Poetry from Al Preciado

 

Rising

 

Impeccable clouds peeled pale clean

Parading like aircraft-carriers filling charcoal sky

into the cracked eggshell , sink-hole of my heart,

healing, even as it wants what it wants, it beats on

Mists color faraway mountains ultramarine

These Utah mountains are the mountains of the summer

of my long trek east to Colorado

Wheeling alone across gold and camouflage hills, valleys

Plains, salt lands, up the thundering, massive Rockies

Carved brutally like an old dog’s teeth

Century-hammered islands of stone mirroring

my own solitude, my recent exile from regret and despair

This is my long voyage into the looming, beautiful emptiness

of the frustrated terrain of my pining soul

I am the perennial passenger, bearing the cargo of excruciating solitude and exquisite salvation

Long journey filled with sudden, bright rainfalls

Falling quick, heavy, hard, fat raindrops

Ricocheting back like ping pong balls, into the

endless abyss of pewter sky

The heart wants what the hearts wants

Even if it is a sickness

A helpless surrender to the virus

of improbable love, impossible love

This self-inflicted flu of desire, infinite, incurable

The disease of choice without hesitation

The ache wants what the ache wants

Here is what I want

Her gaze flaming torch gaze smoldering back at me

Adoring, Unflinching, unyielding

The sweat of my fingertips smearing a wet path

glimmering on her upturned, flushed face

Her legs, slender, fragile spreading, splaying out

Like Butterfly wings slow-motion beaconing

The rosebud that is her mouth blossoming

flowering on the underside of my thigh

The golden shroud that is her hair pulled back.

Revealing crooked curve of her bending neck

The bonfire that sits unattended and smoldering

In the belly of my yearning that she jumpstarts/sparks

With the gorgeous wreckage of her wayward scent

And finally, she smiling, singing, swinging in the playground

of tall trees, eucalyptus waving, roses steaming, blooming and me laying

longing, lingering in the cool grass that holds the promise of her whispers

the soft blueprints to plunder her secret joy , the mystery of her faith, the wonder of two lovers decoding each others skins

the mystery of survivors forged like two metals in these shadows

while the faraway guitars and innocent children embrace

in mud-splattered ecstasy and the possibility of love becomes evident

A serene waterfall frozen in an arc creating a bridge across

the spring pasture to that place, the hollow, that sacred

ground that is rising in the twilight of our dreams