Online Source example essay topic

ONE FOR ALL NEWBORNS By Thylias Moss They kick and flail like crabs on their backs. Parents outside the nursery window do not believe they might raise assassins or thieves, at the very worst. a poet or obscure jazz Musician whose politics spill loudly from his horn. Everything about it was wonderful, the method of conception, the gestation, the womb opening in perfect analogy to the mind's expansion. Then the dark succession of constricting years, mother competing with daughter for beauty and losing, varicose veins and hot-water bottles, joy boiled away, the arrival of knowledge that eyes are birds with clipped wings, the sun at a 30 angle and unable to go higher, parents who cannot push anymore, who stay by the window looking for signs of spring and the less familiar gait of grown progeny. I am now at the age where I must begin to pay for the way I treated my mother. My daughter is just like me.

The long trip home is further delayed, my presence keeps the plane on the ground. If I get off, it will fly. The propeller is a cross spinning like a buzz saw about to cut through me. I am haunted and my mother is not dead. The miracle was not birth but that I lived despite my crimes. I treated God badly also; he is another parent watching his kids through a window, eager to be proud of his creation, looking for signs of spring.

From Small Congregations, Ecco Press, Hopewell, NJ Online Source: web ALL IS NOT LOST WHEN DREAMS ARE 1. The dreams float like votive lilies then melt. It is the way they sing going down that I envy and to hear it I could not rescue them. A dirge reaches my ears like a corkscrew of smoke And it sits behind my eyes like a piano roll Some say this is miracle water None say dreams made it so 2. Long ago a fish forgot what fins were good for And flew out of the stream It was not dreaming It had no ambition but confusion In Nova Scotia it lies on ice in the sun and its eye turns white and pops out like a pearl when it's broiled The Titanic is the one that got away. Online Source: web TORNADOS Truth is, I envy them not because they dance; I out jitterbug them as I'm shuttled through and through legs strong as looms, weaving time.

They do black more justice than I, frenzy of conductor of philharmonic and electricity, hair on end, result of the charge when horns and strings release the pent up Beethoven and Mozart. Ions played instead of notes. The movement is not wrath, not hormone swarm because I saw my first forming above the church a surrogate steeple. The morning of my first baptism and salvation already tangible, funnel for the spirit coming into me without losing a drop, my black guardian angel come to rescue me before all the words get out, I looked over Jordan and what did I see coming for to carry me home. Regardez, it all comes back, even the first grade French, when the tornado stirs up the past, bewitched spoon lost in its own spin, like a roulette wheel that won't be steered like the world. They drove me underground, tornado watches and warnings, atomic bomb drills.

Adult storms so I had to leave the room. Truth is the tornado is a perfect nappy curl, tightly wound, spinning wildly when I try to tamper with its nature, shunning the hot comb and pressing oil even though if absolutely straight I'd have the longest hair in the world. Bouffant torn adic crown taking the royal path on a trip to town, stroll down Tornado Alley where it intersects Memory Lane. Smoky spirit- clouds, shadows searching for what cast them. Online Source: web THE RAPTURE OF DRY ICE BURNING OFF SKIN AS THE MOMENT OF THE SOUL'S APOTHEOSIS How will we get used to joy if we won't hold onto it Not even extinction stops me; when I've sufficient craving, I follow the buffalo, their hair hanging below their stomachs like fringes on Tiffany lampshades; they can be turned on so can I by a stampede, footsteps whose sound is my heart souped up, doctored, ninety pounds running off a semi's invincible engine.

Buffalo heaven is Niagara Falls. There their spirit gushes. There they still stampede and power the generators that operate the Tiffany lamps that let us see in some of the dark. Snow inundates the city bearing their name; buffalo spirit chips later melt to feed the underground, the politically dred locked tendrils of roots. And this has no place in reality, is trivial juxtaposed with the faces of addicts, their eyes practically as sunken as extinction, gray ripples like hurdlers' track lanes under them, pupils like just more needle sites. And their arms: flesh trying for a moon apprenticeship, a celestial antibody.

Every time I use it the umbrella is turned inside out, metal veins, totally hardened arteries and survival without anything flowing within, nothing saying life came from the sea, from anywhere but coincidence or God's ulcer, revealed. Yet also, inside out the umbrella tries to be a bouquet, or at least the rugged wrapping for one that must endure much, without dispensing coherent parcels of scent, before the refuge of vase in a room already accustomed to withering mind and retreating skin. But the smell of the flowers lifts the corners of the mouth as if the man at the center of this remorse has lifted her in a waltz. This is as true as sickness. The Jehovah's Witness will come to my door any minute with tracts, an inflexible agenda and I won't let him in because I'm painting a rosy picture with only blue and yellow (sadness and cowardice). I'm something of an alchemist.

Extinct. He would tell me time is running out. I would correct him: time ran out; that's why history repeats itself, why we can't advance. What joy will come has to be here right now: Cheer to wash the dirt away, Twenty Mule Team Borax and Arm & Hammer to magnify Cheer's power, lemon-scented bleach and ammonia to trick the nose, improved-changed- Tide, almost all-purpose starch that cures any limpness except impotence. Celebrate that there's Mastercard to rule us, bring us to our knees, the protocol we follow in the presence of the head of our state of ruin, the official with us all the time, not inaccessible in palaces or White Houses or Kremlins.

Besides every ritual is stylized, has patterns and repetitions suitable for adaptation to dance. Here come toe shoes, brushstrokes, oxymoron's. Joy is at our tongue tips: let the great thirsts and hungers of the world be the marvelous thirsts, glorious hungers. Let hear break be alternative to coffee break, five mid morning minutes devoted to emotion.

Online Source: web Raising a Humid Flag Enough women over thirty are at Redbones for the smell of Dixie Peach to translate the air. I drink when I'm there because you must have some transparency in this life and you can't see through the glass till it's empty. Of course I get next to men with broad feet and bull nostrils to ward off isolation. You go to Redbones after you " ve been everywhere else and can see the rainbow as fraud, a colorful frown. The best part is after midnight when the crowd at its thickest raises a humid flag and hot combed hair reverts to nappy origins. I go to Redbones to put an end to denial.

Dixie Peach is a heavy pomade like canned-ham gelatin. As it drips down foreheads and necks, it's like tallow dripping down candles in sacred places. From AT REDBONES, CSU Poetry Series XXIX. Copyright 1998 Thylias Moss. Online Source: web 340.