To the self that I forgot.
I called upon a graceful face
To see what I could not.
To hear the sounds that were never said,
And speak what I forgot.
And in the bellows of the woods,
Beyond the mead and moss,
Past paths unpaved
Where fellow men refuse to further trot.
It is there that lies
A sullen fact
That fictitious fibs forgot
To hide the truth
That goes untold
So settles at the lot.
And waits there,
Solemn,
Soft and sound.
And waits there
‘til the day,
Daring feet
Pass to that ground
And face her,
Hear her say.
I do not know
the words she whispered.
I do not know her name.
For I was not the face that graced her.
I was not that dame.
But sometimes thinking,
In a daze
Of all that I have lost,
I like to think,
That someone knows her
That self that I forgot.
The Woman I love.
The woman I loved dances with grace
And embraces the divine intertwine of each moment;
Collecting SAMPLES of insights that upholster in seamed imagines
To the underside of her surface.
For her, life is the memories and collections of a soul that would not die,
So that the infinite span of sensory impressions exposed
Embarked implodes of UNIVERSAL expansion,
So each fold of flesh, the threshold to a galactic space of her own.
She sat spread like a veil.
Her skin thinned and her veins retained their own life,
And let others’ life permeate in.
So there she danced,
Barefoot,
Bared soul to sole.
Careening the serenity of her surroundings with a soft touch,
Just slight enough to sense the subtleties amongst the sheaths of existence.
Allowing existence to occur in intervals of profundities and paced exhalations of admiration.
The woman I love grows thick with insights and soft amongst the seams of their cast shadows.
For she knows the world that can make the world turn;
For she has learned what we yearn for
Though she yearns to learn more
Of the slow rotation of macrocosmic observations
Of a sparsely scattered sky.
For she dares to ask why
The burning sun burns longer than our burning chyme.
Or why something as large as you and I can turn so small in the scheme of time.
And it is not just her mind nor just her heart that I hold dear,
But the shear thread of twine that binds the two together,
So each heartbeat begins a rhythm,
Her mind a melody.
And the breath between her breast and brain remains in harmony.
And a blade of grass could harm her,
But a pause could heal that wound.
For the life that lay around her
Temperaments her room.
Should I be the first to know,
How softly one must move,
And how my pulse must settle down
Before stepping towards her chosen grounds.
The woman I love,
Is a temple queen,
She lives there in the night,
And looks out to the morning dusk
To take in sovereign sights.
And if I should meet her deities,
Then I should bow to grace.
For the tempered life of my templed dame
Dwindles when inflamed.
So I should vow to sacristy,
For it’s her family name.
And relish in the beat between
Each pulse that pulls me in her frame.
End of an era…
We lived like tender things that are soft and malleable
Like skin and sinew that fold into each other’s crevices and lingered there for sometime until the sweat pooled and slowly seeped into our pores,
and I’m a little bit more you than I was before
—and you’re a little bit more defeated.
— — —
Your skin sheds when rubbed wet;
and that’s all that’s left of the fault line between us—rubbled up flesh
And an unrecorded history that shifts like all things that are not stable.
—Sometimes, when caught in movement, we were beautiful.
I can speak of that;
Like your fleeting laugh
or the rickochet we’d sometimes play with words that layered like silicates
hovering above that magnetic heat
that contributed to our inevitable erosion.
— — —
Now, I am lost in the meaning of your words which you say are surface only,
As I have never known a surface without a little give.
I have never known a surface that did not lead to deeper things.
I am not looking for metaphor and allusions in your statements,
Rather I am looking to see through the illusions you hide behind when you state,
“I mean nothing more than what I say.”
Forgive me, but I am more interested in where you are stating that from.
—There was a country there,
we built it.
——
I don’t think I shall see you again,
Except in bits and pieces of a different person,
and in the fables and folklore we tell about ourselves
To make our history make sense.
That history is deep
In time and with pressure,
It will turn into something precious,
But not today.
