Stanley Pacion A BIG BOOK OF MY OWN

Monday, July 23, 2012

KIDNAPPED

Wedding Night Abduction

A nightmare pulled you

From the bridal bed and out from the house;

You were screaming.

It carried you off through the wild desert.

Night had little moon;

Darkness hid the cacti,

Making them all the more dangerous to life and limb.

The temperature had dropped to freezing in the Sonora.

I could hear you cry my name.

I had been cheated at the moment when life’s promise

Happiest, I felt the fulfillment of holy, holy prophecy.

Remember, please! I had been assured children;

One was to be monarch of new Golden Age,

A child to whom future ages might do homage.

I did not hesitate, but marshaled my forces

I frantically shouted with all my might, 'Help!'

I hoped to rescue you,

My beautiful wife, the love, the love of my life.

Still perfumed and boutonnière,

Heady with the day's excitement,

Like some native sorcerer, a shaman

Whose vision had been magically enhanced

Through ritual drink, I could see in the dark.

I ran headlong, inner light to guide me.

I chased the phantom that possessed you.

Your beauty, the allure of your physical self,

Your large brown eyes and olive complexion,

Your brunet tresses running down to your shoulders,

-- drapery of oh-so-special, awesome pulchritude –

The thought of your high intelligence,

Its value to material success in my life,

Your undeniable charm, your grace,

The mercy, at core, inspiration of my poetic ambitions,

Propelled me, you, the dream of you,

It animated my heart and lungs with incredible vigor.

I and my comrades launched search after search,

Soon the whole community joined to assist,

For eight days we scoured landscape,

Reaching down into the most perilous ravines,

We walked the vast expanse for miles around.

In the heat people fell to the ground exhausted.

Old timers said that they had not witnessed such uproar,

Since the days when war Yaqui stole settler women,

Who never returned, rumor reported, because

Squaws knew better treatment among the lodges and

Tepees than in their own homes from first husbands.

We never found you.

I went to the priests and sought advice;

I prayed to the Savior, but it was no avail.

You were gone; we felt you were no longer with us.

I knew it, yet could not let you go. I pined.

I learned that time had never been a friend.

Because these, because all my efforts proved futile,

I am now a broken man, dead unto myself,

Unfit, and utterly homeless, my existence over,

Devastated, no other woman may ever have me.

Monday, July 16, 2012

YOUNG LOVE, It Drifts Away

YOUNG LOVE,

It Drifts Away

At the time we had met the mask of youth

And its costume were still upon you.

Then, the next year, 9/11, it marked the city forever,

Downtown burned, towers had fallen, and all the dead,

Though today, very hard to believe,

The smell dominated the air,

Yet there it was during the last days of December.

All the way to West 26th Street,

A bad omen, I guess.

I remember that first Christmas Eve,

The one prior to the attack, later you confided,

It was your first, and the only Holiday Season,

You had ever spent in New York.

You were different then, more girl

Than the grown woman you are today.

You had bought silver jewelry,

I was at market and you stood before the showcase,

Studied the pieces, awaited me to make the move

And price to drop, bargained without word,

Used patience as your tool, you figured,

I was in a hurry, wanted to get home.

It seems halcyon, as I look back.

Business was good here in the City,

The year before the attack.

When I picture you, recall your eyes,

Expectant, be-all, the end-all,

Tomorrow’s promise, stayed awesome and bright,

I want to say, etched,

But no lines, at that time, visited your face.

You were different then, more girl

Than the grown woman you are today.

And you appeared happy, light upon your feet,

I judge your back had not come to bother you yet.

You had a man, and you relished in his friendship,

Maybe you wished the start to family,

Saw for yourself a real, happy ending, hey?

My defenses were still intact,

No idea that you would come to play

The lead role in a dream-wish drama,

Whose title read, cherished, cherished above all others,

Yet, once I fell within the sphere of your limbs,

All good sense and sensibility abandoned, I was yours.

The pleasure of your company engulfed me.

Simply placing my hand upon your knee,

Oh heart beat, beating fast, lasting long, day after day,

Together, no matter what I might have done,

However I might have conspired to end it.

You said, love, now and forever,

I know it’s trite, nothing I should write,

Unworthy of poetry, your promise,

Yeah, until the end of time, and you,

Today I feel, as if, you had purposefully played me,

You laughed at notion, desire might ever wane,

Though love might be only a feeling,

You swore ours here to stay.

Anyone who seeks,

Fervidly wants dreams-come-true,

Gets the sense of what I am saying, knows

The terrible desire, that were it possible,

A replay of yesterday’s grassy splendor,

To enjoy again the glory in the flower,

Despite the rapid descent, the finality marking,

Every bit of human radiance and beauty,

No matter how grand, ambitious the effort,

-- Isn’t it already written? --

The rainbow comes and goes,

Some where out at space-time’s edge,

Gamma ray bursts post daily funerary notice.

