A POEM A DAY

I'm just happy to be here.

Tag: zachary caballero

April 17, 2014

16/30

“Mama. What’s vacation?


Vacations when you go somewhere…and you never come back.”

-Forrest Gump

TO THE WOMAN I LOVE, WHO IS STILL ON VACATION

I changed my mailing address, but I don’t think that matters.
You can forget about the refrigerator magnets. Something tells me
the magnet wouldn’t attract anything anyway.

What is left of yours remains in the lost and found of who
we once were. I rummage through it at least once a week
to keep the dust a dance away from deluge.
I went weeks deluded, convinced the months would
run out of ways to move forward, pretended my bedroom
would become baggage claim, and you would see me convulsing
on the conveyor belt like being yours made my blood
want to leave too, so perhaps I can’t blame you
or perhaps I just wanted nothing more than your touch
to topple me to pieces, for your hand to burn through the wreckage
and wake up a bird perched against the worst of it.

I am a coward when it comes to claiming
But still bury myself with so much baggage. This body
has blackened into a fisted ballast, a broken knuckled
ballad that probably sounds like elevator music
repeating forever, the pieces picked apart, a part
of me is still wishing you were here a part of me
still wants to be the place where you go even if it
is only to take what is left of yours

I can’t be in a room with an open door anymore.
Ajar. I know what a jar is. It’s where I pretend our love preserves itself
only the lid is always open and you are always going
bad, or back, or ahead.
Ahead. I know what a head is. It’s where I hear myself
raise the worry into bread. Our love,
a spoiled loaf, an oath that tore like a one-way ticket
stub that said everything but stay, or sorry, or
I’ll be back for you.

I don’t know where people go when they leave a place
or a person they never want to return to, but I hope the exit
wound is clean. I cannot keep caring about maps and the lines
they leave for me to follow. As far as I am concerned, they all end
the same. 

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April 17, 2014

15/30

ARGUMENTS AGAINST MYSELF II.

Again, with this?

You go to bed gnarled by how long it has taken to see what is not there.
You sleep quiet, ignore the other half of the bed, and this pretending is
now a lullaby. The brim reach of solitude has spilled, flooded and
and now everything you own, occupied by lonely, a piece of driftwood
refusing to go to anywhere and what do you do?

Why we all know you sink, precious. By morning you surface possessed
by love, more porous and less afraid of blisters, more aware of bursting
than ever and oh this means you are a shipwreck, or a ghost, or simply
a remainder of what the world forgets the most. But the sea is yours to
suffer with or against, and sleep drifts like a quiet anchor, afraid to choose
whose heart to sink its teeth into.

Oh, alluva sudden you undid your faults. Just done, like that.
You make yourself joy
sink your teeth into displeasure
drag your mouth in the mud
And this makes a meal?
How many words have you made a meal with
before you washed your hands?
You want to be the river but know nothing of clean water.
Is this why you boil so gently?

 

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April 17, 2014

14/30

I am drinking Vietnamese coffee
Iced, cream heavy
As the night
I need to drink
Up.

It is easy this time.
The girl across from me
nods the night through the
roof of her voice box.
Fills her mouth with hot air and fire.
Reaches into me by keeping the heat
off her hands. Skins me by the teeth of her
smile so now I am as thin as
her hair galloping by
on a breeze, either leaving or returning
or both. Either way I am exquisite at the
fickle way her lips fissure.

Above her an EXIT
recommends itself, but the night
and the moment is too heavy to leave
just yet. The coffee
is sweating against my palm,
I cannot help but let go of
what is already melting. Besides
I have my hands hung in neon,
my palms forever glowing
OPEN and I don’t think she notices.
but oh, I hope she knows.

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April 17, 2014

13/30

 

ARGUMENTS AGAINST MYSELF

You busy yourself with the trouble of translating disaster
as if there is something dear to dismantle besides
yourself. This does not make you a writer. It makes you a
chump, another darling calamity caught. You have hooked
the raw of your jaw against a silent cat call. Only you know the phone number
to every ringing heart and you still long for everything. The longing calls
and the answer lasts. This makes you question your own warranty.

Now you are worrying.
For what? You cannot collapse the loudness belonging
to a body born a boom box. The volume knob gnaws like a
crappy chorus I cannot help but swallow along to. Since most of me
is made of tremble, I cannot help but scatters decibels when
someone spits a licking so loud I lash from the way happiness
and sound both open my mouth, how sloppy song step out
in suit and tie my tongue into a tune.