Today,
Your towel is gone from the bathroom,
And I’m left cleaning up the remnants of your hair and dead skin,
Knowing I may never know what will become of the layers underneath what you left me with.
Softly, – inspired by Kate Tempest’s Hold Your Own
Go softly with yourself in tender times,
when the earth’s crust has been turned over
and your feet have impeded on her with their imprints.
When your skin looks like the earth after fire and quake
and yesterday’s monuments have yet to decompose,
Go softy;
As your feet turn the earth,
Make monuments out of the garage dumps,
Move slow and take it in.
—All the things that could not be let go of no matter how hard you tried.
You have walked far and each step has either been left or has been swept clean.
—None of it will look like you,
Or feel like you do.
Nothing left will embody your subjectivity,
Or the indents on your face that speak of your subtext.
Nothing left will tell your stories
with the sound of your words when you first heard them in your head.
And no one that does not see you will know you now for your wonder.
No one that does not see you now
has wandered through the labyrinths that you have left in trinkets that speak of your history
And the places that you have lost yourself, just to revel in how you have landed,
finally,
at your current destination.
So go softly,
In time your feet will turn to earth
And all you will hold will be what could not be let go of,
No matter how hard you tried.
And none of it will look like you,
Or hold you like the person that sees you like they never stopped looking;
Because every moment you left behind solidified in their mind like a labyrinth of trinkets that No one else could see.
And the garbage you were treated like,
looks to them like a gallery of the most magnificent things.
So go softly my friend,
And stop to see what you thought was too unsightly.
Nowhere you are going has more in it than what is in each moment that expands when you can stand it,
When you can stand in it.
Love hides in unsightly things,
Like the people we stow away in places that we don’t want to look at,
Because it takes time to get there.
The poets call time a monument,
And I have watched monuments crumble to debris.
There is love there too.
So go slowly- softly.
Nothing takes too much time, it take patience.
In time we find ourselves in all things,
look at them,
look at yourself.
Love them right.
On Injustice
I wanted to plaster your face.
I wanted to fill the crevices of your skin
with something other than shadow and light,
So when the sun shined on your muddied face,
It would harden and crack.
How you looked always so unbreakable.
I wanted the sun to hit you like a spotlight.
I wanted it to shine so bright,
It would make you sweat
As all the cracks in your mask were made visible.
I wanted to watch your irises contract
As you stepped back into the shadow,
Escape the light,
Ignorant to the fact that it was your own body shadow casting.
I wanted the sun to shine so bright,
So that you could be seen,
But they built the city to hide men like you,
And you are safe in their footsteps,
Where their shadows fall,
And my light is muted by pollutants.
Grey – I wrote this poem in 2017 reflecting on language and human behaviour.
Grey.
Everything becomes grey:
–The sky
–The blue lines on your face.
-The final traces of elation
Go grey, then turn to black and white.
Extravagance turns trite.
I watch;
There is no more sky.
Not the way we knew it.
I call this smog.
Smudged paint on the skyline
Where no more birds can fly.
You had raven hair!
Bluish tinged by day,
Indigo at night.
I thought you were so bright,
You’d soar because only angels hold such light.
With feathered hair like falcon wings,
We’d have to tether you down,
But love holds no bounds,
So we didn’t.
I wondered if they could have loved us in black and white.
Because the love I knew was in hues,
But if I thought that they couldn’t…they didn’t…then I’d be dichotomous too.
So we turned to greying hues
and painted the sky
with a palette that pertained to print on paper,
propaganda and headlines.
I wondered if anyone ever told them that there is blue ink?
Or that no one would sink if you let all the snow in Montreal melt.
How our hair turns white with time and age,
But even that inevitably fades.
I wondered if they ever noticed that the snow is white,
But our skin is beige peach;
Tires are black,
Her skin is ebony brown.
I wonder if anyone every told them that true white is iridescence,
reflecting everything at once and that true black pulls everything in.
But we paint the sky
Maybe because we have paint brushes for eyes,
Or maybe we paint the sky because we are afraid of infinite light
And grey keeps everything grounded.
