Banter
Posted by Melissa Pavri | Filed under Poetry, Print
Today I am centrifugal banter, and
A Herbie Hancock time signature.
Damp hair pinned at unlikely coordinates,
In a sparkling constellation of midnight strands.
Tired irises slightly illuminated with day-old excitement.
Just enough for superficial small talk and an affected laugh.
I am everything malleable leaning into an implausible cosmos,
That only exists for foam fantasy and jazz idioms,
Because today, my soul is for the taking.
All diffusive eighth notes and unknown wonder,
The unbearable flux of self-reflection, and
Unfulfilled destiny crashing into my chest.
The next five minutes are of stardust coughs, consensual breaths, and
Whatever Lola wants squeezed into a soy latté.
I am a complacent treble clef,
Enjoying the convenient refuge of acoustic habit,
Until a bizarre conversation redraws me,
A misplaced bass outline, and
Everything I dream of being.
Idiosyncrasies suspended from every angle of my timber frame,
Vintage portraits of the person I once was,
Paintbrush fingers and a Technicolor spirit,
Unfastened like seatbelts and childbearing hips.
A Harlem rhapsody with unbridled hair and naked eyelids.
I let my sun-baked trumpet lips tumble,
Into the broad breasted chasm of loose harmony,
Because today is Thursday, and
Freedom is a vanilla sugar high,
Coagulating superlatives and improvised kisses in a ceramic wishing well.
After a few languid sips my lungs drift into a tenor piano vamp, and
An all too comfortable Miles Davis mode.
This is where I try and shape shift into something valuable,
Something like ten ebony fingers and eight octaves of ivory,
An eclectic construct of incarcerated souls dying for salvation,
At the bottom of a New York City wishing well.
But today I am nothing more than the thin film of cream,
That glazes my cup of medium blend,
A promise of greatness until I diminish into the shadow of a best friend.
I am Coltrane’s fractured finger and buckled left knee,
Cowering and stinking with anonymity.
This is where countless afternoon hours converge in dusky ostinato,
To replay eulogies of synthetic affection and foolish daydream,
In a wretched opus composed solely for me.
I know this Maiden Voyage like my grandmother’s half-cracked smile,
It’s solitary and jagged.
I can taste it beneath my tongue,
Leaking into my veins with the freight of every truth,
I keep buried in my treasure chest heart.
There must be a corked bottle in my throat, and
Tidal dynamics in my gut, cause
When I spit it sounds like staccato frenzy encased in a whole note,
Pulsing to the anxious beat of escape,
All at once urgent and deafeningly placid.
Most days I’m an oscillating bassline with no particular destination,
Fruitless and peripatetic,
Ever vulnerable and easily swayed,
By shiny beacons and moonlit faces.
You are enchantment and unaffected utopia,
Exhausting noise with a fishbone laugh.
A nimbus of paradise in this hellhole of a coffee shop.
Take me two hours before sunrise, and
Hook my body to the cadence of your favorite song,
So I can feel something beautiful in these vessel-like bones.
Until then I’ll measure my spine along Esperanza’s strings,
Tune my heart to a Precious honey hymn, and
Pray for some kind of resurrection,
Shaken from two brown limbs,
Stretch my skin over the shrine of your ribcage and wait for something tangible.
Today I am Blue in Green,
Everything you want me to be,
Spectral sacrifice smeared on an eggshell canvas of heaven.
Wearing an enharmonic smile,
In a godforsaken corner of lovers and madmen,
This is where you’ll find me.