Entire worlds disappear, who calculates that agony?

No human comprehends the sorrow;

Number and immensity overwhelm us,

And we might simply shrug our shoulders,

What answer when first pain, then life no more?

How impossible to variegate the progress,

When once we have reached finality,

Great, bright light, then extermination!

And for us, for you and me, it is same story.

Anguish, the very definition,

To cling to silly notions, and hold them right,

When the telephone is off the hook,

And all the doors are shut.

World knows, love, only a feeling,

It drifts away, and, I, fool, believed, I believed,

I thought at odds, forgot the foreboding,

Paid no heed to events, the remains, I forgot

That one happy Christmas does not guarantee another,

Instead, sure we had mastered our affections,

Our land, the land called Eden,

Positive we had won, and continued the delusion

That, and as you had promised, ours was special,

And contrary to every dictate of reason,

I had come to believe that we had found it,

Love, here to stay, warm sun, morning after morning,

Endless awakening, fresh flowers everyday,

A bed with gorgeous sheets and pillows fluffed,

Despite love, it being only a feeling,

Like the youth, we at one time owned, and

Had been our possession, it drifts away.

DREAM CHILDREN

DREAM CHILDREN,

A Reverie

I know that by the time Isabel reaches her teens

She'll want to read all the love letters Dad sent to Mom,

And Mother,

Ever attentive to the moral order of the home,

Will have censored some details of the lovers’ delight,

Until the girl attains the appropriate age,

And she then possesses the missives on her own.

Our son will study the photographs,

Taken while his parents' passion was young;

He will marvel at his Mother's beauty.

From her character and image he learns standards

That, when time comes, he might choose,

Among women, the one, suitable to marry,

Who, too, would be a good mother.

And our children will cherish the memory of how,

Night after night and over the years,

We read from books to them until they fell asleep.

And their minds retain the cadence of nursery rhymes,

And the breathy note of excitement

In tales of heroic deed and glorious adventure,

And the memories of wonderful day dreams,

Which twice-read stories of fantasy and magic create.

Their rooms teem with books;

These books form a collection, a magnificent library.

It remains today the envy of posterity.

And most of all our children recall the hugs and kisses,

The times they rode out on our shoulders

Their arms around our necks,

The softness of our voice when we spoke to them,

The affection lavished without stint,

Bringing to soul warmth and calm,

And that happiness evident

From childhood spent in a good home.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

WITHOUT YOU, George Street Heartache

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WITHOUT YOU,
George St. Heartbreak

I am sick with rheum and aches,
And a congestion of the lungs.
I cough constantly.

Insomnia stains my eye sockets;
They look as though charcoal had blackened them.
For the first time in my life,
I look older than my real age.

Years ago, when a child,
I read auguries in the snarled pattern of clouds,
And practiced divination in how snow
Accumulated to subtle differences of height
On the post rails surrounding the corral.

I watched the frozen breath of horses,
Looking for some hope of bliss,
But abstracted only gloom and heartbreak.

Today, desperate and preoccupied, I try
To pick out the future from the way
Antennae wire twists against the white walls,
And falls up and down
Along the molding in my bedroom.
All omens promise bad luck.

My mind has fallen into a moat
And a bad mood has dungeoned me.

I keep to the apartment all day,
Flipping over playing cards,
Looking for my destiny every time,
A queen of hearts appears from the deck.

It's going okay tonight, not too bad.

"Stanley, don’t be wearin’ that stickpin
Opals are always considered unlucky!"

My luck isn't very good as it is.
I don't think me wearing an opal
Changes the outcome of life that much.

No eulogy for this affair of heart.
No photographs left here for me to remember us.

I see no people down the street to witness
Me drive off in the Ford alone.

Rain and cold, happy couples walk the avenues,
Huddling close, tight, one to another.

Your name has been deleted from the speed dial.
It has vanished from my computer screen.

I guess these musings are the closest
It may ever come to a biography of us.

I must wonder if this whole fantastic romance,
I once imagined, does it amount to no more, now,
Is it a footnote in this big book of my own?

No children will be named for us,
Not that you wanted it anyhow,
The children being named after either you or me.

No admission will ever be charged
For entrance to the home where we once lived,
Spoke ardently of love for one other,
And I tempted verse to celebrate us for the ages.

And despite all the noise coming from the street,
All the appointments I have to keep this evening,
I can only lie on the floor and look to the ceiling.
The light is going out of my eyes.

Some people lust after money.
Others seek a hundred different lovers.
Lots of people crave more than a fair share.

I, I just want you, your love, dear,
And while life goes on without you,
I feel increasingly impoverished.
I have fallen into awful ingratitude.

A grand poverty of spirit besets me.