The Woman of The Sea -circa ~2013 (The poem came to me in a flash while cleaning the walls at Shri. I tell myself it is about my former teacher’s past life.)
I knew a man
Who swam the Ocean
And knew nothing of the sea.
Who braced the waters with his arms,
But that man was not for me.
And when he landed on the sand
And stammered to his ground
He did not hear the voices wailing
Beneath his carried pounds.
He called me woman,
As my name
“Woman, be a dear.”
And I would falsely smile fast,
To blear his worries with a mask
Of mimicry in vain.
Never should I have had to fear
For he couldn’t know the ocean dear,
If the ocean ’d be his grave.
He spoke so hi-hung
Of his journey,
His many wins within the tourneys.
And carried by his reveries
Of what a man he used to be,
But never did he see,
The man of now
Or this woman,
This woman, whom I be.
I never told him of my name,
And never of my knows,
For I would lose those precious words
To the grave where moments go.
And at the waters did I stop
To smell what I could see,
The sunset crystalized in salt
And floating out to sea.
And with the smell,
The ocean’s taste from saltwater to weed
And watched the moment ticker past
Beyond peripheries.
That man he stands and watches.
But he does not know my name.
And wishes he could win me,
Like some heroic game.
But I am not his woman.
I care not for his fame.
He could not charm me with his medals,
Or woo me with his reign.
For I am wed-locked to the tides,
Hand-fasted to their fall and rise,
That leave me mesmerized
And calling out to be,
That siren maiden
Made to be a mother
That siren maid is me.
But whose’ this ring I’m wearing?
To whom is this voice I speak?
That says, “Yes, dear I am coming,
Home back from the sea.”
I know not of that woman.
I know not of those words,
But the mirror in the ocean’s tides
Shows my lips as where that voice is heard.
I float across the sanded ground,
Fluid like the sea,
Into the arms of this man,
This man that’s not for me.
He calls me woman,
Calls me wife
And sets me down to lay,
But I’m like the ocean,
Beyond his grasp,
And colder by the day.
The Night Lark– 2012 uhm, this poem is about being a morning bird without an alarm clock.
The night lark stays up at night
Waiting for the sight of a silent sky
-Empty mind.
She couldn’t stop the overcasting clouds
Or the thunder that sounded
So magnificently.
She would wait,
For the precipitation to sweep clean the cloudscape.
I couldn’t be the night lark often,
For often I sat under the clear sky of day,
The moon dimmed at dusk
To blue tint/white wash away
The heavy humid musk
That settled just bellow my brow line
And caused my eyes to shut.
Those were the nights of busy days.
Which left me home to rest,
And wait for the morning sparrow’s song
To draw me from my nest.
I’d awaken with the morning sun
That light that swathed my soul
And washed away the morning stars
That blinded my heart’s goals.
The Wish ~circa 2015
When I moved slow enough to allow
The impression to impose a new expression on my face.
And the landscape could sing in coloured hues.
And the coloured hues would infuse openness into my heart.
When I loved so slowly,
I learned the velocity of life’s majesties,
That made made way for great growth at an exponential pace.
When I moved slow enough to see the universe exposed in puddles reflecting light.
In puddles reflecting life,
I’d go back there,
-If you’d come with me.
And the world would show you your face.
-The tiny pores that out pour history,
And explore the intricacies of existence.
It stops me sometimes to an ill still,
The hear the bombards of bickers
We at times snicker to ourselves.
I wish we could stop together,
To see,
Then move slow enough to sedate those hints of hate,
And wait for our sentience to up rise from its’ hiding.
I see it enclosed amongst the kerotin of your skin.
Smudged in the smoke of your speed.
But STOP with me and see.
You
Are
A
Being
of
Great
Beauty!
I’d hand you mirror,
If you’d stop to see your soul.
The City– 2017
Big eyed,
I watch the cityscape,
Like a thousand exploding colours
Imploding into the night.
Quiet,
In the cacophony of drunkards and lingering herringbone tracks,
Left by the ever shrinking back lights that have been swallowed up by the distance between the cars and I.
