benny prasad

bloodborne pathogens.
and everyone in between,
harmonizing.

there was a man who had been to every country in the world and made a guitar with twenty five strings and drums for a heartbeat. he played for presidents and parliaments and underground churches and the taliban and north korean guards and the pakistanis who could have killed him on sight. he should have been dead young and his hands should never have opened, but he played and shouted to the lord, fifty countries a year. his voice was soft and high, like a young girl's and his hair fell well past his shoulders. it was as if he whistled all the time, through his throat, and as if his tongue were a spoon tapping against his tabletop mouth. why are you giving me money, he asked, i have no debts, no loans. it is the only way we know to encourage, with cash.

hanging our hammock over the cliff's edge, we wonder what we missed, which wrong plane we are roaming, and how do we climb higher to the right one. you never asked me to walk to the airport with nothing and wait for a ticket whisk me away. you said, if i commanded you, would you go?

i am no benny prasad.

when the war came

i am one half german, one quarter danish, one quarter scottish, and a little bit of an orphan.

i have no more patience to give you. i miss that shivering girl, draped in men's coats, swaddled and trailing like lazarus floating from his tomb. that girl fit in your pocket, pale and velvet like moss. a moth's wing, powdered and worn around the edges. she fit into anyone's pocket.

she could never have been a standard, she was no one's flag. she collected handkerchiefs, but she was born to be a banner. i'll make them stand tall.

all those crisp little spines.
the christmas orphan, marching, marching, flying.

goodbye, new york,
wonder city.

weinacht is mein lieblingsfeiertag.
i just can't fathom who you would have in store for me.

i have no more patience for these little words; bring out the thunder and let's celebrate. enough bark, where's your bite? try me. give me a shovel; i'll unearth some kindred spirits.

some patchwork from lewis: a mantra

"it it not at least possible that along some one line of his multi-dimensional eternity, he sees you forever in the nursery pulling wings off a fly, forever toadying, lying, and lusting as a school boy, forever in that moment of cowardice or insolence as a subaltern? it may be that salvation consists not in the canceling of those eternal moments, but in the perfect humanity that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it furnished to god's compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the universe. perhaps in that eternal moment st. peter- he will forgive me if i am wrong- forever denies his master.

an ordinary simple christian kneels down to say his prayers. he is trying to get into touch with god. but if he is a christian, he knows what is prompting him to pray is also god: god, so to speak, inside him. but he also knows that all his real knowledge of god comes through christ, the man who was god- that christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. you see what is happening. god is the thing to which he is praying- the god he is trying to reach. god is also the thing inside him- the motive power. god is also the road or the bridge aong which he is being pushed to that goal. so that the whole three-fold life of the three-personal being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers. the man is being caught up into higher kinds of life- zoe or spiritual life: he is being pulled into god, by god, while still remaining himself... he is beginning, so to speak, to inject his kind of life and thought, his zoe, into you, beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man. the part of you that does not like it is the part that is still tin... the question is not what we intended ourselves to be but what he intended us to be when he made us. he is the inventor, we are only the machine. he is the painter, we are only the picture. how should we know what he means us to be like? inside our mother's bodies, we were once rathe rlike vegetables and once like fish; it was only later that we resembled human babies. if we had been conscious, we would have been quite contented to remain as vegetables or fish. but all the time, he knew his plan for us and was determined to carry it out. something the same is now happening at a higher level... there is so much of him that millions and millions of little christs, all different, are still too few to express him fully. he made them all, all the different men that you and i were intended to be. in that sense, our real selves are all waiting for us in him. it is no good trying to be myself without him. the more i resist him to live on my own, the more i am dominated by my heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. 'myself' is the meeting place of trains of events i never started and cannot stop. when i give myself up to his personality, i begin to have a personality of my own... it is the other way around; my self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why i love myself. that is how we love our enemies. that is how he loves us. not for any nice attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are those things called selves. he knows perfectly well that your own efforts are never going to bring you near perfection, but the goal toward which he is guiding you is absolute perfection and no power in the universe, except you yourself, can prevent him from taking you there... and yet this helper, who will be satisfied with nothing less than perfection will be delighted with the first feeble, stumbling effort you make tomorrow to do the simplest duty... we have not got to try to climb up into the spiritual life by our own effort. it has already come down into the human race in one man. one of our race has this new life: a good infection. if we get close enough to him... we shall catch it from him. those divine demands which to our ears sound like those of a despot, not a lover, marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted. he demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration. do we suppose they can do hi any good or fear? a man can no more diminish god's glory by refusing to worship him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling darkness on his cell walls, but god wants our good and our only good is to love him and to love him we must know him and if we know him, we shall fall flat on our faces. if we do not, what we are trying to love is not yet god- though it may be the nearest approximation to god which our thought and fantasy can attain... god is the one without whom nothing is strong... he wrote us, like characters in a novel."

