Bossanova of Her
The music is in her; its playing in her hips,
And in her breasts, it's singing in her voice,
Seducing the air to smell of perfume. She moves
In just that way, knowing just that beat, shaking
With just the right amount of bass. It's in the way she tilts
Her head so that her hair sways to the horns and how her cheeks
Feel the flourish of the guitar. To experience her
Is to know the Bossanova, to know the color of her body
And the shape of her desires and to understand the want
Of words for a tune, or a moon for its night. It's the need
To hold her hands in yours, to have your feet in rhythm with the crowd
And to feel their stares like whispers in your ear. It's in the way she keeps
The song close to her chest long after the sound is gone
And the people have left so that the music will blend with hers
And become her own.
I hear the sound of war in the pages of poets
And see the blood in their words. The echoes of Troy
Come to me from Homer while I listen to reports
Of how men and women still sacrifice themselves
In the sand and die for kings and conflicting nations,
Each side their own struggle, their own Jihad,
And I wonder what would have become of Achilles
If he had had to rely on the precision of a bullet
Rather than the strength of his sword, or if the rumble
That accompanied Hector had been the rolling of tanks rather
Than the hooves of his cavalry could he have kept his son's
Fate separate from his own? Might Priam and Agamemnon
Have made peace if Paris and Menelaus could have split Helen
between them and built upon her any temples they liked and dug
From her by the barrel full, or, if not for Odysseus and Apollo,
Would those two kings have made war for centuries until
The Greeks forgot about their distant children and the Trojans
Took up guerrilla war in those eastern hills waiting to be led
By some new Aeneas to what would become their Rome.
The Night has been coming with unusual zeal,
with a pull that only planets, or large moons, can employ.
It's begging me to wander down its orange lit streets,
a bottle of whiskey in one hand, a book of Dylan Thomas in the other,
or maybe its Yeats, or Kerouac. It doesn't matter.
What matters is that my feet know where they're going
and that I have a cigarette to light the way.
I see rows of houses crowding together for the night,
their fences back to back for warmth.
I sit in an empty Laundromat, with Aretha and
the Four Tops rattling the washing machines,
I pass by a late night burger joint, lit up like
a supernova in the night, drawing after-hours partiers
like celestial moths of the milky way, their voices loud,
their words course. The drunk sits outside on a white plastic chair,
a brown paper bag of booze balances his leaning body.
I walk past small stores, their signs flickering defiance
and displaying their wares: see-through lingerie,
surf boards, dog collars and individuality.
I listen to the sounds of jazz and poetry overflowing
the doorways of independent cafés and the howling wind
of the blue line going by, its electric lines
buzzing off the darkness and landing in trash bins
of abandoned parking lots lit by massive bill boards
pledging themselves to corporate corruptions.
View a video of the poet reading
7th street, bustling with evening traffic,
explodes in neon colors of red, green, white,
against the purple city sky, lit by the late night city life.
It erupts with the sound of noises calling out
to each other, to themselves and to the street.
The revving car engines break in uncontrolled,
the car horns shoot off the concrete like the words of school kids,
who are cussing at each other on the corner
and using their hands as exclamation points.
In the park young couples lust after carnal
pleasures and the freedom that the night offers new lovers,
while love itself is being hocked with a hey baby, hey baby
by the hoary woman in the fishnet stockings and leather dress,
while the bums, wearing their tattered clothes
and their tattered beards, carrying dirty sleeping bags
lined with thin batting and worn out dreams
lie by the bus stop, in dark corners, where the public
can easily pass by without noticing their pain.
Coffee shops, humming with dull lamp light
and the high brow conversation of bourgeois
intellectuals looking over wire rim
glasses and steamed milk lattes, smell of ground coffee,
the thick bitterness sweetened with cream from the bar
and jazz from the speaker system. The artist sits in the corner,
where the view is best and the light romantic, his pencil strokes
shape drawings, his ballpoint pen blooming
words like wild lilies from the brain.
BIO: Eric Arthur Loya is currently a student working for a Bachelor's Degree at CSULB while taking creative writing classes at Long Beach City College. He hopes one day to be a published novelist and poet and continues to enjoy meeting dedicated writers who inspire his creativity and passion.
