Suenos/Dreams-Javier Lopez Ortiz

www.artistasdelatierra.com/artistas/javierlo

Check out this awesome artist from Morelia Mexico.  Javier Lopez-Ortiz helped students in April in Yakima and is working on other exhibits in Mexico at the moment.  Do your words inspire images?  Do images inspire your words?

In the West we are pushing about 100 degrees in Yakima and looking forward to shooting off fireworks that we were given by the Chinese and Marco Polo.  What sizzles in your poem?  What pops?  Make the reader cover their ears when they read your words.

FADE

Knees scissor and piston

pivot and twist up the long draw of a forgotten logging road

bursting, finally, through,

shearing the whithered limbs of long dead

pine and oak at their base

ignoring the tears of flesh and cloth

to arrive at

a hollow of meadow overlooking the valley below

Here, I offer the terms of surrender:

unconditional-

sink under the weight I've long carried,

wedging my back against the coarse slant

of an ancient ponderosa.

Over time,

September mud soaks through,

blood trickles down the knee,

the soil now a dark maroon.

Breathing slips to a whisper,

the wind pushing waves of grass to me,

the green trees fading to a dull olive

into the long killing silence

of a slow motion Indian suicide

prevented only at last by the

flash of an orange hunter,

my body shaken by the shoulder.

His voice muted against the grass,

"Can you hear me?"

- Brett Dillahunt

SUTURE

Clustured together as we are

outside a door that separates

the living from the dead.

I feel the gentle nudge at my shoulder,

a whisper pushes me forward.

On the other side

no one is breathing.

Latch clicks behind me like a gunshot,

Acrid formaldehyde and

fluourescent hums

assault the senses.

I can't feel my feet.

A blur carries me towards the

waxen shape in the corner,

the eyes, first finding familiar features

eyes. nose. neck.

then drawn inevitably downward

to the careless, jagged lines in the chest

sewn in the shape of a Y.

- Brett Dillahunt

Write your poem!

"Heavy is the root of light.

Calm is the ruler of haste."

Lao Tzu

When it gets to be this hot, it is difficult to do anything but slow down.  What does heat smell like?  When you're this hot, you have to shed all the extras.  Follow Lao Tzu's advice.  Slow down.  Write the poem.  Shed the excess words like sweat on the glass of your lemonade.  Hide your poem in someone's ice cream.  Use your poem as a punk for someone's firecracker.  Whatever it takes just write the poem.