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cloud
sparrow |
- only what you need
- in paper dreams
- love or nothing
- this poem is not
about you
- nothing is better
than you
- vanishing
- only what you
need
-
- it’s not what i wanted
- lying in this brightness
- looking straight up
- thru the sky
-
- we could build a desert here
- if we could leave it alone
- long enough
- and it would be home
-
- a place to start
- where we are always starting
- moving our feet to fill
- each step before the last
-
- and we wonder where
- we are headed
- and if we will want it
- when we get there
-
- or remember our tears
- because we are home again
- with each new step
- we are home again
-
- clutching flowers and more
- flowers
- sky
- and more sky
-
- whatever you can hold.
-
- whatever you can hold is enough
- in paper dreams
-
- when words
- curl
- like sleeping
- cats
-
- when ink
- runs
- rivers
- of blood
-
- when silence
- falls
- like a sparrow
- or a guillotine
-
- or the diver
- who finds
- in the last
- instant
-
- only to forget
- as the water
- closes
- over:
-
- then
- you will know
-
-
- love or nothing
-
- it was a bird i hit.
- pulled it under my car
-
- and kept driving.
- left it behind, somehow
-
- alive
- and finding its own way.
-
- redemption is every day
- like breathing.
-
- it means nothing
- but changes everything.
-
- probably it was always this way
- and i never noticed
-
- “everything getting in
- the way of everything”
-
- like rich said
- or me
-
- wanting love
- when wanting it changed it
- this poem is not
about you
-
- i can say it was yesterday
- it was another life, and i have
- slept and woken
- between then and now.
-
- that i am awake
- or i dream of waking
- and in my dream it is today.
- it is simpler this way, to find you
-
- each time for the first time
- without imagining i have known you.
- and still i remember what i have
- imagined, the five senses of you
-
- and the small unreal space
- down to the atoms
- that persists between us.
- with each breath these atoms dance
-
- and if i were awake
- i would remember that each atom
- is my imagination, each step
- in each direction directionless.
-
- the dream only reminds us of
beauty.
- to discover beauty we must become
it
- and there, spun out in light and
dust
- is the shape of you
-
- and here, at the center
- something that does not remind me
- of anything. what i could become
- if i remembered competely
-
-
- nothing is
better than you
-
- let it go
- you said
- and i did
-
- watched it float away—
- white balloon
- against blue sky
-
- could’ve been a bird
- or a feather
- or a dandelion seed
-
- something entirely other
- than what it was
-
- and i thought then
- about what you had asked me -
-
- “how do you know
- where to be?”
-
- and i smiled
- without laughing
- vanishing
-
- we have been swimming in march.
- the atlantic is cold
-
- and it takes me this way
- when i want to go that way.
-
- spun under
- i breathe salt and sand
-
- water finds water within me
- and suddenly i am lost
-
- or realizing i am lost.
- i am a shrug, i say—
-
- i found the ocean by being
- the ocean.
-
- the cost of
- living is surrender
-
- like when i was five
- and almost drowned
-
- closing my eyes
- finally, and beginning again
-
________________________________________________
-
- About the author:
-
- Cloud Sparrow is often asked if
that is his real name.
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