I am halted;
Stymied by the memory of a red light’s protruding ray,
That prospers perniciously.
I am still blinded,
…
Still deaf of sound,
…
Still saturating–
An Ode to Francesca
With sun kissed skin,
She smells of coffee in the morning;
Warm and flashy eyed.
I wake up to the taste and scent of everything she produces:
Soft and potent,
Bittersweet.
An ode to Francesca
–The Espresso machine!
The Cathedral – (spring 2017)
I didn’t know the red sky
through the cathedral’s stained glass,
Like endless pools into infinity were circumscribed.
Or that God’s grace,
Engraved into the window panes
were made of nature’s sacrifice.
I didn’t know the reverend
In his holy reverence,
lived forever severed from his psalms and hymns,
Or that those devoted to the love of the lord,
Lived forever in fear of their urge to sin.
I didn’t know the trepidatious tremors
that trembled under the surface of their skin.
Or that these walls made in stage of love,
From the wage of love,
Were built to keep fear in.
I didn’t know outside the walls of the cathedral.
The winding streets each lined with different homes,
with doors like porous ports into a new reality,
Like the totality of my corp-reality were but a blundered blip
shadow casting through celestial light.
Just so I might feel,
somewhat,
Awakened…I didn’t know.
My mother held my head towards a man and called him god.
My body ached for the first time,
They called that sin.
I didn’t know I was in the process of God’s creation,
That I was made to feel elation,
I didn’t know emancipation would feel like bliss.
-I didn’t know this-
That the many colours of the sinking sun,
Could wield so much surrender.
So I surrendered to the thickness of the night buttoned with stars,
And called that blanket god,
And let the atmospheric haze I gazed through become
my home -my stained glass ceiling
Knowing now, even in the serenades of this beauty,
This too is only a Cathedral,
And I may never know if I know the face of God.
Grace Enters the Room– circa 2013
This is a story.
Grace entered the room
In her state of sweet nature,
Untelling to the tales of her past
She untied the knots to her history
And kept clean to the present.
To most she was a mystery,
Like some soft wind that sweeps in
Just to change your state of motion
Just to make you emote your devotion.
This is just a story.
Grace walked by
Addressed the mess
Felt distressed
But released it in a sigh.
You see Grace
Had this particular quality
That distinguished her psychology
From the main domain of beings
-She gave and let go
And though some days she’d be drained
She learned to retain her self on breath
So though she never restrained in service,
She always had one breath left
To exhale the tragedy of the rest.
It is just a tale
That Grace often disguised in fable and allegory
So she would not compromise her name;
So her story would slip by deaf ears and only crack into the choir
-The ones who know to hear.
You see, Grace was attired in robes
Bestowed to her to which she did not belong.
Nor did she choose their placement on her skin
But none the less, graceful as she was,
She sat and settled in.
This is just a story of:
A faceless fay,
Female, at the least
Adorn with admiration
At her lack of history
At the lack of her story,
This is her story.
When she’d speak,
She took presence in the past participle and third person.
Each night when the clock struck eight
She’d exasperate and unload those heavy clothes
Just to expose the shape of her nose,
The flakes on her skin that were sometimes chiseled
Sometimes dried.
She was young then, in her old age,
And at youth sometimes aged by the sifting of her pores
That only held to the hardest of memories.
Sometime she’d speak of those reveries
In rhythm and rhyme
So only those in tune could catch the words with in the soft syllables
Of her dazzling dialect of her tantalizing tongue,
And that is how she sang herself to sleep,
Weighted by the respect for her role
Enough to deflate her heightened estate
And settle into her rightful traits
That branded her to be as human as you or me.
This is the unknown factor of this fictitious faction
Was whether Grace was born spacious in nature
Or whether her namesake imposed itself as her superego
And she learned to let go at an earlier stage
Than the average age.
And so, we are uncertain as to when Grace entered the room for the very last time.
