The Corpse Flower

Once or twice a lifetime,
the corpse flower blooms
for the gardener
that held his breathe
for years.

I believe that is the essence
of all things.

Andrew Venegas
San Jose
SJSU
poetry

Upon Reflection (on living)

It used to make me mad,
and then it made me sad,
but beauty made me melancholy,
and now I just don’t know.

Andrew Venegas
San Jose
SJSU
poetry

Sets

If I am this and you are that
And that is this and this is that,
I think you’re this and this’ just that,
While I am you and this and that

Andrew Venegas
San Jose
SJSU
poetry

Camping

Take the back road back to nowhere,
as everything else goes by –
sit in silence by the fire,
and move in rhythm with the night.

Andrew Venegas
San Jose
SJSU
poetry

Boardwalk

I sometimes walk along the beach
between the fair and stars –
I sometimes hear the distant laughter
melt into the dark –
till human need returns to me,
and I turn my body back –
the ocean in the background,
and twinkling lights ahead.

Andrew Venegas
San Jose
SJSU
poetry

“The Renaissance”

The clothes

Renaissance fairs are known for their attire, for their lavish decorations. Men and women of every class and religion and race and creed spend fortunes to become “time appropriate”. Some work in offices, long corridors of blue felt with steel rims, under florescent lights – slaving away long hours and sleepless nights for swords and leather straps – for the appropriate armor and that “perfect” belt. They grow their hair out and forget to shave for weeks, unless their bosses complain. They are children of the children of a revolution that no one remembers but all still understand, and the Renaissance is the dream of escape – where they all are servants and serfs – and no one sees the irony.

Frequent fair-goers wear all sorts of “relics” and necklaces – “precious stones” on tanned flesh from dead bodies, once quite real and alive! They sometimes wrap cloth around their mouths, leaving only their eyes exposed – for the mystery or attention is anyone’s guess. True, most people still wear Nike’s and white, Hane’s t-shirts under their costumes, but authenticity was never the goal anyways. These are the weekday Ringwraiths, with weekend reveries of heroic greatness far away. This is not reality – it’s magic – and I am lost among it sometimes with everybody else. Our skin can be so tight in mirrors!

The Technology

While cars meander conspicuously across the fairgrounds, more subtle are the cell phones, tightly tucked between the car keys and the wallets, complete with magnetized petroleum based cards with holograms and photo-identification, accepted at most boutiques and venders.

The cells use the latest digital waves to broadcast their signals to servers, connected to a mainframe where minutes are calculated to the thousandth of a second and tabulated for the monthly bills which arrive at their homes sometime after their “weekend releases”. When many of the fair-goers see their bills, they express disgust at the government’s taxes that apprear ever-growing and heavy when the cost of living continues to rise and buying power slowly declines.

Some will even go as far as commenting that the degradation of longstanding social principals and the corruption of morality have led to this sad state of affairs. They wish we all could just go back to the good-old-days, these “conservatives”, these dreamers from the fair – but they do not see the irony!

The Renaissance

I pray one day they wake up from their waking dreams to find that it was not so much a dream as they had made themselves believe. One day these dreamers must find themselves, lost amid the drift of countless generations, that river of objective relativity. They must live beyond their serfdoms and hierarchies, and they must find that Real Renaissance, be everything else for not, and life an irony the shows itself on weekends – brighter than the sun for any with eyes enough to see.

Andrew Venegas
San Jose
SJSU
poetry

The End

When all the fiery flavor’s flung –
the hero’s died, and trumpets sung,
what, save past grace, resides?
Our fortunes cast, and time spent rye –
where does the seed of hope still rise?
In dreams – in dreams of mind – they lie.

Andrew Venegas
San Jose
SJSU
poetry