Jurado

JURADO is still producer of the Flying Fish Poetry Show Channel 34 MNN

cable TV in Manhattan, NY. Our resident magic realist in NYC, Jurado

was among RealPoetik's first contributors. He can be reached at

meta4@octet.com.

War Cry

Write about reasoning

over illusions that fool the mind,

obfuscate genuine thought

like--- art for art's sake.

Every war has been rationalized.

Picasso painted Guerneca

with cubist brushstrokes

marching in bold angular lines,

goose-stepping across a giant mural,

reinventing painting

with a feverish blitzkrieg

distortion.

So I sketch this scenario:

Over a wartime munitions

factory

with 8 smokestacks,

an armada of planes appears,

menacingly shaped

in a giant V-wing formation.

The planes have their bay doors

open,

and drop hundreds upon hundreds of

children;

long streams of them

fall,

flapping, awkward, dangling

and break backs and faces

on the railcars below,

attacking the bombs below

with the thud

of their whistling voices.

THE PRAYER OF THE APPLE

This is the apple tree that thinks

a man

is its soul.

You can make a door

from this apple tree

upon which you knock but once

and leave your philosophical treatises

concerning the nature of God.

You can make a strong bed

from this apple tree

upon which you can make love to a woman

who wears apple seed earrings.

It is written:

"I am the apple that eats the worm."

She says:

"My skin is spinning all along my body."

Taking her first bite, she whispered:

"I belong to the skin of an apple."

It is written:

"Eat only the seed, and throw away the apple."

She says:

"But I want to live

inside this apple seed."

After she showed me her breasts,

I knew too much.

We once lived in a tree-house

in paradise.

The Swing

It is the last cricket of gone summer.

The cricket's song is soft and low,

slipping all around me, sweetening

into the echoes of a cool October.

And the sun sets

on a silver swing,

swaying

in this Cricket's far off song.

It is the last cricket in hard Autumn,

playing its dirge

over the pumpkin farm,

all still by the cemetery on a hill.

A child's swing moves so thin

it shines like a blade

in these last

rays of sunset,

it has to be dimensionless.

It is only the wind, tossing it

empty in the air.

It's a Zen swing

when it stops

suddenly.

Yet, what pokes here and about,

vibrates in staccato barbed wire

beyond that fenced hill

with the radio tower,

up there, where a rabbit basks

on a sunset colored ridge,

from where it wiggles its ears

like Fred Astaire with a top hat,

this is where I turned the pages,

yellowed like an old newspaper,

reading Spinoza.

There's something resonant

in the elementary school lawn,

like when Mickey opened the centerfold

of that magazine

with those nude pictures

and a glass bottle fell from the sky,

broke nearby into shards,

and we all touched

Mickey's bleeding forehead

as he levitated above us.

Here the field bends

memories and dreams

with stereo gravity.

A sense of time outdoors

changes indoors.

I discovered it again

when I heard the metronome

of a pumpkin being carved

in the shape of the world,

transformed

by whispers, hushes, and hesitations.

There behind the shed,

I heard the chop

of the black knife

cutting the symmetry of

the swing in the playground.

On earth, sound is difficult to muffle.

Where once I heard playing children,

not far from the old cemetery,

I see a skull getting loose, rolling downhill,

and dropping into the pumpkin patch,

ready for carving.

I hear a hard Autumn, clapping

all around me in falling leaves.

Something opens my eyelids,

rubs my eyelashes together

with the migrating birds,

the dying insects,

the changing of the season,

the mark upon my forehead.

And with a soft heartbeat

and legs that shake like a butoh dancer,

I examine the applause.

And I rake huge piles of leaves

joining them together,

making a scarecrow

so hideous

it will scare my own death away,

this Halloween.

Jurado