by Paul Hina
lips—
me laid down on her stains of secrets—
as there are raindrops on the petals
of her prison
43
she is as pretty as posies and
as potent as poison,
her curves are like coils of riddles
made from somewhere mist,
and her hair is spun like the clues
airbrushed on the clouds
but she speaks with the sing-song
certainty of summer rain,
and her kiss might kill you if you climb
into it—head first—
her heart heaving in your hands
44
when she walks, flowers grow
beneath her feet,
when she looks at me, waves splash
at my body,
and when she smiles, the sun shines
across my mind,
her body is the shape of the world
as it ought to be,
enveloped by the mud of the source of all
light and sustenance—
the softest womb to want to be buried in,
counting the moons on her thighs as you
dwindle into the sweetest wash
of wondrous death
45
the water's chatter still speaks
her name to me,
and the mist means her kiss is
near in my memory,
dancing on the surface
of the stream,
waiting for the mind
to mumble its way
back to her mouth,
fingers swimming over her lips,
her wet skin,
watching the rain drip off her
droops of down hair,
and the dance of the dew that develops
in the heart never dies,
only dives deeper
and out of reach
46
her face is so wonderfully clear to me,
like i've touched it before—ever-so-slightly
with the soft part of the back of my hand—
like i've felt the weight of her beautiful head
leaning into my touch, like i've seen those
lazy, blue eyes shut with silent imperceptible
lashes intertwining like furls of fingers and
watched them open again like a shock of cold
water had me submerged,
and her breath, i have smelled its sweetness,
remember it with the lavish comfort of satin
rain, and tasted that kiss like spring's first fruit,
its juices dripping down my chin like the delirium
in a dream of flying, an ecstasy so enormous that
it unfolds a paper moon with what feels like the
hands of a heart from another life, keeps me trapped,
mesmerized by her origami moonlight
47
she is so pretty,
face etched by the most careful hands
—better hands than mine—
and her body is shaped by an artist so
deliberate that no curve is overlooked
to forgo perfection,
and she moves with meaning and music that
revs to life from her whirligig heart,
but, when she's absent, my mind is left bending
lines, drafting faces, meticulously trying to keep
her melody alive in the world,
trying to hum along and remember the sway of
those hips like silver bells ringing shocks and
buzzes up and down my skin—the same way
her smile can bend a string of sound around the
mind, sending a long shiver of her wrapping a
laugh around the stems of all my future dreams
48
the spring days are dwindling,
petals have dawdled and dangled,
and you look wilted, waiting for a
shade to climb into so that the cool
grass can lick at your sun drenched
skin,
and, though the heat frustrates me,
i want to find you with these spring
fingers, press flesh into flesh with
the faintness of flowers,
and we'll find a tree's canopy together,
paint its leaves with our fistfuls of
secrets and pluck a few to dabble
away all the kisses we'll plant on
spring's shadows
49
she is the measure of all miracles in
my mind,
it feels like i've known her for years
and years, and yet she fades in and
out of my days in waves of endless
uncertainties—
her pretty features, at once blurred,
become perfectly clear the next minute:
the way she makes music within me,
gives rhythm to the world with her beauty
—those sweet handfuls of hair,
those journeys of legs stretching into
these poems like sunsets.
