The Lily and I Look Up To The Sky

I watch fissures in the pavement

every crack, a suitable microcosm:

life, death, and organic rubbish.  

My head down, I think of what my neck

is doing to my jaw. It’s hard to open now:

painful joint, one-sided tooth alignment

The perfect crack exists for me, somewhere

in this sidewalk: deep enough for shade,

shallow enough to convince the nutrient river

to flow over me:

                        sentience

                                    agency

destabilization.

I need to be washed over

fertilized.

I am no weed nor leaf nor seed,

but rather a fleck of soil willing

to serve. Given the condition:

I can split this sidewalk into a grand canyon

Turn a desert’s rain into new-Thymes

Let the seed to make a lily find me

Let us be carried to the canyon rims

where the runoff collects, and our family begins.

-Grant Durando

                                    

Dancing With The Queen

Deliberate dancing with a drunken prince

or many, the streets will call for a smile.

Sober, you may refrain; rain erased prints

of me, your handler: I’ll have to wait in file.

Grubby, location utility hands

race to your body like gamblers to cards.

I’ll wait, your patient, from five thousand lands,

unworthy bones move within too few yards.

I’ve lost my favorite impulse controls,

I am enough; now I’m simply not there

to cause and collect your joy. My mind rolls

over another, staring at your dorsal hair.

So fair are my love’s eyes in mine,

I’ll have to wait, for me how they’ll shine!

-Grant Durando

Desperate Donation

I can’t believe you, that I’m enough.

That adjective doesn’t even feel good.

I wouldn’t expect you to want that for me,

you won’t even send me your picture.

I know you’re too busy, I know you’re scared.

I won’t get too excited for a letter from London,

don’t worry. I rage at touching you on paper.

Opening the envelope I will feel your toungue

racing across the seam as to hurriedly heal.

It’s not bizarre to bring it in multiple mailbags,

more than one to keep me guessing.

I won’t be insecure in lust for you,

but I can’t resist if you force me.

I do love your soul, stop slapping your chest

to fend off animal invaders to your temple.

I’ll pay, I’ll pay, to kneel at your alter,

donate my debts and my life’s solitude

solace and splendor.

Donate. Donate to me. 

-Grant Durando

Spark Treaty

There’s no way

            he can enjamb his fingers in your back

like I do.

You are all

            my conflicts resolved in the spark treaty

of ember.

Give him luck

            in having freedom of his will because

you’ll want more.

Promise me

            I’ll get penultimate privelege to push                       

against walls.

One more chance

            to make your spark collapse into a vein.

Remember?

-Grant Durando

That's Not What Lovers Do

Suspicious eye contact on the tube

becomes a toast in a Waterloo pub;

a close walk through our streets

to your too-big for one twin bed.

Hollywood eye contact in the sun,

becomes a hostel hug and champagne:

a drunken misstep in the name of pain,

that’s not what lovers do.

He’ll name you things and pet you like

a piece of ornamentation, something

I could never pin you on the wall as.

So be it, be someone else’s pin-up.

I’ll be waiting for your fingers to slenderly

slip themselves into my ring: make you something

that’s mine. Poor fingers, never grasped

another’s back. You dig mine best, anyways.

While you’re away, tell me everything you do.

I know my eyes ought to be shut

but they’re glued against binoculars:

watching you.

What they see you do

they’ll know I agreed to.

That won’t keep them away

from my blue grey stormy eyes;

the torrents of vicious self-pitying floods

I’ll unleash if he gets to put you on his wall.

Just wait for me

instead

I’ll put you to bed.

-Grant Durando

Coy George

Years ago now, a teacher

became my teacher.

Took my fatherless friend and I

to the woods where an old train station

brazenly bore its scars and disuses:

remnants of a past too soon unused.

“The trenched, stone canals poured,” he’d said.

I saw them keep giving gravel to the river.

“The river is in the woods,” he wrote.

Stepping onto the stage of the globe in his mind,

high school students awkwardly stared while

I admired; he recited Hamlet from memory;

swung his arms like he used to in the boxing ring.

“The river is in the woods.”

“I can’t live like this.” My solipsism,

defined as suicidal social isolation.

“How do you manage?” I threw a lifeboat to myself.

“Everyone has to find a way,

we’re all here, aren’t we?”

“The river is in the woods.”

His boxing rings and stage presence

bled from Boston to my bones.

He slept alone, next to his dying

long-term girlfriend. He would barely meet mine.

His greatest story was self-imposed solitary.

