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.
Chemistry
Posted by Pablo Sierra (Alumnus) | Filed under '06 Spring: It's About Time, Poetry, Print, Show Poems
i know this isn’t proper scientific protocol but…
i’ve been scoping you out on the slide for a while and well…
i was wondering if I could doublehelix around your organic structure sometime
you make want to replicate
because that thy—-mine be looking fine to my adenine,
and honestly the sight of your cytosine has my guanine trippin
please excuse the crude reference to your deoxyribonucleic acidic composition
it’s just that your chemistry is vocabulary limiting, babble speech eliciting,
you’ve got me like
GATTACA GATTACA VEN ACA QUE QUIERO PONERTE UN BESO MI AMOR
i’m saying, if you’d like
we could go back to my petrie dish and turn on that metaphorical heat lamp
i’d be glad to destrand your double DNA structures
and snap off those hydrogen bonds
cuz i’m trying to be your one and only exon with that son sabroson son son in your life!
baby, i’m saying, on a fourteen point ph scale you’d be nothing more and nothing less than a 7!
far from being average
i mean to say you’re perfectly balanced
yes you in fact are the most basic neutral solution
and i can only offer you a love that won’t get diluted
i’ll be at my highest concentration to make our reactions fruitful
and like the juice dripping from the mango fruit
you know my touch is the purest sucrose
so… if you’re ready for that sweetness to take you straight to heaven
then you can reach me at c12 h22 o11
and we’ll get our lab on,
i’m saying we’ll be colliding and collapsing atoms into fractions of passion
i’ m talking about nuclear meltdown, fusion and fission, to the infinite g force, kind of loving
unattainable energy levels breached, let me destablilize your electrons, one at a time, kind of loving
expand your periodic table now because we’re gonna make new elements, kind of loving
so i guess what I’m really trying to say is that
i find you phenotypically fantastic
i promise to love each and everyone of your sibling amino acids
just let me be the catalyst to set off your chain reactions
because baby, after all this chemistry
i’m just trying to make magic
