J.A. Morales - Santo Domingo
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New PaUnder a Palm Tree by the Sea
Lost Movies/Películas Perdidas
A Clumsy Heart
Love poems
(2011)
Stranger thou art be
In the moonlit after light
Higher than a kite
Dew dripped leaf strewn
Hosannas on the sea marooned
Crazy as a loon
Lover thou art not yet never
Kiss tight slow eyed mover
Better late than sooner
Loved me arm length cozy cur
Sit you down please me be
Then maybe we can walk down
To costumed clown town
& I will you mine me be
₪
I
As I leapfrog thru the memory of you
Could I have done but otherwise?
The rise and fall of this thinking thru time
Has it better made me see you?
As I leapfrog thru the travesties
Your fading face I fix upon
To warm the cold nights of my yearning so
Whispers in a soft embrace
I have my shortcomings that age made more apparent
No youth to mask my miscues
Had I even a ghost of a chance?
How sad it is all that we are not
I must cling to that supposition of you
I must hold on though all else of you is falling by the wayside
Of my repetitious tinkering with your absence
Only here in the written do I reverie
I must remember this
A kiss is still a kiss a sigh a sigh
However amiss the relentless burning
Of the papers strewn about, am I remiss?
In believing it so against the constant purge
This rampage of the senses to relive you
But once again as time goes by unrelenting
Will I have only this of you among the shards?
₪
II
Crowdless as I am among the multitudes
I seek you still landscaped like a foreign port
Glossy like a magazine layout of Venice I seek you still
Remember I am only all too human
Too erred in my appraisals I constantly misconstrue
It is after all my string theory to explain the pain
The mismatched numbers in the printout the misplaced calculations
Ceiling mirrored my face in yours in the motelredbulblight of it
Oh my love how I absconded derailed numbmindedly
The forgetfulness endured all for naught as the skin sags
All that must now navigate in aspic like some aborted bird
The flight the soaring in the air all gone
And yet near I yearn you still grasping at straws
I mourn the effervescence that bubbled on the skin
And all the smells I know must have existed
The waft of you in the breezy afternoons, alas, all gone
₪
III
I cannot retread the syllables of you
I cannot disown the written
The rhyme & reason of it all no more than I can the lived
It is all there in the forgotten lines the verse & rhapsody
Of our withered eyes that see no more
Blindsided and passé in the city that is no more
& where I cross sidewalks where you stood
Once enraptured there is no plaque of commemoration
All walls have been painted over
The short lived graffiti of our time erased
No evidence of our passing but a yellowed book on a dusty shelf
Awaiting brittle decomposition
We have become an archeological pursuit
Requiring the patience of the steady brush on bone
Open to speculation on the historical context
Where the silt of time entombed us
₪
IV
Can I absolve you as I absolve myself?
Not from any transgressions to the skin of it
But from the absence of touch all those years transpired
Is there a Nuremburg in the horizon so many witnesses lost is there?
No, of course not, time absolves all lovers at the buzzer
Why cheat for overtime if I can scrabble all the tiles
That lie reshuffled at our feet, you see, there is no mystery
To these reveries is all I have my sweet
To reimagine the game otherwise your silken breasts cupped
You curlicued lips kissed your limbs caressed
Hurtling thru the storm to Paris like two croissants on the bed
Looped forever in my head like a brazen technology
These are heady times as you can only but do not disagree
Play along with me I have but the purest intentions
I did not mean to frighten you only to pull you close
To feel the keel breaking the water
₪
V
Overwhelmed the word that lately stalks the mind saturated
With the eroding snapshots I retain my world in a nutshell so to speak
Eliding edifices these fractured times I thumb through the smile of you
I google hoping for the hits that would efface the pain this finding you
This finding you among the beaches walked the mouth the smell
