"I am an idealistic, naive, passionate, truth-seeking, spiritually motivated artist, unschooled in the science of law and finance." --Wesley Snipes

Tuesday, February 03, 2004

Poem

An old poem. I almost got booed out of a workshop for this one.
I'm still not sure why


BREAKFAST NOTES

Talk over breakfast, the Women
of Color Conference and tall water,
ice, paper napkins—my father
is French, so I shall have the omelette.
My color is peach! she beamed, (yes God)
and out the window, we began an apprenticeship
to the stars, not yet sequined on the sky.

Sexual decisions are seldom sexual,
but economic because a seminar costs X
dollars, and this is why we go: toast
and potatoes with cheese, coffee, jam—
costs four-twenty and I leave a tip
of raucous silvery change. How long
can I continue in these funny papers,
late as I am to each day’s happy unfolding?

So hard to be wholesome while wearing
blue shoes stitched with dragonflies—
a waiter buzzes by, the coffee needs
arranging. Peppering her eggs, the blue
falls. A boy. Which becomes. And the gym
coach punched me “for my health”—then settled
back as snow to earth, a nest for those we haven’t held.

On the bedroom floor, a box of books,
a pile of papers, flow charts: the tumbling
which. Mariachi music drifts in, the closet
full of undershirts. Can you tell me
the Korean word for fish? O, is this Texas?
Has your hair always been red? Muy bien,
how gold! Do you fly each morning past
my house, hoping I will rise to the window and hear?

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