Return To Boston (Poem Trilogy)
by Len Luminosity
perspective / going back
in my mind,
the clouds outside the airplane window are canonized as beautiful,
their rising and falling shapes
like the breath of a loved one.
they’re a warm lavender pink,
rapidly tinting my favorite yellow from the giving sun,
telling me
“welcome back,
you’re safe above our arms”
however,
i could see the argument
that their encroaching valleys
appear more like the tumultuous mess of belonging nowhere, being nobody.
the way the mist is so barely visible, even through itself,
that it seems only to exist at the mercy of the unforgiving sun,
disappearing at whim
to give way to the stares of icy cold patchwork
that barks me out of its presence
as quickly as i can recognize i am in it.
now,
i wouldn’t say i agreed,
but i would be lying if i said that
the scattered dips into nothingness, into open air,
don’t have me tempted to categorize the vaporwaves
as an irredeemable evil,
terrorizing a world above our usual understanding,
making the sky so full of horror
that i wonder why the birds i blow kisses to
don’t coo andin beg for me to never let them come back up in the air
i choose to ignore the creeping feeling of that perspective.
in my mind,
the clouds outside the airplane window are canonized as beautiful,
and there does not need to be more to the story.
no matter how many sinister dimples mark the blue, yellowing landscape,
there does not need to be more to this story.
above the clouds part 2: i cut myself off from the sky
i cut myself off from the sky
because it felt too much like i was looking at my life.
i closed the airplane window
and let the light run itself away
because its presence in my row
made me feel like i was looking at some sort of fucked up mirror
that only showed the parts of me that most make me want to throw up,
including
and especially
everything internal.
i could see the patterns of my organs
spilled and splattered and splayed
out in cirrocumulus chunks,
and i did not like it.
i could never look at myself as long and intently as i stared at those clouds,
and yet i refused to break eye contact with the vaporous water,
even when it made me sick to my stomach
and my brain.
though the patterns and specks of never seen colors
did indeed entertain me,
i cut myself off from the sky
because i had to in order to survive
the trilogy completes: greeting massachusetts / sky chamber
i’ve now gotten my first glimpse of massachusetts in a week,
peeking out from particularly weak clouds.
it was there for just a minute or so
before the clouds thickened to cover the commonwealth,
both our head and toe fenced in
by white nothingness
in a space like these clouds,
it’s hard to believe i am somewhere real,
genuinely inhabiting the world i know
rather than floating through a dreamscape sequence
in a fantastical alien home.
how could somewhere above my house
feel so like a chamber of the weather,
top and bottom and left and right
imprisoned by an endless sea of light blue, of white, of a vaguely yellow sun?
as the wing dips again,
right then left
(the other side then mine),
i find myself hoping to glimpse a reflective lake again,
or finally the boston skyline.
i guess i like the meditative nature of being up here,
but it’s been so long without being reminded that there’s a land to go back to
that i’ve started to become
uneasy
that perhaps that land has disappeared out from under us
and there will be nowhere to land,
perpetually circling water vapor and air
until we run out of fuel
and,
instead of crashing,
for there is no land to crash into,
we simply blip out of existence.
i would like that not to happen.
i want to land again,
in beautiful boston