Of you so close where in all of space the alternate universe where
All time spirals forth from the heat of your breasts there I recline
Dumbstruck as you wrap me round your perfect teeth
Me in your expert hands my calves undone in your fruition
The youthfulness of us we thought would never end
Overwhelmed that’s the ticket and clue to you ever so clasped
In the vise of your upturned thighs poked ass to boot
In sweat imbibed the pants of your gaped mouth managing my lunge
To the pelvic upthrust of your manic fugue the music of the spheres
The fears the total emptying this coming your going the loss
As I attempt to retrace the beginnings of the universe the bang of you
₪
VI
It is through these streets the context of avenues the dusky
Panoramas burdened with memory the traffic flow of you
That I diagram the solitude of these lines from bus windows
The flattened skylines of the suburbs as my eyes gaze up from magazines
On the doorways of fast foods the paneglassness of the city
As through the pinhole the viewmaster clickiness of those days
The membranic afterglow of you flitting from frame to frame
Where the dust gave way I thumbed your name within a clumsy heart
To signpost the center of the map where I reside
From where the scaffolding fell from the day
Where I lay perpendicular to your presence I kid you not
As I trace your name on the dusty pane of a rambling bus in transit
₪
VII
In time we all become a walking philosophy
That we pray through awaiting miracles
Ritualizing our fears as the days roll by I know this to be true
In the beginning it was the word the galactic bone
The word a young man’s game you must remember this
The leap and laugh the wind in hair the host we swallow whole
In time we become antithesis of our youthful scribble
We disinherit undo tear apart & this comes from the heart
There where we start we end so blame it on the boogie
So now you know it was the rhetoric of you enticed my stare
The ardent coupling in parked cars my resume’s a postcard from the tropics
This writing the iambic pentameter threading the bob & weave
Always with a trick up my sleeve pick a card any card
This is the philosophy you lucky girl immortalized the ideology
That which guides my every stroke the punch line in the joke
Where I stoke the spark the watermark beneath the passion
₪
VIII
It is with these words that the love must yet fail
Love does not conquer but succumb as days tumble & fall
We are to each never where the blood in the vein quickens
Those catchy tunes that once we hummed as geopolitical hotspots flared
This is where you must live & prosper the blue marble from afar the gasp
Of recognition this inhumanity that exacts its toll the body count
Amid the murder and the mayhem the love that blinds you better believe it
It is here that weaves the tale the pillow talk this tearing away
Where lovers woo and skin slides over skin & I say I love you
It is with these words that I make amends make do and the plot thickens
Repair the wound walk on bury the dead live on forget and make the bed
Like newly thrust pinballs amidst the bumps and noises until the tilt rings true
And I say I love you amid the roar a time to honor the dead
Amid the rubble as the earth shakes still beneath our feet catch me if you can
The ramalama dingdong of you I sing these words is all I have Be still
Be still and dance & prance upon the head of angels over & over
₪
IX
Can love take root beyond the discourse a line is all there is of you
Say enough of this the verbal undertaking the foolishly innocent
The pastel hallways the brain scan Can it survive the doctor’s appointment?
Will love still find me when I’m sixty-four don’t look at me that way
These are the bigger truths we sit across from in empty coffee shops
This is what we must jot down quickly on the napkin
Inspiration’s a motherfucker like a hidden disease an old girlfriend
You forgot all but the hair as it brushed your cheek
Someone else’s soundtrack from a passing car what were the words
To the tune of the band whose members all died long ago
That you hummed as they pinpricked your vein for the lab test
Can love survive so much infirmity? Can it catch the peace train?
Can it defy the odds? Should I sign off on it? What are my chances?
