Blind
Posted by Pablo Sierra (Alumnus) | Filed under '06 Spring: It's About Time, Poetry, Print, Show Poems
sometimes….I pretend to be blind when I hear a poem
sometimes I imagine life in the blind,
and wonder if by scraping your palm with my nails
I might rappel down the rounded ridges of your fingerprints
to explore the obscure labyrinths of emotion where I know you roam by night
other times I wonder if in the absence of vision
our sense of taste would superdevelop to the point where
we could anticipate the sweet pulpy texture of a sunset colored mango
dangling from the top of a tropical tree that hasn’t yet sprouted to life
In the most absolute darkness,
I wonder if you’d be able to gauge the speed of a single raindrop
as it cratered the denim crosshairs of your jeans,and if so… tell me,
would the imprint left be any different from the indigo ghost of a missile exploding on a sea of blue-tiled houses?
If blind,
I wonder if you’d be able to detect the cognac pigment of my skin when I kiss your lips,
or would the scent of a single strand of my hair in the wind whisper the secret of my origins,
would you be able to smell the suffering of an ancestor’s drying blood on my chin,
could you still limit me, if you couldn’t label me, if unable to see?
see, this illusion of sight has built up a façade called race,
a cheap one-dimensional movie set constructed on a foundation of fear-filled vision,
but vision is nothing more than a distorted approximation of reality
and reality is only perceived when we use our five senses…
so look, touch, taste, smell, ….and listen
these words you hear are
just the chipped paint scraped off a corrugated sheet metal of irritated sentiment
nothing more than the crash of a rusted sword on shield,
of a tired tongue on lip in an epic battle against silence
these words you hear are the desperate echos of three ancients
perched atop a crumbling Babylonian tower
yelling in Kiswahili, Aramaic, and Nahuatl, “why can’t we understand each other?”
these words you hear
should lacerate your eardrums
and make you bleed out that beat of common understanding
that beat pent up by millenia of fear
that beat restlessly caged somewhere between your religion, temple and spine
these words are not mine these words are not mine
since the beginning of time they’ve been burned in the inner walls of each one of our eyelids
and maybe if we just close these eyelids for an instant we’ll see the beauty of sight
and if we just shut these eyelids for a second we’ll taste the beauty of blind
see i have this crazy idea that in absolute darkness we revert to a contact more human,
so sometimes I like to close my eyes and pretend to be blind… while I recite.