these are the meanings, the reasons the
world makes sense when she speaks,
or when she appears to move—a dusty
apparition, breathing and then dying
with the immeasurable rhythms of
a wind so familiar
50
the shock of her hair skittering
across my face is where the core
of all kisses finds its beating heart,
where fingers are bloodstained with
simple, beautiful love,
and every touch is a shiver that bends
bodies into shards of something deeper
than sex—
a pool more chaotic than passion,
a girl more meaningful than questions
or answers,
more necessary than art or science,
the embodiment of truth's tendrils,
winding around every lovely, loopy
imperfection
51
the blooms of spring's first
breath has given way to the
suffocating heat and weeds
of summer stagnation,
and i have stifled the misery
long enough to whisper her name,
hide it in my pocket, breathe it in
on days of stifle and sweat,
and i'll want for flowers but will
settle for the faintest ghosts of the
flirts of a gesture, the thin veil of
a touch, the tiniest taste of a distant
kiss stolen in spring's once sensuous
strings of rain
52
you are a pleasure of poetry that still
plays in that great pause before the
summer smacks all the spring's sweetness
from the stirrings in the heart
and only the stars can send me back to
you on those sweaty nights, the swelters
of the sky stealing the memories of your
mouth until the starlight presses its pretty
lips onto mine, projecting movies of you
onto the moon in my mind, your blue light
lying on me like a long ago lullaby, where
love was a song, and you were only a heartbeat
of lazy light away
53
you are a lily,
long and
wondrous white
and you hang
in repose,
petals ready to fall
into the puddle
of a kiss
54
i don't understand what it is about you
that hooks me so deep,
has me hung up,
always,
dangling over a fall—
&n
bsp; a plunge felt in the gut,
the one that feeds the butterflies
—a descent that spins the mind with
memories of your voice
saying my name,
tasting your beautiful noise on my lips,
knowing your ageless face
will forever be
etched on the screen of my sleep
in this sea of dreams
55
your hair dangles lazily over
your pretty face, elegant and
perfectly framing its symmetry
with something resembling
sunshine—warm from the serendipity
of the feeling that i've seen you before,
known you in the loveliest of ways,
and the dress you're wearing flows
over your body like waves of water
were massaging the skin beneath its
skirt,
and your legs are long and tan and
your ankles are tiny and tumultuously
beautiful when they sway your foot to
and fro like a thought were spinning
your mind around, making me dizzily
drunk on the perfume you've left in the
room just by being so perfectly a woman
56
you are a darkness muse,
a shadow across cool, blue water,
a dizzy dream made dizzier by the
flutter of your long, black lashes—
like butterflies opening your mouth
for a yawn—
and you breathe poems into me,
resuscitate songs, long and quiet
ones that cause dead flowers of time's past
to bloom around the sunlight reflected
off your hair, sending sunbursts off
memory's photographs, concealing the
fade of your face from my hungry hands,
but i search for you in the sands of the
darkest night's desert with the hope that
water wobbles atop this teetering
dream of wanted words
57
i've been looking skyward for you,
watching the shapes and curves of
clouds, measuring the wisps of white
fluff with bending fingers, trying to
manipulate the heavens from ground's
stingy perch,
and i breathe your name into these cottony
daydreams like some loopy sky writer,
and you are so beautiful on a backdrop of
blue—and blue so effortlessly finds beautiful
on you—that i may never look to the heights
without thinking of the daylight in your face,
or devising ways to carry it with me at night,
when dreams are dark and lonely and your
blue is hovering above sleep's sweet lucidity
58
you are a lazy flower, lying still,
waiting for the steamy summer
breezes to pluck your lavender
heart with its yellow smears of fingers
and
a kiss of blue lands on your lips
to moisten your pouty petals as
they drip one by one into the lush
morning green of july's brutal truths
and
the rain's weary whisper of hands caress
the reds, browns, and pinks of you, clings
to your gossamer meaning with wonders
of spring eyes—soft and tenderly held
with youngest grasps of wet fingers
59
she whistles sounds of softly birdsong
in my ears, rocks me gently from sleep,
wipes the drowsy dew from my morning
eyes, and shakes me from the web of
tired, tangled dreams
and when she kisses me softly across the
mouth, she shuffles the night away, and
pulls me deep into her sunshine,
and the day is new and bright, and promise
decorates the room like some undiscovered
color,
and i touch it—this color that radiates
from her skin—and it makes the softest, most
beautiful sound of bells breathing whimsical
secret worlds into my ears
60
when she laughs,
she sends a wave through me,
an innocent roll of thunder
that stirs something warm in the belly,
and nostalgia rises up
and electrifies old shivers,
and a light comes on in the mind
