All newpyramids's RECords
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Touching yourself to your lips, in a smoked glass bottle |
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In the lap of a cult initiation, we’re touching to adult contemporary hits and breeding inspiration, asking all the right questions of the heavy-lidded recruiters, like “Are you happy? Are there gods in volcanoes? Do your thighs touch?” And when they stutter we kiss, and maybe lean in with pen to pad and “How does that make you feel?” Rolling blunts on the bestselling whatever, running fingertips on bricks to feel something rough and unpolished and red, and wishing them—these strange crouching things, with beetle black eyes and slender fingers—the blessings of the wrong god as we’re ushered into the street and dim sum, so close our thighs touch in the dim sun. Laughing all the way to the 17th floor of an unfamiliar hotel, kicking cigarettes over the balcony with the brutish toe of a boot, counting the seconds until silence. One, two, buckle Something borrowed blue. Recreating the Kobayashi Maru in a cheating whisper, Breaking the skin of a red red apple with charisma, and stubble and teeth, as the elevators take us through half of the night sky suspended from Cassiopeia’s throne, upside down with all of the blood rushing to your head, you beckoned, and said and said and said |
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sputters my bragging heart, and I am reminded that this is the essential condition of Zen Buddhism in a moment of tripping clarity. "Mama, I'm a Religious Man! Mama, I am!" And still, kneeling over my traditional sumi-e, indian inked birds or winking calico cats, I am trembling with that terrible phrase on the tip of my tongue: "I was." |
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I am kneeling with the taste of stale wine and dry bread on my tongue; sometimes I wonder why Jesus didn't just take the money and run. |
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These are seeds spat into a red earth. Words to arrange themselves in neat stacks, that flit and bloom in birth, wrapping roots in snappy syntax. Wit sharp as scythes run across a whetstone tongue, reaping a gray brain, thoughts like little prayers to providence, caught in wine-red welts on pink skin: sin that sinks in. I am stoic and undressed, silly, sultry, statuesque. Speaking words, like “happiness” or “elephant” or “shoe.” |
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