An Intellectual Life... Poem by RIC BASTASA

inside this glass world
lives the porcupine
fish

the sea is made of
pure air

everyone is swimming
with the hands and feet of their
minds

one eye sees through another
eye like light piercing a sea of

transparencies and ripples
of doubts are reinvented

it is a deep ocean
imagine a world of porcupine fishes

silence are not knives here
there are no stab wounds on the water

everyone knows how to breathe
without making any sound of rustling leaves

outside this glass world
lies the world of fences and over there are the greener pastures

the fences are high like clouds on the cliffs
and the pastures have no milking cows in fact

it is a jungle without trees
and you will be having a hard time to imagine a

justification why this world is becoming a puzzle
of new languages and reinvented scripts and scenarios

but this is it, this is the way how fists land on chests
how lips design the shape of spits

long ago, they drew ivory towers and disoriented pillars
long ago, they were whistling out of touch tunes

now, there are heads rising from the armpits
feet from abdomens fingers from the anus

and they are talking about dormant diseases that
come out in the open only after your 50th year

out there the mockery is getting louder
the air as colder as men whose blood is removed from them.