with a ding and a jump,
and i remember what it was like
to hold naked hope in my heart,
how tantalizing uncertainty was
when i was young
and the future was full
of the flowers of mystery,
splendidly stained by the shadows
of springs to come,
awash in the summers where
somewhere
a girl shines to remind me
61
my head is sore for wanting,
reaching for muses
among the clouds,
and the hazy sky
gives the world visions
of angels that spiral away
into wisps of stuttering stars,
and the poems i hoped i'd find
are lost in the mucky trails
of the moon
and travel across my eyes
like fireflies
or some memory
of her dancing
through the mist
on some rainy spring day—
her shape as hard to trace
as the horizon
when the moon is a lonely sliver
of white
and the stars are stained
by someone else's kiss
62
her hair falls over the fronts of her shoulders
in chestnut waves, and her breasts peek
out like natural parts of the landscape—a
lovely place to spend some time—traveling
with fingers, twisting those softest wisps,
tangling her tresses with playful hands,
kissing the flesh of the breasts as i wipe away
the air of her hair, bury all the noise beneath
her body and live in her lines, those clumsy
curves that make such a perfectly unclumsy
flower, and listen to her breath, hear her
speak in psalms—the music of life's deepest
meaning, meandering near a kiss, listening
to the ripple of the sweet streams of her
throat, the thrushes that rest on her lazy
limbs, blooms shot across her bough
63
her pink umbrella plays pretty music
under the rain,
the pitter plop of rain's wet feet gives
rhythm to her already graceful walk,
and she might as well be singing,
dancing beneath the grayest of skies,
giving light to the gloom that gloms
away the rest of the landscape,
a white light that shines like a star
waiting to fall, a bright shot across
the world for wishes and wayward
wings—the light where flight begins,
gives breath to the birds—
and hopestreams run everywhere,
waiting for the echo rings of her pinkest
rain to fly further, touch a deeper gray
into light
64
when she curls into a smile,
she pours promises from her pinkest pouts
of lips,
when she bends both hands a
round my arm,
she holds my hope in the heaps of those hands,
digs into my deepest dreams when the weight
of her sweetest thoughts meets my shoulder,
and late at night—in the mute, milky moonlight—
i watch her breathe poems from that lake of skin
that flows from where her chest meets her throat,
and she is my every poem, every verbal palpitation
marks future pages,
and it is the light from her whole heavenly body that
gives me illusions of kisses and disheveled hair,
the dizziness of tomorrow dances where hips
dip and swirl into night's water,
and someday—caught in the gloaming's fingers—
when we're gray with tired—white with weary—
we will still be slow together, still diving into
dreams,
dancing with the kisses that toss our hair
and swirl our hips—
she'll curl smiles,
and i'll catch the breath of her poems
65
she hones the hinges of her hips, knows
when they shift and swing, breathes
confidence on the bell that each sway
rings in the minds of men,
and she smiles to see them stop and
turn her way, a glimmer bounces in
her eye, and she swings her pretty
head, swiveling the neck so subtlely
that her hair traipses—with the tiniest
tips of its fingers—across her back and
shoulders,
and she laughs to think that the same
shiver she feels also shakes up and down
the spines of the boys she has been softly
speaking to by barely beating her wings
66
she is a gray pool in my brain's water,
caught in the electricity that buzzes blue
in dreams,
she kisses my sleep with portraits
of her body—porcelain and silk stretched
around her softest frame—
and she rests near the stream of time,
caught in the subtle, yet strong currents of
our enduring love,
her long fingers holding tight to the hot
stones of my heart,
a smile stretched across the hope on her
mouth,
her hair a slowly mudslide that reaches
for the brook of our memories,
babbling,
babbling
67
you are a pink stroke of paint, a pale
dot of flesh on the landscape of my
night's sleep,
a color that moves and breathes and
makes promises from old secrets,
wakes up long ago whispers that blow
as frequent as the winds that make
waves across the long, lazy strands
of greenery that surround you,
and the watercolor blues smeared above
you lean whiter to gray, teetering,
always, on the threat of raining you away,
your hands and your hair,
your words and your lips,
all could vanish like somewhere sand,
startled stardust, a twinkle trampled
by time,
a promise pushed aside by new paints,
pouring pouring pouring
68
she is the rhythm of my heart,
the red that breathes in my blood,
the substance that pokes my reverie,
the truth that tears me down and lifts
me up.
she is the stunning start of the seasons,
the first shuddering startle when the
rain purrs to a pour.
she is the sun of enlightenment when
i am wobbly and weak with the weight
of worry.
and she is the reason i work—
the push of pen to words and
words to poems—
when i'm lucky enough
to catch her whimsy
in the cups of my clumsy hands.
