Cyndi Gacosta |
Published: November 1st, 2014
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Cyndi Gacosta was born and raised in San Diego, California. She spent a few years of her early childhood in Sorsogon, Philippines. She studied literature at UC Santa Cruz. Her work has appeared in other literary journals such as The Walrus, Monongahela Review, The Toucan, Vanilla, and Skive Magazine. She lived and worked in Seoul, Korea as a teacher, but returned to the States for graduate studies in community planning and development.
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On the Open Road
On the open road I take with me
Strength and courage, all I'd ever need Whether traveling by land or by sea, And whichever path be chosen, my heart will lead As I sing, afoot and light-hearted, Whitman's verse For all around me is the mysterious Universe.
Presence
Every place I go you follow
with a shade of you on my shoulder, so light and tender and carefree like a leaf that falls from a tree, where underneath its summer awning I sleep to dream of you beside me feeling the deep breaths you take and the soft sighs you make
Shooting Stars
Between midnight and sunrise
my friends and I stayed up to witness the shooting stars, a sight I had never seen before. The boundless space, the countless stars suddenly made us feel so very small.
The Finer Things in Life
You appreciate the finer things in life.
The true fine things that are overlooked, brushed off as insignificant compared to making money, things like poetry. In it you see that it's as important as sciences, without poetry a civilization can never survive because there'll only be drones without hearts who do what they're ordered to do because their superiors whose superiors and their superiors ordered them to do things and to just do it. Don't think. Don't ask questions. Do as you're told. Shoot! shoot! shoot! shoot! shoot! on command. And don't stop shooting until your superior yells out hold fire! hold your fire, boys! As the screams die away the smoke clears away, and it becomes apparent that underneath the rubble are corpses on top of corpses with limbs torn apart, and you walk around collecting and putting back the pieces. You wipe off the blood with a handkerchief and you see that this is the corpse of a common man, but drones don't cry when there are wars to win. You toy with a pen and draw scribbles on paper. You ponder for a while then softly tell me that poetry gives humanity a heart and opens its eyes to grieve, to see its mistakes and its own hate, and to beg on its knees for forgiveness but forgiveness is never given. It will forever be haunted by the ghosts of truth. Truth is in the victims' blood and has seeped deep into the earth from where grass and flowers grow.
Parasite
Rome wasn't built in a day
a city scattered over smoggy skies homogenous in culture homogenous in architecture the embodiment of the American dream devours the open space like a gluttonous sinner Utopia is not a solution to problems Utopia exists in ecstasy, in visions on LSD, in peaceful rests of heroin and meth, and numbess of cocaine, and human flesh are sold on streets for cannibals, for sexual devouration and moral degredation a blur of distinction between public and private so what's public? what's private? strangers and friendly strangers go and see see what works in the real world walk the streets, embrace the energy of urban life walk through the vaginal entrance of purity a devotion to spirits of saints where animals must be ritually sacrificed on the altar or in slaughterhouses where we play like kids in the blood pool on hot summer days Inhumane and cruel, isn't that our world? Our kind of human? Our kind of mind? Only we flush it into the sewers to keep streets clean but it's still there, that pungent smell never leaves, always stays I smell it on your breath and in the air at late night bars and street whores and backpacking wanderers. Death and life eats into the city like hogs face first in the trough of slop which all boys had ejaculated into like a rite of passage for them to wallow like good pets ready to be grilled and consumed off our dinner plates. No escape from this city. Go hide in the caves. Swim in the springs. Sit atop canyons. Lay on rimrocks. Trudge through the wetlands. Die in the sinkhole. but anywhere on earth we're threatened and endangered. We hide in the cave. wait for our extinction. Nature will reclaim our bones and cover our cities in plants and drown it in the seas. Where will our souls be? Off to planets or galaxies as our shells are left behind on earth buried with the cities. |