Let Us Go Then

Let us go then, you and I
and wade into the sea
where the shifting sands beneath our feet
no longer question our souls’ intent
and the swirling salt water washes
through our fragile longing
like the stars that rush
through our bodies
and disappear
toward an unknown
destination.

My fingers will always know
the details of your
spine in the small
of your back,
and the feel of your hair
my hand sifts though
and without knowing all
the colored
details of your life,
I will recite the song of your eyes
with the depth of its
wisdom.

Yet they hold so many stories
I have yet learned to read.

And want to.

Copyright (c) 2010 Paul Matsumoto. All Rights Reserved.
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I See You in Colors

I am pretending you did not exist.
Ink nightly washes black
over my consciousness
and abandons me as morning seaweed
upon a foreign beach.

I am pretending we were simply
the sparkling imagination of some higher being,
our life together set below a singular epic sky
unrepeated
in future histories

I am pretending I cannot taste you
each day as I do the sea air in my breath
when I am running,
my heart tied upon one foot,
ancient melancholy tied upon the other,
anxiously racing,
madly racing through lifetimes,
to find our brightened souls.

I see you in colors that don’t exist.

It is all that I see clearly.
and why I run.

Copyright (c) 2009 Paul Matsumoto. All Rights Reserved.
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The Blessings of True Fables

Outside the Palace of Fine Arts
the brassy bedouin gifted
this uneasy teen
her guitar.
And as
he slipped beneath
the sassy spell of
crazed voodoo spirits,
wicked fingers blazed
electric on its strings,
and wailed alongside the waif’s bluesy
this-is-the-last-song-I-will-ever-sing voice.
A mic in one hand and swigs of
Southern Comfort from her other,
she would dub him “Raoul”,
an unsung
discovery,
sober no longer
in the drunken
merriment
of the spring moment
that would never
leave him.

Weeks passed.
Time stopped again
as music channeled
from some
other distant life took hold,
and ephemeral summer
magic howled
its symphony,
then took sudden flight as a thief
in the stolen
night
never to return.

Sadly, Janis soon passed as well.

The young man grew older,
accomplished
many other things
in his life,
until the last sepia’d memory
of Raoul faded
to white.

One day a lost friend,
a godchild unseen
in decades,
passed as a ghost
through his thoughts.
As if by whim, he typed random numbers
into the address bar.
Her profile splashed
on the screen.
He was startled,
delighted.
It was magic!
She’d moved across a continent
and an ocean,
eight time zones away,
and yet here she was
before him.

Conversations followed.

And he smiled.

Raoul had never left.

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

“He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
–W.B. Yeats