by Paul Hina
that closes and opens
with the rhythm of reckless royalty
7
let us live the simple life where loving
is intense and our bodies are fragile,
but where the snow is always beautiful
and white
let us see the world through regular
windows to watch the many people
who wish to know the colors we know
here in our house of spinning flowers
spurting paint puddles on the walls of
a planet we have imagined where we
pick up pennies and the rain is cold but
romantic
but when i leave behind such rich portraits
of you breathing on the windows of our
world the place i see is anything but regular
and i swear that you embody the snow,
warm it up with your whiteness, and the
months of marigolds you hold in the magic
of your mouth need the colors from the rain
we make when we forget the cold and
remember the romance of a world people
still wish for but can never have
no matter how many pennies they pick up
8
sarah songs asleeping #2
in each lullaby that i have written with
these ignorant fingers trying to locate
the right words to convey all that you
are in a song so softly moving closer
to those million measures of music you
make while breathing a little sleep at
night
in all those late night songs there stumbles
some sleep dust that floats through the
stars like the electric rain running the miles
of your mind on the blue feet of dream
chasers to catch all the sounds you misplace
every time you move the moon with your
rhythmic rest
and there is little time to collect the air of
your singing with the care of creatures
crumbling from the huge humming strings
lighting up the stars that slide down the
drizzle of a dream to come alive like the
noise the sun makes when the morning
meets the miracles you move in me each
time you shake the dust from the drowsy
droops of your eyes
9
of all the words i know i have
heard none so crisp and artistic
as the worlds you utter with the air
you breathe in me like a voice were
stained on the heart of a drying silence
speaking names with lips as softly a
sound of sea spray or a hunger
somewhere filled with fruit
and you scrape in me worlds carved
from dreams so out of reach that
only your hands have the depth to
dig as far as to find them hesitating my
breath long enough to die in the
cool dancing light that reflects from
the liquid you feed me when i am
breathless inside the planets you
pour on me
10
i have seen her hide under the surface
of the sky's layer of softest blue but her
shine is all the shimmer that bends over
summer pools
and her glow is every light we see at
night in those pokes of sky called stars-
and though i try and talk words as beautiful
as her body lights up but the letters are lost
when explaining how soft her fragile hands
seem when i touch them
or how her hair falls like freshly flowers
flowing into shoulders so clean that the
lillies that lie there melt milk all the way
down her dangerous dangling arms-
sometimes i hear songs or saxophones that
sway stars like breath white in the cold where
smoke appears to form some small sense of
the stories her body tells when something as
simple as that glide she displays walks with
those fine awkward feet to fall on the air she
flies through when she speaks short spurts of
storms and sentences
or you might hear a bird that flick whistles a
wing on the wind of a breeze so spring that it
smells something like her mouth when i bend
to kiss it
and it smells like a fresh rain trying to find her
from the clouds she carries when she floats
through the lake of the sky
waking up the stars
shaking off the shimmers
11
there are soft branches of elegant ice
that fall from your freedom fingers
to play thrills of sparks like a million
chills up and down my mind when i try
to think of something quite as perfect
as the miraculous moonlights you can
shine in your eyes or the layers of
laughter you carry in your hair
and crystal picture snowflakes spread
their turbulent tendrils on the white light
glass of cold world reminding me always
to love your unique blueness that falls
from the fantasy of a perfect girl to
settle into you, an imperfect, but unique
maze of woman that stems into a hundred
hands when you touch me
and fantastic worlds are nowhere when
you lay your winter lips over me
laughing through the air of your hair,
blinded by the miles of moons you make
when those bluelight showers shine a little
frost from your fingers and freezes in me
a memory of forever flowers frozen over
you
12
this poem is for you when you are
lying alone and i am away somewhere
doing the things i do which is always
me trying to come back to you wherever
you are wherever you go that you can't
hear me tell you those things i say when
we are alone and whispering
like softly words
1
i spend my solitary moments
spreading the daylight sky out
to expose the lights of hidden
cloud called misty world for
chances of exploding into a
fit of rain that possibly could
attempt, impossibly match, the
taste as reckless and wet a
place as your lips like a wind
whipping the body with the
voice of birds and lights flickering
a summer buzz that drips into
ecstatic water every time i
remember you are mine,
and it always rains when i
catch your kiss
a kiss that pours
2
your body is such a thing of mystery when
it bends around for warmth letting or for
my flimsy shape to perform something like
cupping flowers under a wing of relentless
softenings such as every fine little hair
that like brilliant dust sparkles on your
body like a wish watching heaven fade into
the clumsy sun
and if my arms can ever truly hold such a
beautiful swallow of angel flesh then let me
find one more time those eyes, as lazy a blue
could be, so that sleep may find me happy as
a glowing freedom to dream something as
keenly miraculous as those rising lines
rolling down the curves of these miles you
call form
3
the holes in this house have no windows
and these holes have their silence in the
windy rustling of world that keeps blowing
open new holes for me and you to sit by
while together we discover each other again
like a nearest beginning story so colorfully
needing rebuilt
and while the world outside those holes
waits for us to rebuild our house we will
fill those holes with all the colors we
need and the air will always be perfect
when we breathe it together like a clearest
wind blowing kisses at the heart of this home
4
when my mouth has been absent
from you for a time, a dry like folding
paper flowers in the throat lies all
around my taste having the effect of
remembering a kiss so drunk the way
a grape scatters juice when collapsed
upon its fleshy soul while all around
the tongue juices dance those crazy
flavors on the tongue just for being
once so gloriously alive within your
lips so colorfully aged into that perfect
shape of pink ideal that i so happily
have drunk from
5
wedding poem
today there is a light here in the center of
us, an enduring light, a new shine, where we
will pull the truth we tell from our hearts and
push it all one into the other to combine our
hearts with a kiss, and our light will shine
brighter than everywhere white as the sky
hangs us up again holding to the edges of
our star
and as we dangle this forever glowing life
we are from heaven we will fall always
further in a kiss, and more often in a touch,
than any other star could ever imagine
and as the rest of those lights fall storming
all around us making wishes race to catch
something like our love in the noise of the
pouring rain, which is the only place that
feels as wonderfully right as when we let
our light out to play, i will be wishing only
to hang by you
to shine for you
6
i have stared hours into days as the
companion of the sky shaping my nonsense
hands to try and catch a cloud that knows
the softness of, and unspeakably throughout,
your body as day falls like a perfectly
clothing around me whenever i think of us
meeting at night
and only never can i remember a vision so
blue an eye that god has so gracefully given
the world two as the ones that touch me with
the embrace equivalent to a star's hugging
that always midnight blur so quickly blushing
for the kiss of a morning wrapped around your
waist
all the life i am and all the world i be is in need
of as much mercy as a weakness can be waiting
for you to give me that part of world that hides
so modestly