SMITH, Marc


Kiss It

If you need to kiss it,

Kiss it.

If you need to kick it,

Kick it.

If you need to scream it,

Scream it.

But kiss it, kick it, scream it

Now.

If you need to leave it,

Leave it.

If you need to love it,

Love it.

If you need to hold it,

Hold it.

But leave it, love it, hold it

Now.

If you need to squeeze it,

Squeeze it.

If you need to spill it,

Spill it.

If you need to tell the world

You've got more to you

Than the world has as of yet

Allowed you to be,

Then be it, tell it, spill it,

Squeeze it out of each instantaneous moment.

Make the juice, the jive, the jazz, the jism,

The mysticism that ism you!

Grab at the moon!

And hold the stars hot inside your head.

'Cause now is all there ever was

And all there ever will be.

So kiss it, kick it, scream it

Now!


Something

There is something of something around us.

A something of something heard sometimes

In the sound of a single instrument at play.

There is a brilliance and a death in each note

That reverberates off the string

Into the wind, into the breath of the wind;

Like a sigh that precipitates upon our perceptions

Unnamed, unsolved resolution;

Resolution building like white cumulonimbus clouds

Above city skyline stone and steel,

Above platforms and pedestrians,

Stone walks and fountains,

Above pigeons and passers-by to be.

Building more mysteriously

Than the unseen pressure of air

That builds over idle sun porch afternoons

Where idle manuscripts

Silent so long upon a silver stand

Are suddenly overturned by

New accords of weather sounding with every breath

New rattlings, new taps of the branch against the window,

New scratchings at the door begging to be brought in.

There is something in the wind, in the music, in the loneliness

That carries us back to the beginning

To the cloud's face, to the yellow jacket's churr,

To the parting and the convergence,

To the dark red rapture within the bone's marrow.

And whatever that something is

Contained in the wind, in the music, in the loneliness,

It strains against its boundaries

To be found, to be free,

To be resolute in the storm bent bending of stems,

In the beating rapture of rain,

In the vibrations of the strings set to motion

By fingers commanding allegiance

From each of the keys as they are played

By that something of something around us.