Why Kombucha

Who’ll tell you why 

Why we hope and dream 

Why we tell ourselves first, 

And each other later, 

Lies that are half-truths: 

Half in knowing,

And half in not knowing 

That we are never going to fully 

Be in the knowing. 

(Guess which half 

Is more submerged in the self than the other. 

Guess, then, why we do what we do.) 

Why venture to implement such a task of fullness 

When what’s in the depths of one 

Is on the surface of another.

Why talk.

And cause the confusion. 

Or else, cause the mind-boggling, 

Edgeless, transparent clarity. 

Who’ll tell you why. 

Why debate. 

Why demonstrate our fight. 

Our plight. 

Our weakness. 

Why congest our powers in so doing. 

Why the expensive price tags 

On cleaner minds, 

When there’s a flash sale 

On mass-produced tainted souls. 

Why remain silent instead. 

Why the bargain. 

Why this, or that. Why Tit for tat. 

Why we write. 

Why we paint. 

Why we sing and make music. 

Why we read. 

Why we memorize what we read. 

Verbatim. 

Why we stand upside down. 

Why we arch backwards. 

Why it’s hard to just stand upright. 

Why lift weights 

When the world is on our shoulders. 

Why women. Why men. Why genders.

Why victims. Why the patriarchal matriarchy.

Why banana bread. 

Why kombucha. 

Because even diseases and viruses, 

Even endings and pandemics, 

Even change and epidemics, 

Even the effort of living for the breathless… 

And the deed of dying for the mortal… 

Even all this, within and beyond, 

Is amused by inscriptions. 

By asterisks. 

By metaphors. 

By stories. 

We are charmed: 

By footnotes. 

By ink marks. 

By outlines and edges. 

By folded pages,

Containing underlined structures of words.  

By different yellows for a tree 

And shades of red for a sky. 

By noses in places of breasts 

And breasts dangling from a third-eye. 

By hearts in our solar plexus.  

By promises flying out from our sacrum 

And prospects trapped in our throats. 

All this, and more… 

Is tickled awake by laughter.  

Is roused by allegories. 

Is inscribed… 

By the unlikelihood of things. 

By non-statistical marvels: 

Not yet peer-reviewed. 

Not yet documented. 

Not yet evidently conclusive. 

Still deemed a prophetical miracle. 

Shunning the beautiful face of hope. 

Its’ eyebrows innocently slanted. 

Its’ hands on its’ cheek, 

Rubbing the slap across its’ face.  

Who’ll tell you: 

That it’s simply Because,

In all their lack of restrain, 

And in all the ways they can be exploitive, 

Vulgar, profane, shocking,

Art and Imagination will love us for who we are. 

Art and Imagination 

Will invite us in their welded open arms. 

They will love even the most unloved of us.

They will whisper in our ears 

Better lies than the world tells us. 

They will be kinder by digging their daggers 

Deeper in our core 

Until we bleed internally… 

“Et tu, Brute?”

They will do so out of perverse adoration, 

Lest we remain unchanged. 

They will gift us to a body, 

Like a child is gifted to grow through

A vessel that’s a woman. 

A chosen womb. Extending. Widening. 

Thereafter contracting.    

Art and Imagination 

Purify the rotted versions of ourselves 

Give it an acid reflux. 

They will give our fears a bowel disease. 

Blood in the stool. Nausea. 

Who’ll tell you, complexly: “Because”

Just, because what a comfort. 

What a joy. 

What a glorious way of unmaking 

All that has been done.  

What a way to satiate what is lacking. 

So we read. 

And we write. 

And we paint plenty, or else we go to art galleries. 

Or flip through fashion magazines. 

Or think of Van Gogh’s brush strokes. 

His severed ear. His broken heart. 

Or if we have nothing to draw with, 

We draw a smile upon our faces. 

Or we buy art. 

Or we look things up 

That include lots of shapes of thoughts.  

Or we remake our homes. 

Or we listen to the free fall of water 

From a fountain of voices, somewhere. 

Or maybe we just make our beds for a change.

Baby steps. Nonetheless taken. 

And we achieve.

Or we imagine to have done so 

And that’s just as good. 

Maybe it’s even better. 

We just imagine 

Until we grow tired of lying in our imagination, 

Until we simply lay instead of lie in it. 

Our meditative bodies on its’ bed. 

Unless we don’t believe it’s a bed, this lie. 

This thought. 

This dream. 

This half-truth. 

Unless we believe it’s a cloud. 

It’s our destined heaven. 

Depends on how you look at it. 

Depends on how much you love yourself. 

Depends on the transparency of your fabric.

Depends on why you write. 

Why you dream. Why you hope. 

Why you read. Why you draw. 

Why you produce. Why you paint. 

Why you sing. Why you compose. 

Depends on when you start to imagine 

What you dared to never imagine before.