Name: Heaven
Duration: P00H02M20S
Description: I didn't make the connection that there was a common fly theme in my poetry until it was embarrassing. #wtfsubconscious

Heaven

from Quiver by Ken Yoshikawa

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I didn't make the connection that there was a common fly theme in my poetry until it was embarrassing. #wtfsubconscious

lyrics

Heaven

This fly is buzzing in my room,
whirring past my pen.
I arise and aim to quit me of it,
dancing to a bitch slap waltz.
I want you to leave, I say.
Showing it the door, it doesn’t.
It hangs by the lamps on the walls,
as I lay on the floor
wondering about a life of
Kaleidoscopic,
Sugar-famished
time warping
buzzer prayers.
It’s just hungry for the light
like so many words and eager fools:
to hover on the line in that moment of attention
in service to some great wing of eternity
as a single z in the endless hum.
I turn on the hallway lamp to shoo it out
and it leaves
indeed photophilic for some hope this sticky summer night.
Buzzing through the glory of this wide, wide heaven
of vaulted ceilings and clean dishes
till I turn out the hall light,
close the door,
and tend to a book.

Yet it wasn’t long till it returns.
It crawled, faithful, through the crack beneath the door
knowing there’s more to life than shit and sugar,
into a place, into a realm that would entrance its soul
yet all but else refuse to nourish it.

O ecstasy, you sly god, you.

Between the choice to kill, catch, or herd it out again
and trick it to a new horizon
I write, astounded, –
after all these weeks
of stretching my lungs around my feet
and balancing my heart atop my head,
swallowing my mind again
till I am drunk on riddlesong –
that I find a muse in how this fly wipes its eyes that never blink
in what seems to me relief.
Sure I can let it be the fly that stayed,
but, little fly,
Soon
I will have to turn off heaven
so I can go to sleep.

credits

from Quiver, released March 30, 2019

license

about

Ken Yoshikawa Portland, Oregon

Ken Yoshikawa is a shin-issei/first generation half-Japanese American poet-actor from Portland, OR. He has been active in the Portland Poetry Slam community since 2014. He loves blue chicken taco trees and resents punctuation and grammar at his convenience. ... more