As I sit forlorn askance the bigger truth of you Where I cup your hands to my heart
Do you hear it beating? Does my love embarrass the god of your choice
As I reach across the table to brush away the hair & you’re not there
₪
X
Hoping to transcend the shores I aim the words in foreign flesh
Beyond the coastline the syllabic horror of the page beyond
All reasoned rhyme where this ends all chaos reigns everlasting
Thumbing through & making do with just enough to claim you listening
Bereft of all this larceny this skimming this curdled artifice arising
I am this tapestry this riptide this undercurrent of the receding tides
A traitor to my mother’s seed & stranger to my father’s tongue
Dancing upon the driftwood of the years this orphaned need
Am at the crossroads you fading fast when
lilacs last
in the
dooryard
Bloom'd and I assumed but was I ever wrong but it was so inviting
To entice you then at the seashores end to do your bidding
As I was sitting then in a bus ride thru my head your laughter mourning
It was all so disconcerting this love of you bereft of you
With just the words to pencil in the silhouette of your entreating
Arms round the grief of the pages the empty stages where I linger
Retreating tips of fingers where we bid our first farewell
₪
XI
To call myself your lover a slight of hand a slick misnomer
It speaks to all that unlived remained unsaid as the streets
Devolve beneath my feet it should have been a rover
Old words that cannot describe a new loneliness if the shoe fits
In the city that was you I talk & walk the stranger’s walk and talk
A firm believer in dispensation a knock knock on heaven’s walls
You being the necessary reader the required evil to the line
Let us suspend disbelief for sake of the storyline
For the argument’s sake dispense with the polemic
Strangle the goddamn word for Pete’s sake will you give me a break
Is all I ask a chance to dance upon the sword and spring a meaning
Take leave of absence from those piercing amber eyes
And call myself your lover in that old meaning of the word
A flèche to your sleeved heart that’s all this is all it is
In these words that want a botta-in-tempo to your foil
To draw first blood to coin new words then
₪
XII
This is a third world love lost among the statistics the fallout of
Emerging economies where Marx still rules the body politic
Of bad teeth and worse haircuts in designer clothing of you I sing
A futuristic paean of better worlds no doubt about it a dream
I awakened from to the casual attire of my poverty you see
I loved you still & moving among the razed topography
Where I anchored your body to the printed matter for the record
The glorious failures that were our years for future study
I am a witness to all the havoc that love has wreaked
Have seen the damage that hope engenders the genetics of it
The flora that multiplies unseen beneath the leaps of faith
That which we hold so dear the peripheries the passion
It is here that I dwell open to all catastrophes
Where I reign irrelevant astray unknowing
Where I remain
Depopulated
₪
XIII
Can love keep its balance in the tectonic shifts
The displacements of mood can I blame the moon the
Liquid whimsies of gravity? Trump fate’s blind date
And who will be my bride in the waning years is it too little
To late & where is the lover espied through smudged glass
A pencil in her fingers whose name I’ll never know I dwell
There I linger her torso turned three quarters to her left
The open book pressed down upon the table
I cut my losses must be the gypsy in my soul that
Fire in the hole in confined spaces the empty faces that I must fill in
A dawning too hot to hold as I walked past her in slumber
Her face through smudged glass looking for surrender
₪
X IV
Where do old lovers go who do they woo to what wrinkle
In the brain do words recede the detritus of old fruitions
And to what purpose do we encode the past what needs are served
Should we imprint them with new resonances & score the sheet
Should we delete or just let the waters do their chores
Their silent ministrations slake clean the slate and the appointed dates
Left unattended send flowers and entreat the gods for thrills
Or find new landfills outside of governmental purview you get the point
I need these absolutions this being stripped of you the updates
The new peripherals the latest software what makes us user friendly
The clause that holds us harmless should we burn the house down
Revamp this withered love and dangle it like a pen drive to my bleating heart
₪
XV
The uselessness of these endeavors hits me like a cold wind
I whirl around the blind man’s bluff of you sightless to the elements
These words are meaningless they could be any words
That clothe themselves at dusk with the promise of flight
It’s always cold where the words attempt to trace your face
The red herring to the pulp mystery of you the false leads
That eat away the day the terror to find that the precise words
Had failed to ensnare as I idly thumbed a snatch of your hair
I begin each day with the pressing need that I should maybe advance
The galley proofs for your perusal and correction a risky business
Explain what I wish to achieve its epic nature its tantalizing finale
Allay the fears this love needs venture capital profitable return
It is a dare that boomerangs in unpredictable angles knock your socks off
If you’re not careful I cannot afford exaggeration to worm its way in
I just might lose it all the slightest miscalculation could abort the mission
Just as the booster rocket arcs down and the word is put in orbit
₪
XVI
This love has phoned it in scanning headlines with frenzied distraction
Traced its finger through old phonebooks with anxious darting eyes
Hired cars in desperation sightseeing the landscape from a cozy distance
For clues of you among all the din & uproar the bullet-ridden road signs
That crisscross the endless dusty highways where I cruise control desire
Through the smoldering fires a mercenary for hire your
Smoked voice through the wire of old rock & roll songs Was I wrong?
