The Subterraneans

Welcome to the entrails of the city.

To arrive here entails a descent.

With a sole swipe

we’ve the privilege

of immersing ourselves

in the collective unconscious.

Down here,

we are Orpheus.

We are Persephone.

We are Jonah

swallowed whole.

Characters in search

of an author.

The subway

a shadowy stairway

to subconsciousness itself.

Here, below the surface

things take on primordial meanings.

This is where Ionesco

gathered his twelve chairs,

where Tennessee wrestled the Iguana,

and Shakespeare stirred his tempest.

Where those tiny circus lizards

mature into alligators

years after being mistaken for dead.

Where witches concoct their incantations

to get even with, well, other witches.

Here are where breakdowns

and breakthroughs

begin.

Yet what of the rest of us?

We, who simply want to

get where we are going?

Who sit in postures of surrender

content to appear normal,

to look unthreatened

and unthreatening.

To the trembling Shih Tzu

curled in the refuge

of a woman’s handbag,

I too, am being carried.

As I hold my breath

not to inhale

the curried lamb kabob

being devoured across from me,

I come to the conclusion

to be human

is to be ravenous.

Not wanting to draw

attention, I sit quietly

ruminating on how fate

has brought us all together.

Across the aisle

a man in a torn tee shirt

sizes me up

like a leg of lamb

in a Turkish marketplace.

I look away aware

of the dangers

of meeting

a stranger's eyes.

Why I’m so determined

to keep the doors

of my soul shut tight,

I’m sure I don’t know.

As if I feared

some feral creature

might breach the walls

of my inner sanctum.

My gaze settles on

a tall Swedish couple

assailing the car

with their wholesomeness;

film stars touring the Inferno.

At the back of the train

a trio of noisy teens

are daring us all to judge them,

their eyes ricocheting

from face to face

like flames to a moth.

I catch the word “baguette”

followed by raucous laughter

and wish I could turn up

a bossa nova

to drown out the ignorance

of the world.

We are here

to be ferried.

Our baggage,

all in our heads.

Then again,

who died and made me

solo protagonist of

the subway system?

It’s a reasonable question.

But I’m not here

to simply utilize

mass transit,

I’ve come in search

of beauty.

The first thing I notice:

nearly everyone in the car

is staring at their phones,

heads bowed as if

in Godless prayer.

Why come here

only to ignore

each other?

Who’s to say

our trains of thought

aren’t being

slowly wiped clean

by the gynecological-grade

overhead lighting

simultaneously

turning every window

into a looking glass

reflecting what we all know already.

What I’d give for a pair

of rose-colored glasses,

content to hurl

through the city’s bloodstream

via a parade of curated memories

of rosier times.

But who the hell

wants to live

in a pink world?

And yet why do I view

the car as chock-full

of a jury of my peers,

I sitting alone

in the witness box,

moving to strike

the trial altogether

on the grounds it might

incriminate me?

Better to see us all

crowded on the head of a pin

in some teeming eternity astride

the only moment that is.

"There but for the grace of God go I"

Someone’s sure to utter

but the words are little

more than a stale chestnut

in the mouth.

And then the most META

of things occurs.

I am thrown

from my body

and reshuffled back

into the deck of life.

I come to

splayed across several seats

like an upside-down turtle

with swollen feet;

is this my home…

on my back?

It’s the damnedest thing:

But it seems whatever I

BEHOLD, I BECOME.

The rail-thin red head

digging through her handbag

for nail polish,

is me.

The weary Asian tourist

slipping off his shoe

to relieve a stinging bunion,

is me.

I am the bedazzled drag queen

rocking a neon paisley skirt!

The antsy salesclerk eyeing his watch

as if timing a heist.

The fidgety ragamuffin

kicking his sister's seat

taunting:

"What you say is what you are!"

I’m the man in the wife-beater

devouring a sandwich freed from a Ziplock.

The actor going over his lines

happy to be making better use of the NOW.

The shifty pickpocket hoping to blend in.

The nurse dropping her cell

on the unforgiving floor of the C.

The lonely waif

drawing a heart on the window

in the fog of her breath.

The morose teen spotting

the girl of his dreams

as she exits forever on the L.

Hell, I’m the 7Up can

rolling from

starboard to stern

only to end up

at the feet

of the Buddhist monk

handing out cryptic sayings

on calligraphed business cards!

My nail polish.

My stinging bunion.

My neon skirt.

My watch.

MY cell.

My breath.

The girl of my dreams.

My business cards.

Consciousness widens ever outward

like a mandala absorbing all of existence.

We are LIFE ITSELF in all it’s

homo-sapien variation!

And at last…

we are one.

And so the trains roll on

taking no notice.

Approaching the platforms

like huffing bulls

only to pull away…agile serpents

winding through their darkened lairs.

Here in this labyrinthian underworld

we can choose which train we board

or dare to be carried away on

a rip current

born from the vigor

of a thousand psyches.