69
i can no longer trace the curves of
her body with my fingers, can't imagine
the height she carries on those long,
lost legs of hers, i can't remember the
shush of her whisper, or the sound of
her voice,
i've lost the secret sound of her fingers
folding into mine, and her lips are ghosts
that fade—like each kiss—right through
the holes in my memory,
and it all slips away into somewhere water,
a pool so deep that, if i jump, i'll never return,
only sink into the loops of memoryland, never
emerging, will be stillborn and breathless inside
these brief glimpses of her song, a fan dance
of light through the open ocean
70
she is an approaching storm,
the sweet rumble in the distance,
the crack that creaks across the sky
like some great ship on choppy water,
she is the curve of a cloud,
the wet in the rain,
the electricity in the lightning,
she is the devil in the details—
the girl that grows greater gardens
while i dream of distant lands,
touches the nighttime whispers until
the wind wakes me with its shocking caress,
a passionate kiss across the terra firma
of my mind
71
her round, Botticelli face was painted by
the softest fingers of renaissance angels,
stretching their wings to touch her ceramic
cheek, to feel the blood rush through a live
wire of moving art,
her paint was dried by the hand of the
miraculous cosmos, planting stars in
her eyes, swirling the dark muck of
the infinite unknowables that shape her
body for curiosity's attention, to spark
all of beauty's new inventions, where
dark matter meets the sweetest curl of
light
72
she is the how and the why,
the reason of my heart,
the rhythm of my song,
the method that trails travel in my mind,
and these paths
lead me to her pretty peonies,
everywhere popping with whispers
and side-long glances,
petals tiptoeing across my skin,
shining secrets like a light for my pen
73
her beauty bends credulity when she
wakes in my dreams, tipping the moon
with the weight of her whimsy,
and her laugh…
her laugh is like a thousand once darkened
stars have come to life in an instant,
and each bright light is a shiver i'll spend
my daylight hours chasing to translate,
but you can't make meaning from the
easy perfections of her song, let alone
make music from the miracle of her simple
smile, but each failing is a fathom worth
its weight in sleep's oceans
74
your legs are exposed
so high up your thigh
that they shine like Shangri-La—
reflect art on the artless—
and your long hair
dances over your shoulders,
down your back,
waiting in the stun of someone's stare
to shock the so
und of the heart
with love songs and sleep breaths,
to dreaming of better detours
through the words
that lie in your hands,
and the tales that are translated
through those fingertips of hair
that tickle the naked skin of your shoulders
float on layers of whispering poems
that bounce between your naked knees
75
i dream of falling down the muddy
waterfalls of the hair that so raggedly
hangs beside your face,
the color and the curls reduce my
mouth to mumbles,
but instead of lying my hand across
your softest slope of shoulder and leaning
into breathe the air of the earth that slips
by your ear,
my mind becomes an open aperture of
memory,
and my pen leaks light everywhere with
little poetries, where your mudslides make
mischief in this muse starved mind
76
her body is painted by the pastel
garden on her dress, a drip of a
dream pressed wet against her body,
and the petals slowly peel off the
skin to peer into her sky blue eyes
and push the scent of all her flowers
around the room,
and i have always wanted to see,
maybe touch, the sunshine she—
this singular girl of summer—hides
in her hair, to hear the earth beneath
her ache and grow—roots into tendrils,
tendrils into veins, veins into the skin
of softest spring breathing exhales of
her sweetest colors covering, momentarily,
all the world's darknesses
77
her soft, round face radiates the kind of
youth you see in renaissance paintings—
something angelic and glowing, white
with the slightest pinks of life coloring
the flesh—and you just know she tastes
like honey and milk, and that her skin
lies like silk across her body,
and she is full of the softest snow that
winter aches to recreate, and the clouds
constantly try to reinvent her with their
intricate chemistry, but their fingers,
the hands of the slightest blue atmosphere,
just can't create such soft ceramics as her
snowy arches and curves
78
it's true you're plain,
your clothes aren't flashy,
and your hair is lazily
tied behind your head,
your face shows little effort,
but your skin is as soft as your features,
and underneath those sloppy clothes
are curves and beautifully lines—
softly bending toward ecstasy
and when you let that lazy hair down
and shake it out for me,
there is a stutter in the light
that casts a shadow
on all the world but you
79
i thought i heard you call my name,
out of sleep, from the depths, where
the mind confuses memory for meaning,
and it startled my heart with the rapidity
of a revving thing
and my body purred and was moved like
light through an electrical current, and a
rush of goodness ran over my skin
and the world, my world, met me through
the gauze of no more sleep, and i was
dreamless, dying for your water, clutching
for more meaning in the lightning beneath
the veil
80
her eyes are startles of starry
skies, and when i fall through
those skies, i sink into plumes of
clouds swarmed with white lights—
bright with bliss—
and those lights are the glimmering
kind, the kind that shake and swim
on the surface of the dreams that
stream from memories made opaque
by the rain,
and dripping stars conjure mischief
sculptures on the screen of these celluloid
rivers, and i count every light, every jagged
kiss of ours, and they're as clear as the sound
the heart makes when i hear you call my name,
feel your eyes like fingers of rain on my skin
81
she'll always be a dancer in my mind,
spinning poems from her pretty tendrils
of pirouettes, pliés and tiptoes, peeling,
always, new fruits for me to try and taste
she paints moonbeams on the canvas of
my remembers—where art stands, eternally,
near the thrill of forgets—with the soft strikes
of her satin slippers,
and she presses—on-pointe, arms stretching
elegantly to calm the clouds—startles
of flesh that stain my quiet moments with
the dizzy lights of daffodils and daydreams
82
does she know that her thighs hold a
thicket that flows to heavenly places,
where smears of wild flowers grow and
smell so sweet that my teeth ache at the
sight of their saccharine stained colors?