To have loved a love dated by the newest technologies Goddamn
Was I dazed by your looking posed like a Goya nude Hey Jude
Take a sad song write a letter walk the city like a mideast beggar
Failed lyricist that I was ever to be sitting on the dock of the bay
Was I wrong to have loved you study the lay of the land my man
As I erred on the side of reason the total madness of you
There being a season for all things under heaven as I
Turned on a tailspin riding shotgun missed the target guns a blazing
Right off the White Cliffs of Dover love’s a rover
₪
XVII
Love is a many splendored thing is a thot I bring to more
Than lonely walks the fingered books as I jump within my skin
As I sneak a look at my panicked stare on bathroom mirrors
My pocket full of restaurant receipts that twitch in the eye love is
A many your flowered dress in jazz nites where I was
The spitting image of a barmaid’s brother these are my
Flatline epiphanies my outturned pockets the what you see
And the what you get the piano solo the trumpet blare
The very breath I take on solitary park benches crossing
& uncrossing my legs in the slow burning panic of wait
Of the wretched unchronicled of the earth of this I sing
The genuflected knees of unanswered prayers in empty church pews
The simmer of you rising in bubbly conjectures the deathbed words
The many splendored thing that hiccup of you caught in the throat
Where you touched my silent heart and taught it how to sing
As you danced by in your flowered dress & the world stood still
₪
XVIII
Tightrope the memory of you trapeze the heights the fall
The new atrocities & threadbare shames this paupered love
The window-dressed mannequin’d vapid stare isn’t it a pity
This city shaking its tail like a dog gnawing the bone its gutter grace
Love’s grime third world charm sublime come kiss me quick o darling
The slings and arrows cut to the chase
An old pop tune that now soundtracks the moon
In the lower rings of Hell O Jesus is it cold
That impolitic thought of you ricocheting off the rafters
Mind you the rafters as over the ramparts
We watched were so silently so silently
From breadline to breadline like a hurried shadow through the fog
₪
XIX
This love has too many commercial interruptions
Too many calendars with circled days forgotten it is
A house abandoned in catastrophic hurry & ever-widening perimeters
Where the angels fear & the lovers tread
It can’t stop talking to itself beyond the social discourse
You might have seen it in the long abandoned ruins
Like a beautiful theory in love with its irrefutable logic
This love that went out for cigarettes & never looked back
Log jammed river teeming with debris the leaps & bounds of it
Seething wet with democratic devastation
Aborting rescue operations with eyes of wonder
Pursuing something it’s not sure of elusively
Picking a peck of pickled tongue twisted passions
Like that Aegean bard that committed the whole damn yarn
To the pluck of the lyre at one sitting the memory of it
As we await enraptured on the battered shores the end
₪
XX
This is just a refurbishing moving the furniture around
On the page the careful distillation that voodoo that you do
As you turned your face over your shoulder the snapshot
Of your leaving warped by sunlight this doomed love My God
You were as beautiful as you’d ever get those were the vintage years
As tirelessly we trekked the night and blue penciled the grids
Of future possibilities as endless as the brown galaxies on your skin
Dizzied my eyes on August nights a rhyme a day to keep the boredom at bay
This was the new day dawning a dancing of taut flesh before
The sagging years & corrosive pitter-patter of betrayal the
Forced leaving in the advent of the wrecking ball sweeping low
It was all that we did not know would happen to us yet put it to the test
Would flop us down in thudding certainty on the recliner
To uncringe our fingers & stretch our toes, munch our snacks
& pick our nose in afternoon repose the arching of the sun from
East to west before my gaze on these unrefurbished longings
₪
XXI
Cornered by the streaming memory of your scar tissue
A barkless nightmare dog tear your heart out a fear like ice
Between the sheets as I discipline the mind to where I
Can almost see you scurrying like a salamander through the electric circuitry
Of misplaced snapshots of you kissing other lovers on Ibiza beaches
All that I did not live of you the laughter before my time the
Cackled voice of wartime short wave radios rip curls of longing
In that house of wood where you slurped me whole starry starry night
You bit into me like a ritual you had no time to explain sanding
The recesses of the flesh with the futures that I must dive now