 

My Art is a Phoenix

And so it is that in the history of art,

the great work arises 

from the ashes

of loss, tragedy, and sorrow.

Art begins as an ache.

When was good art

ever made from happiness?

Who works when they’re happy?

So, this is our dilemma:

How to make art

and still know happiness?

To sit and contemplate

a leaf, a rock, a cloud,

it is possible to commune

with what is

without an intermediary.

Like pure cinema’s

return to its 

elemental origins,

such simplicity feels

nothing less

than avant-garde.

But this world is the history

of creativity.

Whether an artist or not,

all men and women

are entrusted with the task

of crafting their own life,

to make of it

 a work of art.

An artist is possessed

and completely diseased by

creativity and ideas.

For that, we are willing

to sacrifice everything.

There will be pain.

There must be.

Consider the grapes that need

crushing before producing wine.

The leaves that must endure frost

before generating their brightest colors.

How then, to live with pain

so it strengthens and informs

rather than

weakening and discouraging us.

Hurt brings awareness,

making us more present

to the beatitude

of the present moment.

Beauty is not

an object apart from us,

but a way of perceiving.

Is anything beautiful

if no one’s there to perceive it?

Is the sky at dawn spectacular

if we are fast asleep in our beds?

The world demands our attention

and beauty is spiritualizing.

That is how we take part in it.

It is connective.

Beauty is a calling

and can be 

a vocation;

Otherwise,

one risks becoming

a human Dickensian factory

run by a tyrant.

But the good news is:

nature is with us.

A bruise dissipates slowly,

like a spider un-building a web.

A cut closes up in a matter of days

without the slightest planning ahead.

Snip off the head of a flower, and

a new one explodes in its place.

A salamander grows back its tail,

unlike a nose despite one’s own face.

Rain evaporates back into clouds,

as an arrow’s origins are a quiver.

A liver can slowly regenerate itself

the way a finger pushes out a sliver.

Cells die every second or so

only to be promptly replaced.

A tree repeats its branches though

its roots down below go untraced.

Take note of the healing that happens

without effort, meddling, or intent.

The only vacuum that nature abhors

is the lack of faith in what to expect.

Therefore, my art is a phoenix.

Apatite

~For Ward

Some stones clear your head

so you can feel their colors.

It takes attention to detail.

The way I look for poetry in The Times

and always find it, though

there are no poems in its pages.

A word here, a title there.

The Times is chock full of sparks

when the mind’s as

dry as parched kindling.

With my garden I uphold

the pursuit of beauty

even as the flowers

make me feel a Frankenstein.

My over-grown hands

and scarred face

fumbling amongst the petals;

things so effortlessly perfect

just as they are,

while I’m stitched together

limb by limb,

my transplanted heart

squeezed inside 

its treasure chest-like terrarium,

along with precious scraps

from learned books

stuffed and corked

for safe keeping.

How I long to put my feet

back into earth.

I am in awe of colors

for their own sake,

they create a climate

cogent as inner weather.

That's how I know

the wind

is the will power

of the world,

that life is alive without us

and to participate

its best to put down

our belongings

and just join in.

I recently received an apatite

stone as a present.

A beacon for drawing down the stars.

Almost immediately something was different,

as if its properties were loosening me.

What was once packed,

constipated, congested, stuffed,

filled to the brim…

now flows.

I used to run around like a chicken

with its head cut off

to live more from the heart.

Now I sit still.

This mineral has me thinking

of all I’ve done to myself

to try and stay alive.

You’d think

failure were an art,

and every step I took

a kind of canny forgery.

Like forgetting to water the flowers

or refusing to eat what’s before me.

The way I ran away from the moment,

one would have thought it

full of hurt.

Wanting to look like someone else.

Wanting to touch someone else’s body.

Not staying silent when

I'd nothing to say.

How I survived being trapped

by gnawing off a vital extremity.

My discomfort with being naked.

My disgust for other’s selfishness,

(having been selfish most my life).

My impatience with those who are ill.

My refusal to remember my mother.

The abandonment of my own protagonism.

The way the past makes me cry.

The way loss humbles me to the core.

The way I crawl into films

to deposit my feelings for safe keeping

knowing one day I will return for them

hoping to feel them again

in the safety of

a rainy afternoon.

By Peter Valentyne

---

 

A Well-Being of One’s Own

I confess I judge people

by how much they’ve

overcome themselves.

It says almost all

one needs to know.

I don’t mean to judge.

I’ve just opted out

of the jury pool, though

my practice remains.

I’ve asked myself

why would anyone

carry their bags into

every room they enter?

Besides, they take up

too much damn room!

Life doesn’t require luggage,

but an unpacking of the heart,

because despite our experience:

beautiful, traumatic, fun, scary,

hurtful, healing, embarrassing,

they’ve no staying power

unless we place them

in a strangle hold.