syracuse

when i was young, i loved paper dolls, mustard on toast, eel eyeballs, the way that library books were sorted, and cracks in the sidewalk where my bicycle skipped. you met me there, you hurricane-child who began life addicted to cocaine, lived the first few years on the street, and then became an evangelist to the people who rented motel rooms by the hour. you were ten, preaching and punching rude boys.

we grew older; you became mild as a cow and i as fanciful as an asylum, and we thought it would all end there, deep in the black forest, but we survived and together became bright, true swords, lithe and poised. and now i find myself telling you goodbye? again?

i stood sobbing before the baggage man, apologizing over and over for the weight of my luggage.

an interlude before the someones

the first, we are symmetry itself, symmetry that gives way to puzzle pieces. our train tracks are lined up and i am never so lovely as when i am with him. together, i breathe easy and true, wry-mouthed, tunnel-eyed, candle-shined, and my hair all tangled into one feisty, lilac breeze. we are absolutely free with one another, entirely free. together, we could climb an everest or invent our own unscalable mountain. we could survive anything, a fatal joy even. we turn like the two hands of a clock, anchored and twirling. i've never wept like i did when he drove away. we terrify each other and we would learn any language to be together. it's eternal.

i do not desire him.

the second was the first, and i dream of him two nights out of three though it has been years. he reads my thoughts through my eyes when they need to crawl out and when they ought to remain a mystery, he wonders at them fluttering inside my skull, like moths in a bulb jar. together, we would live on a boat or build out own cottage on an abandoned city corner. he writes in the language of my heart and our voices are evenly matched. he rouses my fury, my desire, my prose and my poetry, my silence, my peace, my ponderings, my ever-awed curiosity, my loyalties. i was in love with him and he was even more in love with me. he is a column that has torn itself free; he has half-gown, half-built himself wings. he was my sky-lighted pantheon.

his train tracks are aimed, they run to the edge of his own cliff, and no engine, however given to flight, could survive such a fall. it is a height, himself.

therefore, this is how i will have it. i will stand on my own sunny street corner in the square, watching the crowds scurry and roar, until i find a someone. i will say to him, "do you love someone? or are you in love?" and if he says no, i ill ask, "will you please kiss me?"

be gentle; no one has ever done this to me. i never let them.

he might oblige. i will say thank you, show him my favourite smile, take his photograph, and recede. maybe his friends will cheer , or take his place, or maybe he will be wide-eyed and alone. and i would be gone.

i have my moments away from the mulberry bush, and there are times when i'm walking 'round it, 'round and 'round. but mostly, i am dreaming somewhere deep in its thicket.

winnowing and straw

my sunhat is crouched on the floor, iglooed around air, sheltering no wendybird, just coating nothing, tented to keep its own shape, ginger, tender, expectant.

it snatches freckles as they fall, like any mother would.

my father was a yardstick. any father is a yardstick.

at the end of time, when god is fully revealed, he will peer into each of our eyes and discern either love or hate.

the old man's question: on a fishing boat

when we are one,
will you love
my loves
and hate my hates?

you have been my mortar
and you have been
my pestle.

i am moving through the days like a child pushes back his curtains, draws them open in the morning.

i am moving from minute to minute like a dusty red elephant siphoning dark green water out of a river.

i'm slipping between seconds like a ferris wheel suspended in the sky, suspended, swaying, poised, ticking.

i am sliding from week to week like a man holding negatives high, peering through them to the sun's face.

mechanical and aquatic.
sliding along the curtain rod,
white linen and a faded circus tent.

i watch and wonder:
am i in love?
why am i not in love?
if only we could muster up some desire.

bed stuy, do or die

the boys on the corner wear their pants pulled low. they do chin-ups on the street signs and sport knit hats or yankee caps, even in the summer, even in the winter. one of them is named gregory, and they are always there, morning and night, to call or whisper things like, "hey, gorgeous. hey there, snow white. girl, you got the most beautiful eyes i ever seen." in the deli's doorstep, they bicker, joke, sweat, whistle, kick cats, snap open bottles of soda pop. they move like the jellyfish swim, growing slack and then clenching and moving nowhere though they always seem to be churning saltwater, churning and drifting. they're electric even in the ocean, sparking and charged on the crammed avenue.

monday, august 1st. 2:37 AM, she wrote from my window:

"One of the corner boys got shot. not 20 mins ago. Driveby. These are dog days, its like theres crazy in the streets. I watched the car drive away and in my madness saviour complex i almost ran down to give them towels before the subletter stopped me. I had this feeling something might happen"