JOSE OSEGUERA - POEMS

More superstitious than he would like to admit, Jose lives his life based on the patterns he perceives are developing before him; mainly those in numbers, music, literature, film, and wayward coins his long walks encounter. A published writer of poetry, short fiction, and literary nonfiction, Jose likes to tell stories from the perspective of marginalized people in society; the unspoken hero and the misunderstood villain. He wishes to discover more of the wondrous secrets the Universe has strewn about in the beauty of all nature and people, and in the smallest things that go often go unnoticed.

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​A SPIRIT THAT SEIZES

​A SPIRIT THAT SEIZES
 
 
 
All is noise;
Everything under the sound of purest sunlight,
The budding of petals,
Thoughts prancing over the mind’s crevasses.
Silence is noise, in harmony                                               
They live as one, their essence
Human ear cannot discern--
Dark from light, clay from flesh, exhale of life from inhale of death--
In all that is done and undone, spoken and unspoken,
Seen and unseen,
All that is and isn’t
Alive here or in the hereafter.
Narcissus seeking serene beauty,
Seducing his coy mistress
Echo, who in turn, became the mistress of Silence, never
To sing from her heart, but from her ears.
Noise is all;
An ocean we seek to drown in,
Yet refuse the lungs of its nurturing waters--
Casting out demons when the ghost seeks communion--
One with the rippling waves.
The noise without to silence the noise within
Noise on top of noise; one to drown the second,
As blood shed on blood-soaked earth
So innocent blood will not be shed.
 
Rest does not reside in silence--
The sound of nothingness, noisier than the sum of everything--
To seek it amidst blaring stillness is foolish;
Accepting it echoes our ability to love ourselves.
Only by swallowing it can you find silence’s inner peace;
Only then will you be alone.
Only then will the tumultuous sonance that attunes life’s meanderings into perfect
tension
Lull your weary soul to rest.
 
 
 

​RED AS A ROSE WAS SHE

​She rose in early morning, the day
Of new hope, spring in January,
As the Sun thawed her heart
Blossoming red once more.
 
The silk of a man’s tenderness;
Lost in her rent memories of a husband--
Bruised petals at his feet,
A youth he strew about
Wildly as if love were a trinket to torture her with--
Violence on her scars.
 
Years plot in bad soil, her rose wilted, waiting for
No one, allowing her beauty to shame from the Sun:
Falling backwards into his empty embrace,
Gouging the double-edged thorns of his promise blind,
Learning that mistakes can’t teach you a thing until you make them;
That even so, you make them again and again.
 
The blood she shed for others
In tears and petals withered,
Rid her of the flower befuddled by masculinity,
Palming grit aimlessly for romance’s indecipherable leaves--
The charm of his eyes, the vow of his smile, the succor of his virility--
But rather for what love had deprived her of;
For what it still owed her.
 
We watched as if we saw her,
But witnessed what she no longer was.
Miraculously, as dead as plucked on asphalt, arid by the
Everyday, at its core, the bud entombed in petals, ever so
Crimson fluttering on her cheeks,
Bled love anew on the day of her wedding.

 

​BEATLES SAUDADE
 

Saudade
A feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia.
 
The thought came to me as I listened to Abbey Road apathetically,
Glancing up at a mirrored ceiling--
En vogue in the late ‘70s, tacky by the early '80s--
The more I stared into my eyes,
Pupils eclipsing their Milky-Way-brown irises,
The farther I felt from myself.
 
My past floated lazily like a striped, annular flotation device
On a pool of what I held in my mind up to that point:
Deep enough to drown in, but shallow enough to see the sun
Gleam past molten glass vitrines insulating the wet from the dry,
Dancing flames on the arabesque-tiled sphere.
 
I could see individual drops of water as clearly as pearl grains:
Each a moment in time--
Of pain, sorrow, joy, and fear,
Songs I loved, ones forgotten;
Canticles of undying youth, sung out of the mouth of babes and sucklings,
Their backbeat jangling crystalline out of sunburst hollow bodies--
Multiplied as tears wept awakening from a dream.
Their imperfect sphericality, thousands of moons
Glowing with feeling-light— the tumult of being— thrashed the once still pool
As tepid, calm breezes, unbeknownst to all, slowly morph into violent storms.
 
The lifesaver, exiled relic proving Pepperland’s existence,
Rapidly pinwheeled 33 1/3 revolutions per minute:
Candy cane, barber's pole, lollipop swirl,
Moptops, LP-black, questioning a world full of questions,
Their melodies detaching problems from their consequence, not their weight;
A galaxy of neumes traversing the entirety of my ears.
 
The blackness of the gyrating disc concaved into a singularity,
A spider knitting its web in the midst of the storm--
A translucent house filled with empty people--
Strong enough to balance a walrus, high enough to befuddle an eagle,
Yet it's frailty clear in the impending tide's stultifying massacre.
 
Seemingly vicious, the arachnid invoked a paralyzing spell on all who stared,
But the fortress built around herself,
To protect her from a world much bigger and dangerous,
One whose full extent she would never know existed,
Relied on the architecture of others--
Man-made or God-spoken creation— to secure her livelihood
For nourishment, binding her wounds, and hiding forever in her loneliness.
 
Oblivion of the lifelines she cast out, one after one,
By one swift, five-fingered strum, could bring
Heartache's wounding blow.