Poetry

By Robin Liepman

I’m not going to be able to pull this off (attempts to pull off face…)
It’s unstable, strange, and I can’t seem to find the purpose.
But I’m stuck with it. It wraps around me constantly,
producing unsettling and alarming noises from the wacky bagpipe dangling from a one-way window
peering into the void until realizing that voidness is your own emptiness
and the swirling blizzard of the cosmos resides within
consistently blotting its escape to rein with the grand outer stars of space,
…I’m not going to be able to pull this off…
Because when we squeeze together as close as humanly possible, there is still an impasse, and as our eyes infinitely reflect each other’s shimmer back and forth, we try as hard as possible to merge our souls,
like two eggs waiting to be cracked and mixed together for cake batter,
but the dance towards union is only possible with this rubbery costume to navigate, move and jive in,
So… I don’t think I’m going to be able to pull this off…
For there are billions of amorphous colonies of bundles of trillions of cells, bouncing around and off of each other,
spinning tops on the table of the universe, spun near the edge, threatening to fall off the tippy top,
and that oceanic motion swirling and crashing and flowing back in
pushes and pulls at my every ligament,
stretching my stomach to the Earth, my heart to the Ocean, my legs to Asia and my head to the Middle East
So… I’m all discombobulated and definitely incapable of pulling this off…
Well, without this fleshy gangly jumble of gooey chords and bulbous processing systems,
I wouldn’t be able to try, for there would be nothing to pull off.
There would be no dancing, no struggle, no questioning, no words,
though I wouldn’t suffer, I also wouldn’t experience the feeling of being overcome with joy, eyes watering from complete awe and bliss with the one song universe,
being one individual while being one with the cosmos
consecutively united and autonomous, my ideal community.
So… maybe I don’t want to pull this off.
[[Written at a meeting this morning]]

Alexandria Grace Vickery

Waking Up to Life
A dewey dawn day, rising chest stretched up to sunny sky,
portruding into the infinite, bursting beyond bright breaches,
casting cool shallow shadows upon the crevices of the
cosmos.
I caress the crevices of the cosmos,
circumnavigate the collision between you and I,
because when our stars burst together,
“there is no telling where you end and I begin.”
Endlessly looping,
swirling and swooping,
wopping, wooping,
hopping and hooting.
You bring me the joy of one thousand oranges,
bouncing upon beautiful bundles of blueberries.
My connections are strings, so I sew nets with my movements,
gracefully weaving webs and humming birdsongs
while roaring like lions and howling as a wolf.
I am constantly waking up more and more to life.
Thank you brain, eyes, heart, spirit, soul, and the whole.
We are whole, you are the One. Don’t you forget, but it’s fun to pretend.
[[Written on a very delightful morning]]

Published on page 50 of the Fall 2011 issue of Leviathan.

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