To retrieve before the lungs burst unflask you with these words
As you arched against my tongue and washed ashore on my very breath
& I rode the word’s last wave & licked the sweat
Off your brow in a forgotten motel your maddened look as you
Mistook me for another as we shook beneath the trade winds
And I cried into your hair the whole mad night
₪
XXII
I have seen my love walking blurred under the noonday sun
A beast onto itself stripped of all tactility vaporous as mirth
Glinting the eye her upper lip brimmed in beads of sweat
In the kissless seasons I now inhabit lone gone the virgin summers
Of corner bars & jukebox nights and the tinkle of the quarters
In that time before the page when joy was as wordless as a slap
In the face my love was a flurry of curls and lipsticked cigarettes
And shameless guffaws in the dark and yet I see her still
As alone love walks the city like a stolen identity in a faint
Flush of hurry a blur in the landscape a vanishing point
Of argument as under the noonday sun she walks a character
In somebody else’s book with somebody else’s name not me
Nor you an entire other fiction walking other streets under other suns
As I stand in stillness witness to all that we are not nor ever will be
Just the casual reader whose pulse just slightly wavers at the sight
And just as soon turns the page and disappears
₪
XXIII
Can the last love poem ever be written as the magnetic field of it
Warps and contorts in the race to capture its nascent molecules
As it whizzes by too hot or too cold to hold in place its quantum memory
Of that late afternoon bed as it fizzes from syllable to syllable
As it ricochets and gathers speed in a bend at the farthest reaches
Of the universe where I held you like a solar flare as I sat on a chair
And vectored your presence with crisscrossed beams of light so
Hold on tight as we varoomed off the bed like a galactic happening
Light years away it seems like yesterday as I beat the word on
The anvil expecting miracles in a parallel world that I intuit
Right off the corner of my eye as I sat writing all this in
Another time where all the alphabets converge like spinning wheels
Through the night sky and I can finally redact the last word
In the last line of the last love poem before the last curtain falls
With its implacable thud and the lights begin to dim
And they sweep the floor & the crowd goes out for drinks
₪
XXIV
This love keeps on talking & outstays its welcome elicits
Yawns and spouts forth like an anarchic spigot refuses
To be worn lightly and goes on & on like a standup comic
It’s a punch line with nothing leading up to it a PowerPoint
Slideshow of constantly re-edited versions of itself the
Shifting captions the misleading dates & places with no
Outside source to verify it does not suffer rewrites gladly
Blue penciling its vectors as its spins out of control
But yet it is sweet on the tongue with a Hi I’m here
As it steers connecting the dots with theoretical abandon
And permeates the very tissue of experience shifting its molecules
As it crackles with sonic intention the sweet perfume of you
Still clinging to all available apparel a spring cleaning of the senses
Leaving you cold & dry in the inhospitable streets swiveling your head
In all directions as the passerby swerve away from your volition
Cutting through the Red Sea of you to the promised land
₪
XXV
This love once loved to sit & watch cartoons in the
Bingo-parlored afternoons in the wide expanses of
El Paso Texas in the year of ’55 don’t be cruel to a heart that’s true
All those years ago in a rockabilly summer of wilted kiddie pools
Among the high forgotten grasses This love once loved the
Whipped air of Sunday drives in nickel chromed sedans across
Deserts mined with Nike missiles all pointed elsewhere Be Bop a Lula
Cold war babies in the years before the music died but with a whimper
This love took its first spill on an old Schwinn that was nothing
But a hound dog round the campfire of slow cattle drives
& was classified as an un-American activity A card-carrying commie bastard
Sort of love Marshal Dillon put on the stagecoach first light of day
This love wore its coonskin cap down to its ears in the cool clear waters
Of the Eisenhower years walking with mother the streets of downtown
El Paso looking for guaguas where none were in the rounded adobe stillness
Of pastel twilights shopping for specials & discount bolero crooner LP’s This love
₪
A Clumsy Heart / Love Poems
© Jorge A. Morales-Santo Domingo 2011
jorge morales-santo domingo, poesía puertoriqueña, 1970-2000, Alicia la Roja, Puerto Nuevo, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Puerto Rican poet, generación del setenta.