up the internal ugliness
that surfaces as blood and ash
over our everydays. If only
if only
our tendency toward love
was not being buried so far
so far
under the toxins of fear
planted as trees
by the greedy ones
tricking us into thinking
our minds are free.

 

The paper
lanterns
that began
floating up
into the mind’s
night will drift
far but their
glow could
keep on and
on and on

Some of my ghosts are still
travelling the rooms
of my body
writing over the bones
maybe curses
maybe prayers
maybe questions
like will you accept
that you are beautiful
without destroying us?

Courtship of sea dragons
and duendes, that’s the way
I recommend we dance.

We learn how to move
like the sea, then like the land,
then like ourselves, where
home is equilibrium
and the rest
is all dancing.

Esperanza, like the time I moved to
Barcelona in a daze and came out wearing
bells of its light because the sea dreamt I
was the sun’s first daughter not a fairy
but a gentle warrior.

There is grass on the floor
of my memory where
you taught me to sit
and see its softness
and the breeze
and the sitting there quietly
no matter what else
tries to hide it

Imagine
our ghosts
on strings
attached in a
way somehow
unknown
to giant
unseen
copper bells
their music
floating
into the sky
without trying
and echoing
awhile
to whispers
then
silence
so we know
they
let go

So you found it,
where your energy meets
the earth–and you’re waiting
for other people to find it too.
You’re an animal, you’re a spirit,
you’re the sea and the dirt
and the mangosteen and
the atrocities and the magnitudes
of love. If you can
remember that all of this
can be part of you and still
you decide letting it all go
in the big sea breeze you’ve placed
yourself beside day after day,
the earth’s seeds may start to
blossom inside you, and you will
reach for them and use them
when you need to.

Did you know
that loneliness
is autoromance?

Soon the walls
become tall ledges
from which to conjure up
dreams or weep
without silence
or locate the sea
and discern
its current temperament

I have opened to the page
of the heart’s unpredictable
tectonics beneath the surface
of consciousness ready
for the plates to shift
as they please
and even the aftermath,
as what will be
will be.

I create myself,
my brown or green or psychedelic
grasses, where I can be my now
self or my future self or
even my classified dreams.

Appear, near to
where the turquoise sea
spills softly onto land
like groping hands,
perhaps we found in
these foreign jungles,
these rice paddies, these
malleable dreams, that love
is a stranger
distance than geography
can map or comprehend

It is monsoon season inside
the pearl of my mind
and the rain is
especially beautiful
today.

Perhaps it’s easier
when the illusion
of security doesn’t
force itself unhidden
like a broken key
to a room with cool
sheets on a bed
like a cloud
after a long day,
you know the kind,
to try to wreck us.
And perhaps we won’t
wish for easier.

The lighthouse in the mirror
of the shadow self turns
on automatically
in storms

What do we do
but trust the river
cold stones smooth all over
the current began
so long ago

The real sign is
that somehow
we ended up here.

This route lacks coordinates.
It is unmappable and therefore
more beautiful, do you see?
Led by roots, by scents, by astonishment,
we are nature too, remember?

I am looking for
places the universe
bore to gamble
the piles we make
of ourselves.

Mine is the way the sand is cold
the way the shape of your shadow
moves how morning begins to
seem like an end unless I
let the wilderness carve
a flood that takes what I
no longer want to hold.

I don’t need to pray
with my eyes closed
anymore. Anywhere
my body want to go
it will go.

Open, opening, a door swivels,
no back, front, around an axis
opened into outward. All we speak
is edible. The body so many mouths.

In the belly
of desire
the key
to salvation
sleeps

Come in here
we’re going to feel
the hurricanes
move everything
but us
for once

Could I convince you
to abduct yourself
with love and that
listening with your ear
pressed to your soul
is the easiest way
to arrive, would that
change the way
you tune the strings
that move you?

We carry Budapest voodoo,
that raven, mask, and bell.

1.
In Midsummer
in the far far North
of our minds
where it is never dark
we pick wildflowers
we put them under our pillows
where our dreams are like bees
that fly through the garden
we make with
the most intimate parts of us.

2.
The end of the parade
is a quieter street
where the hearts go hiding
like rabbits
when the rattlesnakes come out

3.
I pushed the answer
to your message
out on a paper boat.

(I know of times
after dark where
you’ve become the sea.)

4.
What borrows us
from the night, against sleep
another
dream machine,
insomniac in the garden with
the white roses & the white moon
a spotlight. No busted gods
nor their creations, no billowing
soul’s ghost, no
lost calculator. What’s left is
easy,
warm wind
gathering these
white petals
here.

In my dream,
I was balanced
on the sea where
I can feel myself here
in her dream, too, the
waves of its wet mouth
falling on me until I
remember that reality is a
lovely illusion, a realm of moments
stuck together by surges of grace and
grief and joy and obsession and etc.

I have
waltzed
over to
certainty
sat on its
open
shores
looking
out
onto
what
seems
to be
nothingness
or
everythingness.

 

I’ve heard about darkness,
diseases that are born
from the spirit
of evil. I think it’s true.
And I think strength,
the kind that rises
after a hard storm
from the inside
like rain returning
to the sky, must come
from the love that we make
on this side.

Teach me what
it means
to be
an animal.

Love,
Jessica

Se olvida easily
tarareando through the night,
el día, the vibration
de living
sin mucho más que being alive

Being Alive

It is easily forgotten
humming through the night,
the day, the vibration
of living
without much else but being alive

Estar Viva

Se olvida fácilmente,
tarareando a través de la noche
el día, la vibración
de la vida
sin mucho más que estar viva

No matter what
you thought
you knew
the crime
of ignoring
the heart
will kill
you
There the salt
of great grey waves
Have dreams
the sweet scent
of yellow
spring flowers
You float just above them
even when
the dreams
are bombed to dust
like Dresden
then built back up
and bombed again

The ethereal gate
between death and
the afterlife, I wonder
if we have it all wrong
that the way is not in
but out.

Logic
through
a shredder
throw
the strips of it
up
wait
for it
to rain
onto
us
like paper
tears.
I hope
we
remember of
the universe
its entirety
the part
inside us.