This does not make you a harmonica. I tell myself again.
It makes you a hoarder. Yes. People are plentiful creatures,
but they only distract. With all they profess, their plenteous
confessions come in waves and sometimes they stay
too long, sometimes they hover in the air
the hot air of a lost lover or was it leaver?
The hot air of a lost leaver now porous
now a perfume performing overhead using the headboard as a stage,
your bed head is heavy with what you keep losing. Aren’t you
listening?

I overheard you complain about who’s in your head
and how it is impossible to get over her, and you cursed
your body for being a river instead of a bridge. You lose
yourself in relationships already lost, convince your tired heart
that loving is alive because you remember it. But don’t you remember
the night time? How you forgot love, and washed whatever you had left
in the dirt water of what you remember. Is this what you meant by
giving yourself to tremble? Boy, you are so in your head, you haven’t
heard any of this, have you? Aren’t you
listening at all?

 

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Aside | April 15, 2014

12/30

There is nothing in my stomach and the only thing unusual about this is my surprise at the growling. What meaty emptiness I provide for myself. What myth of fullness I cannot help but cavil against. It’s not that I abstain from consumption, but that I confuse how much force I must use when I am swallowing food and people, so I withdrew my tongue because I still have a hard time choosing. This is nothing new. I am history, repeating itself. Have I said that before?

Whenever I ran out of lunch money, I refused to tell my mother. I feared the things my mouth might say when I tried to tell her I am empty today. Thought hunger could be helped if I kept it to myself, so the boy in me became a king of self-consumption. Craving kept me royal. How majestic must one pretend his breaking is? I eat, sure. I do. But don’t you know I can’t always stop myself?

There is nothing in my stomach, but this stopped being strange. It has become something like familiar, or was it similar? I guess it is both, or either, or neither, or even now as I dive deeper into my belly, I am biting my tongue at all the terrible, even now it is dinner and I am still appalled at all the room left in my mouth. Have I said that before?

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April 14, 2014

11/30

LOCAL MAN GULPS STATE’S BEAUTY OVERNIGHT Last night, local poet and native Texan, Zachary Caballero, watched the sun spill into a field of bluebonnets, when he decided to open his mouth and gulp the beauty of it all before it set, devastating his body, scorching his throat, all in an attempt to store his chest with heaps and heaps of gold, his closest friends report. Mr. Caballero’s mother found the twenty-two year old optimist passed out drunk on her front lawn this morning, when thousands of Texans woke to find the sun weeping. Nearly every river ran scared when they woke to an empty bed for the first time. There is nothing left to sing about, as swarms of Mockingbirds roam the bruised body of God’s country, searching for life in the belly of a man, for what remains is not due to what is left, but who is left? The sun set last night at seven twenty-six p.m. The temperature stayed a faithful seventy degrees, while the entire day tried to stay awake, until all the petals, and all the trees, and all the people that spend most their time trying not to leave, arrived in the thirsty mouth of Zachary Caballero. Friends of Mr. Caballero claim he has always had a big mouth, with an even bigger heart. They know this because he swallowed himself whole once, and came back by Spring. They know this because he weeps at the grocery store whenever the mangoes go away. They know this because he has kept the grey of every day, and refuses to say so. So they say. Numerous attempts have been made to communicate with Mr. Caballero, as thousands of Texans are wondering when they will look at something beautiful again. It is difficult to tell how the wildlife have been affected, but it is assumed that unless the state begins again, even the predators will have to pray.  When asked to comment, Mr. Caballero opened his mouth without a single word falling out. Instead, the water returned to their bodies, and went back to bed. A chorus collapsed half of West Texas as mockingbirds heard the silence turn to stone. He took every part or particle of God from his oddly-raptured body and gave the gulf back its grief, scraped his bones clean of mercy and saw the devil towns disappear when he was done dancing. When his mother discovered her son, she saw him wearing the smile he was born with, and when asked about her son’s peculiar behavior, she simply replied, “He does this all the time.”

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Aside | April 14, 2014

10/30

I loved a woman made of white noise for so long
It wasn’t until I threw my heart into my mouth
for the last time that I realized her static song echoed
the loudest whenever I decided to leave.

When the good left, and nothing but the bye remained
I burned the last of her from me and drank hot tea in the dark
to calm the scattered static that greets me whenever I am hungry for her again.
The tea didn’t tuck the storm happening inside me asleep
so I built a ravine out of bed sheets and burned books,
caught the rain water between stories that were not afraid to melt
and thought myself sturdy like that too.
So I boiled most of my body down to brass
’cause even though she, my once darling darling,
picked me clean from her teeth like rotten meat,
I still like what happens when I cool inside another’s mouth
how melancholy breathes an impossible beat
how my tongue is tearing its skin into miles of brass in the heat
and even though I am singing the blues back to the sky
I am reminded that loving a  woman made of white noise does not make me a songbird,
it just means I love without thinking, it just means I did not need to think to love her
I just did.
And even if the static she left made me second-guess all the color in my breath
I still got the blues burning through me and
though I know it though ain’t much,
at least I can finally get some rest.

