Visual Aid

Here in the dark language fails.
Your hand traces rivers on the map
of my back. They all flow south.

You look at me without speaking
but I need to fill this space, make manifest
the destiny I feel lying naked in your arms.

Language fails. I can not explain
what you will find as your explore me.
I want to warn you, to tell you

I am riddled with danger, mountains
of snow, and valleys of hurt, miles and miles
of solitude. But you are young and brave

and your fingers are so gentle on my skin.
I will guide you. Together maybe
we’ll reach the far shore. Language fails

but the maps do not lie. You draw
me closer. I press my words to your mouth
and let the warm waters rise.

another old one

Written my senior year at BG while I was taking a Psychology of Language class. I'd kind of forgotten about this poem. Actually I remembered writing it, and who it was written "about", but didn't remember much of it clearly. When I went back and read it today, I liked parts of it. This is actually a slight edit; I took out the set of lines that were really a vindictive commentary on the specific person, and made a couple of other very small changes. There were several people in my creative writing cohort who wrote a lot of very intelligent poems based in other academic disciplines (art, physics, music, chemistry, etc) and this sort of fit into that same mold, in a way, though it's got my particular penchant for the sex/romance/personal aspect as well.

Regressive Saccade

The eyes do not only move forward
when reading, but backward too,
fixating on words already seen,
an effort to comprehend. And not all words
are equal - fixation varies
according to frequency, plausibility, length.

I think of seeing you
naked when we made love,
how seldom it happened – you’d shut off
the lights, dress after, your body
still a mystery shrouded in sheets;
and how I never thought
it would work between us, but tried
anyway while you hid yourself
from me with cotton and lies.

The average time of fixation
is 200 milliseconds, but a poor reader
may take 500 or 1,000, wasting
a whole second on one unworthy
set of letters. Our duration
was one month, long enough to learn
my initial reading had been correct:
a non-word, there was no meaning.
I had performed badly on this task,
wasted time, failed to let my eyes move;
but I know that learning has occurred,
the brains tiny neurons will remember
this pattern, next time I will know better.

something old

going through some old poems from college recently and came upon this little one, which i always liked.

Limitations

The greatest failing of evolution
is that human beings never developed
the ability to purr, express pure
contentment.

Instead, they use looks and sounds
ambiguous, or words forced out
to clutter up moments
like teacups left on tables.

If language is the one field
in which humanity excels,
this is proof we still
have much to learn.