ALL WORK © L. "FunkyLB" BROWN 2004-2007 

WAITING (IN DEEP BLUE-GREEN)

Below is my most favorite piece of creative writing I've done to date.  I haven't been able, before or since, to say exactly what I wanted to say in the precise way that I wanted to say it, but here I really feel that I did just that.  I'm not being self-congratulatory at all, just musing....I'm trying to come out of the closet as a poet, novelist and screenwriter and it's difficult because I've kinda painted myself into a corner as  a singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist.  I've always felt I had to choose a 'master' to serve and music won.  But, as I'm getting older and (maybe) wiser I think I want to let all of my colors shine.  God put them in me for a reason.  Multiplicity, polyvalence and reticulation are all okay, I guess.  I shan't let my natural shyness, reserve and understated-ness keep me from being wholly myself.  The German master poet, Rilke, wrote in the first letter of his seminal work, Letters To a Young Poet: "This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity..."  I find myself ruminating on those lines quite a bit of late.  Anybody feel me?

 Rilke, in that same first letter, goes on to demand the complete eschewal of vapid (my word, not his) love poems, but....bygones! (as Ally McBeal's Richard Fish would say). LOL!  Writing from a place of love is what I live for.  Afterall, the greatest thing is to love and to be loved in return (to paraphrase Eden Ahbez's Nature Boy lyric).
 

Waiting (In Deep Blue-Green)

i do not know how you resurrect me
with the honey-oranges of your noonday greetings,
but you do.

sometimes, after you've gone,
i watch the space that had just held
delicate fold after fold of you for signs of
preternatural provenance
'cause nothin' as yet explains why
naked azure suggests only you.

i walk (timidly) onto that blissful ground where you once were
and allow whatever remains of you there to enclose me
unclosing (plaintively) all of my emerald stained daydreams
of how I could love you, if only you'd let me.

i imagine that I am the air that lovingly caresses the lines
of your perfect nose as you breathe,
leaving gossamer impressions of
FINE.

i am the fluorescent light as it
etches minor chords on your skin
from every possible angle
coaxing your poignant browns
into the barest of indigo.

I am each stair you      ^ascend

and

                             descend

whose hollowness is extended absolution
by the very fragility of each of
your feet (tiny and remarkable even as they mimic
assonant rhythms of frolicking jade and jasmine).
i imagine each foot, like petals in autumn, quietly folding into itself
finally finding repose along the fleshiest part of my thigh.

i am time.
spilling infinite kisses of maybes along the curve of you back
mining the path to your soul
with lazy midnight tears.
Muted.
Meaningless.

i want you/
to want me.
So i wait.

WANTING (AFTER WAITING)

i want

to kiss

You

beneath the charred shells

where the bruises are buried.

i want

to breathe

aloe(d) light into the

tiny, sepia prisons

where your skittish heart

chafes and then braces for yet another

graceless goodbye.

i want

to touch

You

with still fingers

in every shifting place

from which your suffering draws flailing sustenance.

…but most of all,

i want

to be quiet

while the bottomless (sub)text that looms in you

sings to me all about the beautiful girl

iwanttokiss

You.

AUG 11TH: THIS IS NOT A LOVE POEM

                                                                    this is not really a poem for you.
                                                                   i stopped being a poet the moment i met you.
                                                                   how silly and trite to compare your eyes to
                                                                   rising moons and setting suns...or other such prosaisms.
                                                                   they are as they are--a magnanimous gesture
                                                                   of benevolent gods, who know that
                                                                   audacious rivers of raven light
                                                                   coupled with the occassional bashful invasion of honeybrown shadows
                                                                   is what makes this world liquid sanctuary
                                                                   for desiccated, searching souls like mine.
                                                                   so, why go on endlessly about them?

                                                                   this cannot be a poem for you, really.
                                                                   i ceased writing the moment i first held your hand.
                                                                   the pen i used in the past to record lines upon lines
                                                                   of abstraction and nothingness
                                                                   seems like such a crude medium through which to capture
                                                                   the innate gracefulness of your hands.
                                                                   my lumbering pen cannot begin to express
                                                                   how your hands are like retiring leaves in early autumn,
                                                                  deftly making the dance from the sky to the ground
                                                                  seem like the most lilting and lyrical of all denouement.
                                                                  there is no ink delicate enough yet dense enough to illumine the
                                                                  acute poignancy of each of your gingerbread fingers.
                                                                  what could i possibly write about the sweet, healing burn of their
                                                                  tender pressure on my broken back at day's end?

                                                                  this most assuredly is not a love poem for you.
                                                                  love poems are meant to be spoken in whispers (mostly),
                                                                  passed from the lips of one lover to those of another.
                                                                  i cannot imagine any words i may write being more transcendent,
                                                                  more meaingful when falling from the wet, fleshy parts of your
                                                                  infallibly textured lips than those three simple words
                                                                  that are like a cool salve harvested from the deepest, warmest
                                                                  layer of the Earth...i love you...

                                                                  this then, i imagine, is a love poem for you,
                                                                  though, i demure to call it one so shamelessly.
                                                                  afterall, these primitive marking on this page
                                                                  are but hollow intimations of  how utterly beatific
                                                                  it will be to have...i love you...
                                                                  reflected back at me as effortlessly and as completely
                                                                  as it is surrendered.
                                                                 for that pregnant longing, i write you this love poem.

UNTITLED #8

                                                                        i bleed protest songs

                                                                        onto the soil of our dominican solitude.

                                                                        kissing you will be revolutionary.

QUIET HORROR

                     SIN TITULO: NUMERO SIETE

                                                 they exhumed my body the day you went away.

                                                 it seems no one knew i was dead

                                                'til the deceptively coy petals

                                                of the wild flower that you really are wilted,

                                                and the hungrily adoring butterfly that was me

                                               chose eternal repose as the gold-flecked dust

                                               that honors the earth where you once stood.

TURBIDITY

                                                                         the days are so long here
                                                                         and the night winds haughtily cruel.
                                                                         i always hear your turbid voice
                                                                         (naked and bottomless)
                                                                         coming from that mythic space where
                                                                         the interminably blue-black sky
                                                                        meets the skittish waves of the liquid wall
                                                                        that separates us

LOST IN TRANSLATION

                                

 

                                               Beloved.

                                               today i thought

                                               me sentí your latido de corazón

                                               in my fingertips.

                                               it made me olvidé de (almost)

                                               our bodies nunca se encontraron.
 

 

 

 

 

 

translation: Beloved.  Today I thought I felt your heartbeat in my fingertips.  It almost made me forget our bodies never met.

 

 

 

                            HOW I LONG FOR YOU

                                    

 

                                        in an indigo dream,
                                        the road to you was paved with wet, ivory clay.
                                        and as i moved (coaxed along by the sepia fires from your eyes) 

                                        my feet were swallowed whole.
                                        what marked the passing of time throughout my journey
                                        were not my own footprints,
                                        but meticulously sculpted obsidian impressions of my longing

                                        for you.
 

                                         I.

                                                                 sometimes,
                                                                 i wish i didn't live
                                                                 for your amarillo smiles.
                                                                 maybe...
                                                                 my sudden sickness in your absence
                                                                 is the jaundice that remains
                                                                 as the light of you fades.

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