Because the gust of wind that always blew in seemed solid as chime
And despite her namesake
It seemed that grace had evacuated the place and the excessive space she often portrayed seemed somewhat to hold…
…Scratch that…
Very much held a heavy load
Of many robes.
This is not a story.
This is a factory.
Where real things are created.
And it is fact that Grace, though somewhat ethereal in her ways was of a tangable trace,
Of formed flesh
And featured face.
When she unclothed the robes that wrapped around her perimeters
She aired what she inherited.
It is not a shock to me that the many felt distraught and disarrayed
That the empty space that once displayed
Now noticeably breathed
And took deep breath.
And when she exhaled, she exhaled just like the rest.
It is no fable,
That their accumulative exhales prevailed in sound
Hard enough to gargle ground
And when that earth quaked
Suddenly still with chill
The room grew ill with accusations
And acquired a belief that this woman
Took too much mass,
And filled even an empty glass with whines of the past.
It was all too forgotten that those many robes and goblets filled were milled to Grace,
And that nobody can erase a creation written in indelible ink,
Only tear the page or change its’ form
But the many forgot that norm.
So when their outrage stormed
They expected her to take it in sake of her name
And they’d be reborn saintly-sinners
Grace’s strength grew thinner and thinner.
It is not just a tale
That the embodiment of God takes shape
When there is a lack of grace,
So whether Grace evoked the divine to take her place
And use her flesh
Or whether it is a natural occurrence
That God complexes compiles
When tolerance exiles
-We are uncertain.
But it is for certain
That that moment’s metamorphosis
Metabolized
Not only the many robes
But the many who imposed their illness in space
Merciless, as they may call this might
God took mercy on Grace
And when all dematerialized
grace entered the room.
In me to kill– 2018
When I learned that I had it in me to kill,
Suddenly,
I no longer needed to take the chill ill will of a narcissist’s thrill
Or the systemic abuse of use and misuse,
Where in the four walls of my family,
I was a human compost,
Composed and complicit
To be used to elicit kindness in the face of rage,
And survival was the wage paid for taking it,
And taking it was the wage paid for being born at this stage of my lineage.
I am illicit,
I am not supposed to be here.
I was m…made to believe…
I was made to believe I was make believe
I was made to believe in silence.
Now, I like silence,
And the sound of an exhale,
like a sign,
like a cry,
That says, “you made it, you are alive.”
When I learned that I had it in me to kill I realized
There is a fine line between those who wield, yield and shield from weapons,
And those who wept on graves and kept on killing,
And those who wept on graves stones of their own buried bones.
I am treating myself like I am precious,
Because I do not have a closet of skeleton’s to weep on,
I have a graveyard.
I am a graveyard that has grown over,
Some call it succession,
I call it success ,
To take the broken pieces of my history
and be a woman I can be proud of.
When I learned that I had it in me to kill,
I stopped trying to let myself die,
And started fighting for my right to exist.
My name is Jocelyn,
And this is personal.
I am a person,
worse off than some,
Better off than most,
Lest we forget the colour of my skin
Or the fact that I had it in me to heal,
I had hope.
I have hope that those better off than me,
Have it in them to heal,
To feel past the blind spots in their peripheries into grave yards of others.
We have learned to make fuel out of buried bones,
But it’s not sustainable.
I have hope
That those better off than me can grow.
Take the seeds from ripened fruit and share then on barren land.
Some graveyards need a gardener,
Some bodies fuel off forgiveness.
My name is Jocelyn,
And when I learned that I had it in me to kill,
All I wanted to do was heal,
having learned that this precious world
Probably forgot its power.
My name is Jocelyn and may you know who and what you are,
You are powerful,
All of you.
Please, use it wisely.
The Alzheimer Poem– 2018 (trigger warning Alzheimer stuff)
I’ve started to see faces in things.
I stared at the painting,
Transfixed on the embossed oil paint,
That folds in on itself like sulci.
How the light hits the sheen of gloss,
And pooled at the crux of her drawn elbow
Refracting at me,
Eclipsing, for a brief moment, my grasp on reality.
