| |
|
Michael
Ceraso |
| |
|
 My
name is Michael J. Ceraso. I am 30 years old and was
born in the Ivory Coast to an Italian father from Milan
and an Irish-American mother from Brooklyn. After a few
years of travel with my two brothers and me in tow, my
parents finally settled down in my mother’s native city.
I have been a New Yorker since the age of 6 and I will
soon be returning home to New York City after two and
half years of living in Austin, TX. Before that, I
lived and worked briefly in Hawaii. I also lived for a
period in Valencia and Madrid, Espańa and absolutely
long to return so that I can purchase some property
somewhere between Barcelona and Alicante. It is simply
the way to live. I think it is important to see how the
rest of the world lives, to break the New Yorker ‘center
of the world’ syndrome. I have recently completed a
volume of poetry titled “Poems from the Mine of
Ripening”. It contains a variety of sentiments
which cover the development, over the past few years, of
my mind and spirit’s search for each other, perhaps. My
main mode of expression is poetry. I can frequently be
found playing darts in Irish pubs with good friends,
drinking cider and talking about anything from
hooliganism to graffiti to traveling to all things
baseball. |
| |
Under Construction
The very first act was struggling,
every subsequent act the same.
One became two; ten trillion became fingernails,
Suntan lotion, healthcare plan and gross difference
in the clutches of being all alike.
There was always a first —zygote, mimesis,
drunken longing, dreams of lusting,
final exam, prestigious titles and tax attacks,
gray hair and grand kids—senility!
I know it alls! I must! I do! Dead silence!
Amazing silence! New beginning!
All beginnings bring wisdom, in retrospect, even the
painful ones.
They are the well-behaved walls composed of my
loss-labored mortaring.
Blind Rhythm
We meet
and we speak,
talk talk
in these various bars
spinning a long
self-contained
gloss gloss gloss
and so I've sought
my safe passage
through the void of
sighs and snorts
and now what?
I need another
pint of wisdom,
another and another
and those faces there
become something I abhor;
all their joy and
not knowing me.
Like existence,
I'm keeping up
with a blind rhythm.
Ah, ah, ah, I become
aroused and briefly upright!
Briefly!
Its times like these
when one has to un-lie to himself!
Caught Unaware
This is my mill-stoned soul to the grind,
like water and sand, best under pressure,
we cosmic glass, stained with the so-so hope of the
world,
made when Life came crashing and there we happened to
be,
in between it and all those potentials on the other
side,
caught unaware while picking
the shallow wet for smooth rocks and dream shells,
screaming moist with mother-fluid luminosity.
Hope is integral, the inevitable self-preparation as we
diffuse into dying.
Here below the unassailable daylight of existence
we are slathered in a brilliant lacquer, glinting from
all moments
—amazing moments!
An Unknown Order
My high ceiling
frowns down from
a milky dome of light
It hangs down a shining servile rod
and remains silent in its observation.
Below,
I’m a tamed vine,
striving for color and
creeping to an unknown order.
The light makes
wings of shadow,
flecks of insect skin.
This room is exposed; it is provoked.
Again, it calls out for new sins.
Odd, bent memory
struggles through the many
dialogues of the self.
I recall what I can.
Yesterday
stands before me.
Like burning wicker, Memory flickers my passion into
ash.
I have tried to escape, to pull my evenings
out of a world of shopping bags;
I am still successful from time to time.
I am still in between colors and creeping to an unknown
order.
© 2007 Michael Ceraso |
|
Home // ISSUE 5 |
|
 |
| |
|
|
