By Joseph Barrientos
Two on two
the lapping of the waves
I can hear them calling
like her fingers on my skin;
both call to salt and sky
reflections of two lives
Fae tunes
danced upon the divide
of world’s chanced and chosen
with the water’s swift
abandon
(It’s poetry, so nothing’s right out in the open, but I’m just going to go ahead and say TRIGGER WARNING in all caps before we delve into this one)
crickets quieting footsteps
no one thinks to question the shadows
closed doors leave behind
until the lights paint
red white and blue
across the glass:
through the cracks
the social worker
notices the spider
completing its wrap
where the buds
silently fell.
Schizophrenia
untreated stares
coalesce in cattails
men raked over Spanish moss
hoping for salvation
finding only thistles in the flesh
occasionally mistaken for
identity
Image by Christopher Campbell.
winnowing treasures from the sea
her hands are coarse sand and
swirling shells crying
for the wind
as she turns the sun another degree:
“Look,” she says, “Look,”
without protest from the recess
of notes worn in threadbare hair
–remnants of hippie days, one supposes—
things my fingers can twist
merely into deeper shadow
like bare feet under summer maples.
–
Gradually, the tide takes us
our footprints carried into the waves
that we might walk on water
drowning only flesh
in the reflections
Happy National Poetry Day everyone!
Photography Luca Zanon
Mirage
When answers shift like grains of sand
twists to tongue like traders in a foreign land
Truth becomes a camel
sucking sustenance deep into enamel
sifting for parsing hopes
built on childish slopes;
it will last
until the next repast
humanity colored with invisible ink—mirage
success would never dare presage.
(A blast from the past. Now with full audio.)
Roiling at the seams
in browned spots
the print, smeared
still holds flecks of the image
the profile was meant to be.
Lower, still
the ageless quality of a tree
rising from the hunched cranial
(let us admit: too large) cavity
rooted in the faded flesh
our fingerprints
so gently blurred;
without a stream to drink from
it curled and devoured
the paper that gave it breath.
Perhaps, even, its branches
would die to give us this moment.
I have heard it called quaint,
our gentle hording
of a memory,
but the thoughts that resurrected
the flesh beyond those roots
was once quite dear
though without the stream
it rippled free into distortion
like the beating of a dream
of a drum, of a thought;
the water carried me away
one day
rootless under the surface
with nothing but the edges
of a curling notion.
The magnitude of an apology
is an elusive jelly-fish, floating
memories in an expanse
of ever-moving sea-water
crystalline nothing harbored
–in an expansion of space
—-too great to have meaning
——without catching the tide
honesty writhes in and out
but until one tastes its sting
the pieces of possibility
scatter on our shores.
under a fleeing moon
whispers of a friend’s shadow
drifting across the clouded lake
even the birds lost
for the words
for the colors
in a storm
–
Flesh
–
the only barrier
to crossing
that divide
I want you to stop and consider something for a moment. Our generation is in a truly unique position in the history of the world. We are the first to have not only grown up with the Internet, but grown up on the Internet. This is the critical difference between us and everyone gone before us.
Call us the Millennials. Call us the next Lost Generation. But there is something more to us.
Ok, screw that headline.
After all, it is they that come up with the terms: we surf the Net. We cruise the Web. We are lost in Virtual Space, careening through the system of Tubes that constitute what is, to them, nothing more than an overly addictive game.
But it is not a game. One plays a game. We don’t “play” the Internet. It is as critical and ever-present in our modern environment as the grass beneath our toes or the atmosphere that holds us to it. It is not external—it is connected. It is not alternate reality, but another layer of reality itself.
Which is to say, the Internet is not something we use. It’s something we live—on it, inside it, alongside it, frolicking with it down memory lane, what have you—but it is an inescapable facet of our existence. We use the Internet to keep in touch with those both near and far, to organize, to research, to prepare. We plan with it, chart calendars on it, study, and dream through the wondrous expanse of its pages. Friends and enemies rise and fall online. Love and hate flourishes and dies in its expanse. Some of the greatest debates (and the tackiest) in the history of mankind are no doubt, out there, in the expanse of the Internet…Online, eternal, waiting.
For us, the Internet has never been something we needed to “learn.” It is an evolution—another entity, sitting alongside us in the classroom, aging and lengthening before our eyes. It is continuous. In it, we grow, and through us, it grows. It is. It simply is.
What more need I say? The Net is a part of us. It’s not tacky sci-fi, not some Utopian paradise—it is, at its simplest, the collection of thoughts, ambitions, emotions, which embody Us. It is us. Let the history of mankind be writ large upon it.
And let the folks on it learn to start treating one another as equals. But hey, that’s just commonsense in facet of life, isn’t it?
…isn’t it?
Everyone gathers to hear the poets preen
on the source of inspiration:
how the athletes ran into
glass cases;
how the singer overcame
dead man’s notes;
how the clown croaked
on a moped’s swerving laughter;
how the skin of truth
peeled from our bones
as the noise of the streets
drowned our jail cell march.
Huddled over coffee and secrets
we agree only those without
stand alone.
That their haikus
lack the character
of conviction.
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The Waking Den 