I am sitting in a periwinkle chair,
The room is saturated in a yellowish hue
That imbues it with a sense of fear.
It is such a sterile place,
Why?
His brain is rotting,
so is mine;
We don’t call it that.
It happens over time,
Like the way oil paint
Crumbles in the light,
I am squinting now,
Trying to see
What the painting would have looked like
Before it chipped in several locations.
I see pieces of myself in her iris and her jaw line,
Like if I angled myself to just the right degree,
The painting would look like a mirror,
That displays only my broken parts that choose to look to the oil painting,
over a man that forgets parts of his history,
Over a woman that depersonalizes family for the sake of survival.
Death, they say,
is necessary for life.
Like I kill parts of my consciousness to live in reality,
Or else blind myself by staring at pools of light that bounce off a glazed surface.
I wonder how much light must have gotten into his head to set his brain on fire, until it burned out dead.
He doesn’t remember me,
But he remembers the Beetles.
“Here comes the sun”
I sing, he sings!
I am noting for the first time subtext,
Noting for the first time fillers in my blind spots.
He remembers me!
In fragments,
I think,
Like the phrases of the songs we would sing together.
When he sings,
He tilts his face up to the florescent lights of the hospital room,
That ricotches off the oil of his skin,
He looks like a painting now,
But despite the contents of his insides,
He looks more empty,
Fragmented,
Like a broken song.
Our life together plays like a skipping record,
The bits he remembers,
Unable to get to the end or revisit the beginning.
He lives like an oil painting of himself,
Frozen in time,
If I squint hard enough,
I can see parts of myself in him,
Like if I angle myself at just the right degree,
He would look like a mirror that displays only my broken parts,
Of what I am bound to be,
My life with him, now, like a skipping record,
Bound to be
The parts I remember
bound to me
The parts I remember the beginning
Because I am afraid of the end!
I stared at the painting,
Transfixed by the embossed oil paint that folds in on itself like sulci.
My brain feels on fire.
Where you go
Where you go
When grief uncoils its’ body
like a feathered creature shelled at birth
Pecking through your heart’s wall.
The Arrhythmias of uncertainty,
Heavy with yesterday’s ache.
Yesterday aches of a creature working to break free.
I think grief must be a phoenix,
Born inside you,
The smoke and ash
Cause your chest to concave and shoulders’ recoil;
Fetal like.
Grief burns from the inside,
Blistering bodies as it rebirths,
Fetal like again and again.
I’ve been reborn so many times
Each time breaking through thinking
I’m somehow magnificent when my wings hardly fly.
Clip the wings of a phoenix and it’s just a burning body,
Wallowing on my pelvic floor now,
The pain is too much sometimes.
The grief sometimes swallows me in ashes
Too heavy to rise from.
Where you go when the grief is too much
Is a hard rock;
Grounded,
Slowly rebuilding a life from all you have lost.
Pieces and shards welded together from soot
Soppy with tears,
And nothing ever quite looks how it used to.
The world becomes more alone with grief,
As you change;
Waiting for others to understand how some things burn.
I am too lost by what was done to me to ever pass judgement on another.
And it’s from that empathy that the phoenix shines bright.
But I am too heavy to rebound from the slight elasticity in the soot and soil,
So instead,
Stay grounded for some time longer,
Slowly burning until I become light enough to rise.
No Man’s an Island
I have lost myself in the vibrations between me
and my surroundings.
I am left somewhat shaken by the quake of an earth
that spoke preceding our readiness.
I am the sweat of survival swishing around a river’s mouth,
Just a drop drenched,
Salvaged for nothing but swimming.
I have been swimming for so long
I’ve forgotten my longing for shore lines;
Lined with currents that carry me to dry land.
How fickle I feel to float,
What am I?
Forgotten?
Washed clean of all I have been,
Wandering in waters to deep to stand
Like a body of land or landed body.
I am washing away when sometimes I’d like to stand,
Like I did before survival,
Like an island,
Not a bead of sweat,
amalgamating in sea.
kind movement. Compassionate mind. Empathic research. 