Thursday, October 2, 2008

And the answer is?

and she said
arent i pretty?
aren't i pretty?
and she meant
do you need me?
do you need me?
and there are words
and there are meanings
and rarely are they exactly the same
but rather like the difference
between stained glass
and the shadow it casts
one so firm and coloured
with its careful metal letters
spelling out the sounds
and the other stretching across the floor
wavering
in the multilayered light
with the grit from the day before
pushing through its surface
and casting its own shadows
wherever it finds time to fall
and sometimes finding that other side
gets messy
breaking through those wrought edges
into the watery wealth behind
its dangerous to push those forms
to risk stepping out of that frame
into the water world of real
where truth sweeps your feet away
and washes your soul clean
in a great rushing flood through your throat
that explodes like light
through all those clogged up words
all those times you said 'fine and you?'
when you were reaching for a rescue
and suddenly you're sparkling

"Am I pretty?
Am I pretty?"

"Yes. I need you with me."

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

you were so right--i loved this one!
brava. brava.

yes, you are a beauty
i need you with me.

1telos said...

what a pretty poem...
might want to sea if the Seahorse pops has anything to say about your images of glass and light through the glass, noumenal truth and direct experience and all that...

Chiastych said...

Yeah. Good exploration of meaning as intention. Why do we so frequently cloak our desires and motivations in plausibly deniable guises? Could it be that we want to protect ourselves and our audience from the omni-present threat of overt power-struggle or condemnation or the fear of love unreturned? But these courtesies become blind habits which turn into their opposite and that's where your central metaphor works and your message takes focus: "the grit from the day before
pushing through its surface
and casting its own shadows
wherever it finds time to fall"

Keep it up, HM.

Candle in the Dark said...

i love this one. so much. it so perfectly describes us as girls. and i feel every word as if it comes from my own heart. thanks for sharing..

(this is ur carbon copy speaking ;) )

May-Belle said...

i think that we have forgotten how to use words. we've become wrapped in a world of computer codes and texting and we can no longer find the words that can even come close to the complexity of emotions that humans go through. even if we could our listeners aren't sure to understand or even grasp what is important...so we stick to how-do-you-dos and other oblique forms of communications...like poetry.