Me, I float through the forest

light as a leaf on the wind,

my well-being in proportion

to that which I’m aware of.

Hurt waves its white flag

so to escape any whiff

of personal patriotism.

A poem is

antithetical to politics.

Poets are rarely tribal,

but lame goats

meant to lead.

We are not dualistic.

We are not nihilistic.

We are the power

of the flower. We are

clouds, sky, and stars.

We are our remedy;

our pain is our medicine.

God married the Devil

so we could dance

at his wedding.

Eat, drink, and be weary,

for tomorrow we die

so that we might

truly begin to live.

Life takes our teeth,

our hair, our smiles,

our memories, and

scatters our photographs

like so much mulch.

With our precious

things gone,

what do we do

for an antidote?

How do we become

what we already are?

God saves those

who save themselves.

God loves those

who love themselves.

God hates those

who hate themselves

and projects that hatred

onto others.

Our illnesses are purposeful.

They’re never willy nilly.

It’s what our body does

when it can’t live up to

what we think we want

but should know better.

06/14/24

The Sex Life

of Flowers

That Bloom

After Dark

Mine is a hybrid theory.

It fuses the pulse

of the human heart

with the rhythm of nature

and the universe.

My hypothesis is simple:

Every dream

is a flower

that blooms

at night while

the gardener

sleeps.

The dreamer

hovers like a bee

over the flower bed,

his being freed

from physical constraint,

only to find that

in the wee hours

the flowers find

the darkness arousing.

Between bee and being

a speechless intercourse

as unique and expressive

as a sign language

becomes palpable.

Is it any wonder

that after midnight

every garden

turns into a veritable

den of iniquity.

Take the tulips

offering up their roofied goblets

to be syphoned like honey

from unfamiliar lips.

Or the daffodil’s baring

their privates

utterly promiscuous.

Or the hibiscus growing

so horny it’s ridiculous.

The lavender, positively libidinous.

It’s a botany for the hot to trot!

In a bed of roses,

breathing in their scent alone

is considered getting to second base.

For every piston and stamen,

bosomy blossoms entice us

like B movie starlets

in a 60’s Hammer Horror film.

After midnight this very path

is an unseemly flirtation walk.

One need only close one’s eyes

to see their true colors.

Not only have they

designs on each other,

they have them on us.

Their sole rule of thumb:

every night a de-flowering.

You can feel them

flirting even now

can’t you?

Using their wiles

in the darkness

beneath your lids.

Flowers and dreamers

drowning in the dark

together

in dire need of

nothing less than

artificial insemination;

an exchange of pollen

via the stamen

to the carpel,

until a delicate

fertilization

occurs

before wilting, spent,

entwined stems

collapsing side by side

to form

a vulva-shaped

mandorla.

Dreams

make us all

female,

receptive,

so that we live

half our lives

in a state

of abject

fecundity.

Realizing this,

I ask you:

What better vehicle

than the irrational

when the literal

threatens to

reason us all away?

This is the testament

of the flowers:

Nature as the supreme harlot,

with beauty her snare.

At night,

our psyches

push through

dirt to make

their messages known.

Through

the coitus

between

darkness and light,

fear and desire

escape their

thin skinned

terrariums

only to buzz

about

in search

of sacred

pollen

like

church busybodies

syphoning

gossip about

the local gardener’s

love life.

Their hearsay

knows no

shame

nor are we

disbelieving,

as our minds

know only

how to

bloom, being

less adept

at other

courtships.

That said, the flowers

are emphatic,

fanning out

from their centers,

peacock-like colors

of purple, taupe, and jade

flanked by

the curdling cries

of flora

in heat.

And you thought you knew flora.

Yah, Flora and her hanging gardens.

Twice nightly.

Such dreams

arrive un-beckoned;

a reckoning

from the

other side,

sprouting

mandala-like

patterns,

both holy

and wholly

on their

terms,

bearing the gift

of nocturnal release;

the very mud

their roots

are mired in,

a compress

for drawing

out toxins.

This garden is

a bacchanalia;

a peep show

under every petal.

Creation itself enacting

one glorious sexual act

after another.

A sacred stems-a-kimbo.

Despite

our sleep

we remain

subject to beauty,

in order

to meet

divinities

face to face

within the

sheltered

perimeter of this

very Eden’s

undeniable eroticism.

Like the flowers,

dreams want nothing more

than to pluck us

from ourselves

and offer us up

in a gesture of love

for the nearest Beloved.

Though inside

the dream

we are all

our own

light source.

Night is still

a soil

and

God

the gardener

of her carnal

Queendom.

Now you see.

Sleep is Elysian.

Who, then among us

can say

which humus

is more real?

The one we

grow out of

by day,

or the one

that decomposes

by night,

floating our

fears,

hopes,

desires,

lusts,

and

loves

upward

like a lotus

rising

from the mud.