June 2013 Words + Art Reading + Poems

His body rolls + shivers,
plates twitch as the water rolls,
breaking into one thousand notes
of shimmering cold heat,
electric color zapping the skin,
light eels zipping through viscous space.
Luscious, luscious aqua,
Luscious, luscious turquoise,
the trickster orange vermillion
winks when we are not looking.
Boats are lost –
searching for those shimmering colors,
breaking upon the rocks of the swordfish song,
sailors’ eyes melting upon sighting colors not of this world.
Sounds + colors swap –
Down is not up,
up is not down,
down is not down,
up is not up.
We fall up
+ climb down.
We are tossed until
softened like tumbled seaglass.
The pale aqua blue was always the priceless shard.
We think we have entered a forest of light,
a world of water
when, in fact, we have been swallowed whole.
Our darting silver not fast enough
+ now we are as one with the swordfish,
his inner walls reflecting his outer song.
A flash of the sun dazes us
+ we know the universe that lies within.

Rock n’ roll is dead –
they say.
But I say it’s alive + well.
She rocks + rolls in glitter
eyeshadow,
reveling in the curves
that are now disdained.
We hesitate to look
at ourselves
in the shards –
fearing the distortion –
we are already too fat.
We already strain
to be pretty girls.
What we are isn’t good enough.
But, why do we glory in these
spectacular rounded forms –
these organic shapes
in a beautiful glass room
+ they shame us in ourselves
+ are shunned?
Something is broken
when art is more beautiful
than human form,
when little girls cry
because they cannot see their beauty.
When a famous actor who
played Tootsie
cries in an interview –
because dressing as a woman
+ told by makeup that they’ve done
as well as they can
when he asks to be made beautiful –
he realizes all the fabulous, interesting
women he has lost the opportunity
to know
because of some warped idea
of beauty
we all hallucinate is real.
Something is broken
when art is more beautiful
than human form,
when little girls cry
because they cannot see their beauty,
+ boys turned to men
cry because of what they have
lost.