Dead People

Hopscotch jumping, skipping rope. To me the voices  
of pals up the street, the sound of our shoes scraping  
on the playground blacktop repeating nursery rhymes.  

In my mind’s eye that echo’d in the center of my scope  
With marbles & spinning tops, dodgeball in the sun,  
swinging on the rings, flying high in the stirrups.  
 
And crayons & coloring books. I didn’t know of rhyme.  
Just coloring within the lines kept me out of trouble,  
turning Winnie the Poo & Tigger into paper dolls.  
 
As I grew & took to illustrating as a knee jerk reaction,  
I still wasn’t one with letters. All I had & wanted to say  
was through acrylics on camel-hair brushes.  
 
The tips of my fingers blending charcoal smudges  
to reveal the depth of the anatomy of a nude. The deft  
crosshatch of penciled textures of hair, skin & bone.  
 
And the sensual movements of two hands working  
the curve, contour and craning necks and limbs  
of the moist grey yielding lay of modeling clay.  
 
Making love with my creations w’out a smock covering  
my pale sheen in tiny studios w’ only dusky skylights  
for relief from rising heat at the end of the day.  
 
My work through the night would only have just begun  
to intensify in its yearn. I wasn’t thinking of poetry:  
Sitting, nodding off while scratching words in a journal.  
 
I felt I’d be the first of my generation to live forever.  
 
But before that time in my youth began,  
the poets I read as assignments all spoke to me in  
ancient Greek, Sanskrit & gobbledegook.  
 
The Iliad & The Odyssey, the works of Shakespeare  
would flatline in my dyslexic brain, not to mention  
bore me out of my skull (‘cause I didn’t understand).  
 
And when summer vacation was over for another year,  
I felt bound & gaged in stiff bit & bridle like a yearling  
brought in from winter’s pasture where I’d been born.  
 
Herded & corralled, to be hobbled & given shoes,  
covered with scratchy wool against my nakedness,  
and my wild, long, sun-streaked mane was shorn.  
 
The new shoes were too tight, not yet broken in, and  
a breeze from the classroom’s half-opened windows  
beckon’d me to come out to give chase in happy sport.  
 
But I hunch’d at a desk with my nose in a stale book,  
images express’d in dead language by dead people,  
about places long crumbled into the dust.  
 
Of relentless time, which was wasting me away  
while outdoors, with its adventures, waited for me.  
 
Emerson, Dickinson, Thoreau; they and the likes  
of Homer, Plato, Sappho, et cetera, with the world  
they knew between them, would just have to wait.  
 
While I was too young to make sense of it all,  
when all I wanted was to gamble like the  
long-legged colt I was, through the wilderness.  
 
The trails and gullies out behind where I lived,  
to roll higgledy-piggledy on the brambledy slopes  
of the foothills of the east San Fernando Valley.    
    
   
   
(Prose poetry)