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Wendy E. Braun – This Existence

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Drafting: Sandalwood Saints

-I am working through the drafting process on this one. When I write, I like to work through a few drafts, playing with perspective, tone, and structure. Right now this poem is going through a bit of a fragmented phase. In this version, I am trying to maintain the lyrical qualities while discerning the places in which something more needs to occur.

Rise to drink the elixir of  Kailas before the first rays of dawn forever alter it.

Chant from texts and divine a time before the printed page demanded a certain weight, and divinity rose from the universe within.

Bathe in oils of amber and the sandalwood saints who wax awakenings of ascended masters.

Then walk to your own precipice with each step offer a mantra of awareness.

***

She rises in the early hours to drink of Kailas before the red of dawn forever alters it.

She chants from texts in a tongue divining a time before the printed page, demanded a certain weight, and transcendence arose from the universe within.

Alone, she bathes in oils of amber and the sandalwood saints wearing awakenings of ascended masters.

Walking to her precipice, a pause and then with each step she offers a mantra of awareness.

 

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I can say…

anything here.

More than I have been allowed in years
and years of words,
of shame,
of love,
of wonderings like wine spilling over empty cups
and hives that drown in their own honey.

I looked to Anteros but he only offered silence.
Winged things understand little of the distance.

The gods cannot comprehend the chasm
where I’ve focused my gaze and immersed
beliefs in dancing shadows,
how it divides and swallows up
all that is known or what could be if
certainty existed at all.

My love walks a wire,
each step promising something more salient and yet
they say I’ve cried away the bits of light that illuminate.

I’ve cried hovering there and balanced between
the book of flying weighted against the history of love
without rescue from you because you
are like the white stag of winter
elusive in all forms.

There is that nothing space where tears create a river
for wild things with fins and things with wings
and there I am with arms,
and legs,
and a wire.

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Dollies for Our Daughters

By: Wendy E. Braun

We give our daughters dolls with perfect noses and silken hair,
painted lips and wide hips, they suppose are meant for
late night dancing.

A purple haze over eyes so large with glancing glints
a hint of Nietzschen wisdom blossoming,
like raindrops caught on broken bottles
sleeping on sidewalks in the early morning.

They run their thumbs across baby breasts
that rise from fat too young to spawn the growing,
while drawing puce perfection across the masks
of the marred identities they’re etching.

Our daughters trace on larger lips to plump to a prince’s passion,
without understanding the prestige of purple
that will come from his pushing and pulling.

They wonder when legs might match Dolly’s
so long and lean not knowing what we are forgetting…
Skirts that short don’t allow for bending,
while parts that pop can’t be rejoined
in an easy mending.

Eyelids that glance just so with a glint
of youthful sophistication,
lead to lost shoes, and city streets,
and backseat broken dreamings.

Our daughters cry when the waist is less than nimble
and the reflection fails to match that symbol wrapped in cellophane,
where afflictions are boxed and free from pain.

We give our daughters molded lies
and hope for something more,
while they paint on scant smiles
purchased on clearance
by a boy at the secondhand store.

ON A PERSONAL NOTE: I work with children and have watched many of them mature over the years. Although I know that the day will come when they will struggle with a societal persuasion of beauty, I can’t but feel rather heartbroken when a ten-year-old wants to wish away the “fat” on her hips. There are some things that we forget over time, but even now I can still recall when I was teased for the chest that wasn’t, the baby faced reflection and longed to be the girl that was noticeably maturing. In retrospect, it seems there wasn’t much worth wanting what I didn’t already have within me.

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Grieve Like the Red Tin Soldier

By: Wendy E. Braun

The taste in the cotton folds
of the pillowcase,
damp drool stained
scent of unwashed hair and sweat.

A cry for something,
someone or maybe
just the high hopeless notes
that fall in alleys
like trees in that empty forest,
ripples of a voice
that can’t be placed…

Only the weight of it,
like an old tin soldier,
whose red paint is
chipping in your hands.

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Goodnight to the Army of Mice

By: Wendy E. Braun

The Starlings moved into the kitchen wall over a month ago, and I couldn’t help feeling like they belonged there, my apartment a testament to what would have been, been careful not to wake them when brewing breakfast. I had felt that way about the mice until I opened the cabinet last Sunday and found an army of mice or evidence of the stench of them. The Starlings can stay, but as in all good tales…

I laid out bricks of poison the way the government hands out welfare checks and minimal benefits. We all die with full bellies in the end and are angry for the expense of cleaning up the waste.

In my twenties I cried when my roommate trapped a mouse, its small grey paws glued to a tray like tar on a desert road. Black eyes wide, rounded ears white lined with pink veins, sound pulsing through the fragile frame. She caught me trying to apply grease to its paws and promptly placed it into a plastic bag to ensure the last breath. You see, she had gone after it with an umbrella, which I could never understand, or why it was the problem when the roaches had been the ones to spoil the fruit in the basket, and it was the Bronx, and we were still young.

Yesterday my neighbor scored a raccoon with marshmallow bait, and now its law to end it all owned land equaling a general lack of relocation. Somewhere inside my walls, the mice are dying, and raccoons with bellies full of sweets rot, and thank god for the Starlings wings, and pray that the landlord doesn’t care as he cares little for the mice. But save me from the dreams where the stinkbugs cover my eyes and my mouth, because they are the only ones that I know how to get out, and don’t we just want to get out, all of us out.

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He Has Hung the Chimes

By: Wendy E. Braun

He feeds the birds
in moonlight –
cracked shells
in small mounds scatter
across the pavement.

A wind came and
shattered the feeder
some months ago.

Faded wood rests
on an old iron rod.

The door asks the post
to leave the packages;
he can’t hear the bell.

Still, he feeds the birds,
and cleans the chimes.

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Armageddon

By: Wendy E. Braun

He said,
“I wanted to see the end of the world.”
And I said,
“You can’t, because it hasn’t happened yet.”
He said,
“Don’t be smart.”

And I thought about that–
and then the stars,
and the way light travels
through the universe,
even when they have
lost their glow,
and then how
it all ends,
and when we end,
and if we do
it won’t be over
because
we will
still be
light
traveling
and matter–
floating.

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Millions of Moons

By: Wendy E. Braun

Watching,
tracking the patterns,
thoughts like moons
aligning in orbits

Something to be
had in
watching
silently.

Again, yes there it is
the collapsing of
one thought
into another like
dying planets dwarfed.

So many stars,
and millions of moons.

3

By: Wendy E. Braun

If on a winter’s night a traveler, like you
should come along and wake me from my slumber
or cause one greater then I had hoped
I will slam the door so promptly that it
will bump spring into being,
as to dissolve the “if” into
non-existence, so that he
who travels finds himself on
a train practicing dharma with a bum,
but not a bum but rather another
traveling man with wisdom
and desire for an open road
that extends out and into something
so other, something quite other than this
— then this and so on to the roads of Albuquerque
where the running spirits of the Pueblos dance
in the dreams of the cabbies whose cost is too high.

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