Two Poems by Kenan Phillip

sin azul

Every morning you drop into yourself still alive,
a bolt of Peruvian prattle,
gasping like a fish at the taste
of your own breath going solid,
paraffin in a junkyard,
waking to falling sheets of blood and bone,

the sweet coolness of
plastic like a new noose,
handsome nails and shaggy
teeth, scented-gel-hair slicked
and pushed just so. A shape:
life, presented as a heap of
atoms on this side of time,

a form radical enough to match
all other forms in intensity,
so intense that every
now and then it jars you awake
to the realization of time
like a lead flower unfolding
heavily every which way you turn,

and it is something percussive
and oddly foreign inside your chest
which informs you with certainty:
should you despair of any hope at all
and throw your eyes to heaven
you will find, even there, a bolt of time
from a pale clear sky,

a sky sin azul,
without even a gust of blue.

It is as Cortazar said:
I say this

and it dies.

midyear

That familiar scent which is as weird and wonderful as the happy incident of your own birth, which is at other times capable of reminding you, if only faintly, of oranges. Can you hear it beating under your toes? There are the wondrous patterns woven backwards and forwards in both sinew and satin, there are tea parties held sincerely and without the least irony on Golgotha Hill, there are ancient and indistinct faces burned indelibly into the sides of the pyramids, and there is each breath fluttering in an iron cage, not very unlike a witch’s wind moving terrible and certain under heaven.

Through it all there is your heart moving like a thresher, an endless cutting force, always expanding, expending, exhausting. This must be the nail they spoke of, which runs straight up through the foot of god.

Kenan Phillip