and yet the sound of the thicket, moving,
murmuring into the great yellow divide—
where the divine hides its mysteries—that
sound is enough to drink from in dream,
but truly drinking would be too real, would
make all other dreams wither away, all her
gardens' sugar would dissolve on the tongue,
and all the flowers, all her colors, would run
down her thighs like a shadow of kisses
fading into sleep
83
she is a precarious flower on those long
stems of legs, winding and unwinding
tendrils of nervous thought around her
thin wire frame,
and she breathtakingly bends her lines
around my mind, planting seeds, dropping
trails of petals back to her smooth, white
fronds of palms waiting to collapse, petal
by anxious petal, finger by fretting finger,
around my lazy lines, lyrics trembling for
the shapes she makes into songs
84
her hair's a beautiful mess tossed aside
for shoulder-draping, crawling over her ears
to whisper seashores, to murmur the secrets
of spring's flowers,
the delicate cirrus of each slithery strand holds
all her past touches, feeds glimmers of every spark
that's ever run up her back, every shiver of every
kiss,
and my fingers comb through every miracle, catch
all the magic as i run over those muddy falls in a
whimsical frenzy that drops petals like magnolia
snow
85
april's slightest spring sun
sends whispers of you,
memories coming unglued
from winter's night,
and i hold tight,
grasping every faded memory
with fists
firmly clasped together,
like i were holding onto
your last gasp of air,
squeezing your final whisper,
softly choking the end of a wish
&nbs
p; 86
she's lovely and long,
a pink drink from head to toe,
languidly lounging
like some reclining venus
to make Manet blush
87
those waves of your amber rain of hair wash
out the clarity of days, sends me to uncertain
skies where clouds climb the bluest walls of
kisses, reaching,
reaching for the mystery of your darkest eyes,
waiting to touch your nighttime waters, to taste
the rush of your starry fingers in my mouth,
feeling for infinity, planting it on my heart with
a burst of Indra's net, sending endless shimmers
across my soul, exploding like dust across this
clutter of cosmos, climbing over endless
convulsions of joy and pure, white, lovely
laughter
88
her streams of curves
cracked open my sleep last night,
making maps from memory,
flowing from one end of my mind
to the other,
her sweet blue-gray water
stirred old sensations,
and i stole a drink of a kiss
from her mouth
for love remembering, touch feeling,
and i stole the sound of her smile
from a swirl of liquid laughter
rushing over the rocks,
and rolled with it
toward the falls—so deep
and the rain will never stop,
will fall and fall,
descend slowly, softly, eventually,
into snow
89
she is the wisps of fog that hide the treetops,
she is the rain, waiting near the water—too
small to fall—curving elegantly over tides
of sky,
and when the morning breeze blows a wish over
her fingers, the leaves tremble for a touch
and the sun licks every limb up and down
until her memory is washed across the water,
and this new day's skin waits for her wind, wants
to curl up under the weight and wobble of her
rain, waiting for rainbows to meander toward
moonbeams,
and i'll make a wish as the moonlight mesmerizes
the surface of a puddle, wait for the morning, and
watch the wisps of her fog stretch out her fingers
to the tips of the trees as tickles of teardrops fall
effortlessly into