“The river is in the woods.”

He gave without conscience

a willingness to write for a pittance.

Like the stoic canal, I will pour, pour, pour;

until my people turn me into stone

and void me of seafarers on their way to the river.

“The river is in the woods.”

Gates as Options, Failures in a Field

I laid my sword down,

explained that my war had ended.

I would be king of my castle square;

if only she’d be queen.

The square isn’t too closed,

there’s plenty of space to roam, explore.

But your hand will always be in mine

your word forever etched on every wall.

Easy for a king to claim monogamy to his kingdom:

for whence have kings built empires

around no bloody, capital centerpiece?

The vigorous heart; autonomic and too strong.  

The gates are closing on my square, darling.

If the fields were navigable I would send a courier

but they are vast and sparse.

Perhaps you’ve been ravaged already.

Not by pigs nor bears, no; by the notion

of option which holds no walls, nor queenship.

I can’t hold my gates open much longer;

for every minute spent holding them up

is one less spent on my love.

I can’t let my square suffer, solely

because you’ve lost your way.

If you’re looking for a throne

that seats you more comfortably:

I fear you will search fruitlessly and I,

die heirless.

I pray to thee: see God in my eyes.

Find peace in certainty,

or honesty in uncertainty.

Take your words off of my kingdom’s wall

or fill them with hymns to our reign.

I can’t hold these gates forever,

for my arms grow tired and cry

for relief of stress and tension.

They hold today to break tomorrow

the next I die lonely, or praise the lovely.

Oh please, let it be praise.

I can’t hold these gates forever.

No Rush

A weekend may be enough

for us to break off battered wings

sear them in a plutonic fire

freeze and reattach with utility staples.

Sew them extra maintenance, support.

There is no rush, no rusting wings on air,

like no rush for vodka over ice.

Just keep the bottle in the freezer.

Freedom arrives in a short time,

it will wait for us in a snowstorm.

I wait for springtime breezes

to blow snowballs below the fire.

At least we’ll see over them, then.

Tip the plowman. Drop your luggage

in the muddy puddles I keep

as pets by my front door.

Pour me frozen and take us to the sky.

Don’t pluck daisies until their stems are dry.

-Grant Durando

Stop It Surrealism

Wine pills dizzy

falling down

love long lost

idealized

fuzzy Monet

black.

Diamond long fractured

distributed among purer hands

purer than mine

my burning burns me

alone

I accelerate sparks

catalyze them into bonfires. 

If You Move In With Me

If You Move In With Me

Can I still keep my pseudo-Persian rug?

Can I still turn words into non-rational dreams,

conveying my cobwebs of self-derived narratives

gelatinized by globs of imagination?

Can I have friends to drink wine and have

dinner in our space;

would our super massive heads incapacitate

these minute details of other humans?

Can I ride my bike in wet weather?

I’d love to have you dry me in the radiance of your will.

In your honesty, I will be your towel, too.

Can we slow dance in too-small living rooms

for 15 minutes; Miles Davis; Kind of Blue?

I’m not looking forward to sleeping alone,

its all in the process of becoming in love.

Only, I’ve fallen in love alone

and I’m not looking forward to sleeping at all.

-Grant Durando

Reflections of the Falsely Presumed

Brushed metal and auburn wood outline

contented countenances and blushed cheeks; facing

foundations of finite tantrums of disbursement.

Medium-height carpet.

Phones buzzed and giraffes arched to peek;

the borders fell off the bedroom wall

favoring the shallow underpinnings of sleep.

Interlocution unfurled a bland flower on the side:

décor for a slipper. Memories of walking on walls,

idolized as to not be forgotten: the grayness.

Tulck...tulck…“Have you killed someone?”

There must be a telltale heart to be silenced

With each thrust the glass reflects a crack.

The splintered window was a priori opaque;

the characters thrived on a foggy ocean pier.

Invisible lies threw dagger-drops unclear.

Three nightmares that detriment sleep

from the ground up; recollection of mist

feathering a face. Drizzle-dry as a dream. 

The Labor of Letter-Writing

I wrote letters, or so I thought.

My mailbox wept for more than ads,

telling the world what it’s lacking;

divided between getting and spending.

No outgoing box for my letters tonight.

I can walk across lines of non-traffic,

as canoes navigate bubbles and overhead bridges.

Nothing overhead but the weight of rain.

Fatigued by curbs and signal lights

my dried eyes glaze over the box

now: a fact that no letters are coming.

My mailbox weeps for my lack of labor.