BACK FROM THE DESERT

Toward such a thirst, you would not falter.
Toward such a thirst, you would not know.
A tongue makes for shaky infrastructure,
through the ellipse of your tunneled logic,
past a back narrative you hold tent stakes for.
It could move at a moment’s notice.
Fold it down. Repent. Reinvent.

STRIKE

Bird song at dawn,
as militant as any
artillery strike, or
ham-strung symphony.

They gather their voices,
the night edges into
diffused blue. Who are we
to make any sense of it?

BELIEF

Diligent into the sun we face
another evening’s gathered shade,
full of rain, pestilent whispering,
floods of solace we haven’t yet
learned to say…
To lean upon a cripple
at a cross roads, to have
his shadow point the way,
a sextant we cast to the ground,
hymnals we know by heart and flip
through their skin-lisping pages.
Oh belief, I am as far from you
as I am from sleep.
A silence turned over
for lack of a beginning, or end.

REMAKE

The open window,
the antic crackling bug crunch
of a cigarette butt being put out.

A silence complete in its’ fullness.
The shadow of your last self
just lost in first light.

CROSS-TOWN

Riding the lonely, late-night bus
from Queens back to Brooklyn;
just me, the driver and a young
Latino boy slumped in his seat,
grasping a diet Pepsi like a drunk
would his own elixir of benediction.

Off in the distance, the Manhattan
skyline, a wilderness of mad, endless
expansion. Video billboards flash
like tarot cards telling someone else’s
fortune: a distant cousin’s, perhaps,
or maybe a visiting head of state.

I remember seeing “Bladerunner”
for the first time in high school;
taking in its’ vision,
hushed, dry-mouthed, dazzled,
and can’t believe how quickly
the future has come to claim its’ own.

EXPATRIATE

I take my razored fingers to the seething
multitudes, pulling up stubborn roots
that proclaim their hold, stuff visages
into black burlap sacks, send them off
to some sanitized legal limbo heaven,
and no, you, in fact, are the one
who first mentioned the word guillotine.
I have a report right here that proves it…

ELEGY

The frail pinwheels of fireflies
play out across the open meadow.
I draw my dark ancestor into a dance.
She cries against my shoulder,
recites a litany of dead names
that mean nothing to me;
a deaf-mute second cousin, a minister
who mended split-wood fences on the side,
a one-eyed sod farmer who bottled
personal misery. She asks my forgiveness
for all of them, but I am left
with open hands, too many
of my own mistakes, and the aching
code of dying light.

BIRTH DAY

The monkey dreams a radiant cacophony,
a kingdom of tendriled fronds and god’s teeth
gnashing the mulch of the world into creation.
The monkey sees the jungle he dreams
upon the jungle before his eyes.
The monkey dreams he is a monkey,
born of monkey, but more than monkey,
born this day, but every day, to arise.

RADIOS SING HEAVEN: I

My body is humming, my body is humming,
cold angel glow of the dashboard, radio on,
empties tossed by the roadside.
This is the sound of surrender, glutted and tinkling.

I am only half-aware of the parts of myself
that are dying right now, for lack
of air and water and light.
What is left I wrap like a shroud
of monoxide around me.

RADIOS SING HEAVEN: II

I glow with abandon, thirst,
and pray to those murky
rough voices behind the hedges
of the choir; those bitten,
spindley things warped for lack
of light and exposure, who sing
with voices of clear underground
streams, rattle roots in their
blackened hands—Oh, give me
something! All those starved
and bug-eyed, ferocious
with neglect, who are lost
in the naming and so grow stronger.