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April 13, 2014

9/30

What strange hum fluttered inside this
featherweight of a boy
when he found himself falling
with the wind?

It was the everything that
made me music.
It was the everything that
made me howl ‘til I ached
myself away.

I tell myself
nobody owns my wilderness
but even that feels false
too.

I do not believe in eternity
per say,
but I do know that most
of me will be forever translating feeling
from fiction or fact or ash
and that I cannot ask questions
without second-guessing
what is said next, but isn’t
what’s next always a guess?

Tomorrow is there as it has
always been but it does not
begin until we say so and that
is a terrible truth to swallow.

The swallow of everything is terrible
but only because not everyone thinks
it is music and so they do not lose themselves
in the falling, but I know now
to land is to know love
again.
I know to be a featherweight of a boy
is to feel the fall days long
but it ain’t as bad as it seems.

Whenever the wind leaves now
what comes out is not a tired
sad strung but a humble hum
that I refuse to let leave
my lungs.

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April 9, 2014

8/30

I am sitting under a tree when all of a sudden
form matters. The branches of my body
interrupt the sky so quietly, I cannot
understand how my
almond skin can crack into a thousand pieces
and still be enough to snap the sunlight
when all of a sudden I remember
it is Spring in Texas and I am a sap for
seasons that surrender and people that
remember how to
too.
On days when the wind is a wish,
it is impossible
to trace the blue in the sky without
becoming it. I kiss a bluebonnet
with lips light as fever and the entire state
begins again.

I set my sun hands against my body
and break into myself to see what
fruit is left.
I am forever
finding fields of lost treasure so most days
all I think of is the buried bloom and how this
must be what the earth feels too when we
consume her heirlooms and do not tell our
our tongues to slow dance in chew.

When Vincent Van Gogh saw Almonds blossom
he did not think of me. He thought of his new nephew
and of life, beginning again. Ol’ Vince saw almond trees
blossom against the backdrop of everything
we know as home and heard parturition
part his paint brush into
Have you ever wanted to
borrow the blossom of some other fruit?
I swear some days, I am a mango tree,
or a man made of mango, or maybe just some
other man. Either way
I’m familiar with being a sweetheart,
with eating my heart out of some other
body until all my blood cells gush gold,
and now I am better than I once was
the best of me is what happened when
the rest of me stopped sleeping in graveyards
and started digging gardens. Now all
the hard that once was
laughs on my lips,
the soft flesh of what is left
simply lingers like a first kiss
or a last breath.

My mother told me I was the first kiss of spring
so I know how to surrender my mouth
without unbecoming. I denounce the wreckage
of every previous season because all the winter
did was tell me what I was not. All the autumn did
was love me to death. All the summer did was
make my heartbreak humid. So, yes. I want
To be part of spring’s announcement. I want
To feel the flowers finally firework
inside of me without having to set myself on fire.

Can anyone tell me
What it means to see a beautiful thing
and have your first thought be
“please don’t ever leave?”
Can anyone tell me
what it means to see yourself
as a beautiful thing?
I have waited most of the harvest season
to manifest but only because
I respect the process.
I gave myself to graveyards all my life
but when the sky surrenders
itself to love like it does,
what else am I to do
but fall in love in with myself too?

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April 8, 2014

7/30

Duke Ellington sang to me about Solitude
all before noon so yes,
it was a good morning.

Before the good morning, I dreamed
I kissed a woman just by saying her name
right. A tongue spellbound by 
the will to not fuck up is 
how I woke up all majestic
in the mouth.
That’s why the blueblonnets
blush like they do. I sing all
spring, That’s why death forgets
for a while.
While death forgets, 
I remember the lyrics.

In my solitude
You haunt me
With dreadful ease
Of days gone by

In my solitude
You taunt me
With memories
That never die

I sing it slow cause I know what it means
to pray to god and have nothing but
jazz make you feel soft
again. And to be soft is to be
sorry for the hard.
And I think that’s significant.

When I drove home after work today
I coulda swore Duke sang to the
sky about solitude too
and God
was drunksad too
so the whole state wept. In other news,
a man on the radio spoke about how
Jesus became God 
simply because the people
said so. Said suicide was
confirmation of what they spoke
that when you kill yourself
and still spill forgiveness
that you become something else.
Holy was what it was.

To speak yourself holy.

So yes,
I had a good day.

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