I exaggerate my mood, and in a panic I imagine
An army attacks me and that I am driven as a refugee,
Lost to my wife and child, forced to flee home
And that I abandon my bed and kitchen utensils.

I know it wrong to venture
Such outrageous comparisons;
Yet when I sit here alone, I feel,
As if, God were punishing me,
That prayer fails me,
And that in my life today
I am bereft of His Succor.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

GODDESS

GODDESS

The first time I saw you;

I was in a remote world.

It was years ago.

You, yourself, stood in a niche, manifest,

In a Hindu temple, a granite figure,

With your eyes carved wide-open.

You were adorned in regal, pageant gown,

Dyed scarlet; gold thread, woven within its fabric,

Made you shimmer in the flickering candle light;

I noticed your irises were painted violet.

Your right arm, it protruded direct, out

From the shoulder, it was bent right angle

At the elbow, it had a barely clenched fist atop,

And from your fist a thumb extended

Straight up perpendicular to your head,

Its signal was unmistakable, providential,

It portended good luck, ‘thumb’s up’.

Brass bowls of red-hot coals burned,

They burned perfumed joss sticks at your feet.

Your supplicants queued from portal to portal arch,

They humbly attended chance to implore good fortune.

On polished metal trays they carried

Oblations of fresh-cut flowers and I remember seeing

Strings of marigolds, cluster upon cluster of pompons,

And, along with these, bunches of large lotus flowers.

The worshipers offered all kind of fruit.

There were bananas, coconuts, and pomegranates.

All was splashed with bright vermilion powder,

As if to inform the procession,

To remind those petitioners that once

Your altar demanded blood,

Your countenance necessitated animal sacrifice.

And me, I await, patient.

I am yet another mortal, who prays for favor,

Hope to tease meaning from your stare,

I desire, I wish for you to bless me,

My eyes are locked,

They dwell upon your motionless and painted face.

I hear drums tap out devotional rhythm,

And through the distance a din of flutes and whistles,

Singers repeat your name to accent your ascendancy.

How deep the people’s love and ardor!

I go deep within my pocket,

Pull small bundles of wrapped, hard candies,

And add them to my tray of gifts.

I excitedly tell the temple priests,

I wear appropriate raiment, that my clothes are clean.

I show them my bare feet.

My nostrils detect your mango fragrance!

And in the clamor, coming up, almost inaudible,

Against the background noises of the street,

I believe I hear your coded parlance,

'I miss you'. You tell me, you miss me.

I am on my knees, I plea,

Goddess, Love, grant me the serenity

To accept the long absence

Before you are flesh in my arms again,

The courage to change those things about me

So better to pray and be proper devotee,

And the wisdom to remain faithfully yours,

To be yours and yours alone, today, tomorrow,

Whatever obstacles may bar the way,

Stay course steadfast and loyal, fervently always.

Saturday, July 7, 2012

KNOCKOUT

KNOCKOUT

Describing the awful upset of my losing you,

The melancholy, the force which has struck me so hard

That I have seemingly become unconscious

And have lost all capacity for right direction,

Demands that I must contradict every sacred philosophy

And postulate the existence of a physical soul.

Your absence, the thought of your

No longer being part of my life, has floored my spirit.

I fear that my vitality has been stopped.

My training in prayer and in hope's audacity

Has been rendered meaningless and has in no way

Readied me for the muscle strength and the great breath,

The fitness required to contend successfully,

And then win the match in this arena.

I have been hit, and I am down.

I bleed, darling, I bleed.

I struggle to my feet, to arise before the ten-count.

Your blow has opened a cut above my eye.

What salve, what ointment staunches the blood!

The men in my corner struggle to fix it.

They will not let me face another round.

The bell keeps clanging,

I hear the terrible roar of the crowd.

I have lost the fight.

Friday, July 6, 2012

ALWAYS, After Pablo Neruda's Poem, Siempre

ALWAYS, After Pablo Neruda's Poem, Siempre

Do not believe, do not entertain,

If even for a moment, that I care,

I have no concern about those other men,

The lovers who came before me.

Come to me carrying an old boyfriend on your shoulders.

Show me a picture which has a hundred men sniffing your hair.

Conjure up a mother goddess image,

A thousand guys nestling between your breasts,

Or that you have had fellows worship, grovelling at your feet.

Flood me over as might the torrent of a Monsoon river,

When in mid July

It rushes out from a mountain-gulley slope in Goa.

Roar into me with a tidal wave of all your memories.

The debris of your keepsakes and

The bodies of your drowned lovers,

Let me see all that awful damage on the beach.

And as the great ocean sea recedes,

I shall stand and look to the wisdom

That all humanity succumbs to the timeless motion of the surf.

Yet here I am.

I wait, I am waiting for you.

No matter who you bring along,

We are alone, we shall always be alone,

We shall always be you and I.

Alone on earth to start our life anew.