Way up high A swirl of cream onto spiral blackness, Complex aromas linked to adult status Creating a want to replace hunger Since we have just too much on the muck heap Someone else can starve. Floating cream Keeps the fat intact: black and white. Select a choice garment, taking good care Of hair and fingernails just in case.

Green signifies nutrients out of place On the estuary sands at low tide, The growth is a sign of impurity. My body is a source of pollution, The female image designed for consumption. Not some essence but the body itself Is what comes in with mother’s milk, so that To connect is to accept authority due Given its proper weight. I feel strange And come to resonate with translated pain That I no longer understand. Unknown words Enter the body and breed future harm, My language has been remade as a code. How come I to be thus translated?

Goatherd Kaldi took red berries to the monks And told of his dancing flock. Arubicu from Ethiopian mountains Came with the story to plant in the Yemen. The beans used for money through Africa and Arabia. Thus from Aden through the Red Sea ports to Venice Tillyard in Oxford, Lloyds in London. Louis XIV was given one small plant. The Seeds were smuggled by a Spanish envoy To Bogota, in what is now Columbia, And so on to Blue Mountain futures.

We were taught to fast and to wait quietly Beginning with an inner emptiness That might just be controlled. To listen and wait

For powers needed on the higher path: The control of pain, hunger, and all physical wants, A heavenly taste that sustains from within. Like a wave coming down, not yet breaking, A roar that scours the hollow rocks, That blasts the roots of trees, that surges Laden with tons of gravel; just so Is the call of madness calling again.

But the emptiness is nothing taken within And I am nothing, only I will regain Not this body but the undivided Before the dark and the fear beyond Formed in me this subjectivity Speaking my name, coming into being.

At night when all the wood is still I hear the rustle of unfolding leaves, How orchids quake in leaning grass. All things bear the star pattern folding in To luminous zero. I was astonished Looking at the numbers on the dial Since I could feel by all the signs, increase, And yet I no longer had any control Seeing the ribs there poking through Suddenly wrong and ill beyond cheating.

A ball of pounded beans and grease Stays hunger and revives a Somali warrior. Here phantoms of electromagnetic glitter Keep a signal fixed on. War between adverts In snappy soundbites of exact euphemism, A knowing smile and a hand shaking beans Invites me for coffee. A total diet And a pure conceptual alibi, A complete statement of identity: One and only one. Here we are stirring Capuccini on the formica counter Not looking round. Hear the spatter Of rolled paper and vegetable fibres Consumed into ash. The fret of salt Eats along the oil-washed headlands.

The stink is low water on a warm night; Growing fat worms in estuary mud, A blue fizz crackling along the spine.

Where the youth pined away with desire Lumps had formed behind the nipples Swelled, grown sore, and started to bleed - For obesity is a disease of the poor. That girl in the mirror, she’s kissing me Cramming for exams

In undeclared competition. She says 0 why, mother (angry on a new diet) Is anatomy commodity? She says It’s a street with a deal It’s Bangkok (we go there We do that)

Was Cupid a boy? Why a boy was he?

The children recruited as divers Are floating through the theory seminar With bubbles rising from their mouths. A small but sudden shift in water levels And three hundred thousand are dead. Delta is not a bad name for an airline When you think of it. Seems he mistook The M1 for a runway and tried to land.

Now we look at each other in the compound Waiting for a plane, or a sign from God. The animals are dead and here is despair Met on the journey from our own lands.

throbbing between lives

0 why

TONY LOPEZ