Neighborhoods of angels ascended from rooftops, from porches,
from flooded streets with those long neglected leading the
grand procession skyward for no cars, no buses, no boats, no planes
came to their rescue; they were left with only their wings.
Your Congo eyes swim midnight,
lapping your corrugated brow.
My suburban blues wade out to meet you,
wash your matted chest in cerulean gaze.
Come here. Come up to the bars.
Moisten the glass with your black nostrils.
I'd like to shake hands in a gesture of civility,
perhaps share an apple,
offer a waxed juice carton to chew on,
rub noses with you, my eyeglasses
misting in your rank jungle-breath,
whisper your zoo-name.
Do you miss the forest,
remember your mates,
their textures of meat and fur,
the odor of vegetation,
the tangle of vines and drums
rolling through the valleys,
your nomadic quest for fruit, tumbling over terrain
sharp and noble as the ridge atop your skull?
Recall how nightfall muffled your wistful visage
in its melancholy caul, how you'd sleep 'til dawn
on your improvised bed of branches and leaves,
arms crossed, back against a tree?
Like Solomon on steaming haunches,
you reign in languor amid rotting oranges,
your primeval stench camouflaging wisdom,
then grasp a banana, circumspect,
knuckling the dumb yellow boomerang
like a cloistered monk fingering his cross,
strip away the rubbery peel as petals of a dying flower,
meticulous with the tender wholeness
of the unbruised fruit reflected,
vulnerable and free,
in my captive blue eyes,
in your aqueous simian stare.
The poetry flu came
without warning, a virus
sending its bacteria
pulsing through my veins.
It secretes from all my pores;
it drips from my runny nose;
it burns my forehead;
it congests my lungs;
it churns in my stomach;
it catches in my throat, making me cough;
it aches my limbs;
it throbs my head;
it makes me tremble;
it forms goose bumps under my skin.
As the flu ravages my body
I finally collapse in exhaustion,
vomiting a steady stream
of poetry
onto the paper.
November signals us to bid
farewell to summer's warm caress.
Soon north wind will begin to blow
maple's flaming party dress,
which falls on withered grass below,
a blanket for spring promises.
I wait for you. Your honor comes home
to a safe oasis apart from harm and
danger. Your cool words are the water
that quenches my souls thirst for life.
A task is a duty. A duty an obligation.
The whole thing is a test. One scene
passing to another, divesting of the
slight burrs in the opportunity of moments.
Resting in the breast of the eternally
renewing dawn I answer you with my
footsteps. Every day passing another
goal to quota, another mile to try. The
evening of glances and of looks. The
morning of arduous labor. I ply with
my hammer and sex of origins, but I
cannot apply what I am perfect in your
meaning is. I merely flail, asserting
again and again my muscles and
imagination soaring upon my dreams
of you. Making you the giant object of
my relentless quest for the answers in
myself. It seems we never wander without
you, but we do stray far from home. True
love has an answer though, It is.
Please, come with me
where there's no path,
where we are not to go,
where God, through bishops
bid us hide
Adam's passion
and Eve's naiveté,
under piles of sodden leaves,
behind walls of fallen wood,
let desire be our beacon,
conscience be our guide.
Now wend our way
through brambles and forests,
through fumblings and bumblings,
through miles and trials
of unexplored and
forbidden, forbidding ways.
Where we end,
I cannot say,
even bishops sometimes shrug,
for they, too, once were young.
I don't know if
we'll finish together,
or what we'll find,
or even if we'll know
when we've arrived
but once we go
there'll be a trail
for others to follow
and on our way
we may not even find each other,
but, let's hope, we'll find ourselves.
I'm trying to jumpstart my life again
But my battery is dead
Without you there's no spark
My dreams have all gone flat
Since you hitched a ride to the Other Side
I'm stranded in the middle of nowhere
Without a map
Where do I go with no direction?
I always knew where I was going
When I was with you
Now I'm lost and out of gas
You were my only oasis on
This long journey home
My faith in life has temporarily
Been towed to the junkyard
And my mind is flooded
With memories of you.
quenching
myriad musical
thirsts
from honky-tonk
dives
to symphonic halls
it shelters
eighty-eight
solitary tones
which sing out
singularly
and in countless
combinations
in voices from
pianissimo's
whisper
to fortissimo's
brazen bravado
the virtuous sounding
upright
and mildly
pretentious
grand
are instrumental
in fulfilling
its noteworthy
mission
keeper of the keys
hammering out
black/white harmonies
Was it the lie I told in Fourth Grade,
That saved my skin, but gave Clyde hell –
Is that the sin you saved me from?
Or the time I told my mum I'd cleaned my teeth
But hadn't – she must have known,
She always did – was that the one?
Or the lie I tell myself each day
That I'm OK and everyone else is wrong
Or just as bad, so it's all the same?
And what about Clyde? Did you take his hatred for me
And turn it to love, so he wouldn't lose faith
In humanity, die victimized, bitter, alone?
I said I was sorry and it was only because
My dad would have thrashed me, because
His dad thrashed him and things never change.
When I say I don't know you, or turn you in,
Or look another way when you're suffering,
Are those the sins you died for, expecting I wouldn't do it again?
Was it for the whore, the cheat, the murderer in me?
My blindness, my deafness, my lameness of heart,
My terminal, fashionable ennui?
Is sin really not in the things that I do,
Or don't do, think or say? But a worm in my brain with no beginning, no End,
a splitting string of Socratic irony, I the interrogator, I the accused?
Were you really here before Abraham, with God?
Borne through the ages to die and to die and to die
That I might live and live and love, forgiven? Why?
That we might break the cycle of shame?
Realign the wheel of cause and effect?
Resign the blame?
(First published in The Chicago Poetry Fest Anthology 2004)
Angled against the edge of an ebony sky, the trees huddle as though in robes of black,
and fireflies, like tiny lighthouse beacons, blink on and off in the heavy air;
stars as distant buoys are sprinkled through the vast, seemingly liquid space above
while I, I hold this single moment as a chalice to my lips,
listening to the intermittent buzzing of the crickets' song.
I wait to see if you will appear on the porch
in a pool of saffron light,
letting the screen door bang behind you
like a reality check,
or as a crack resembling the crack of doom.
Heat lightning strikes, flickering.
Do you see the stars as I do?
Would you try to hold one on a lifted hand?
You have come from a far shore
on a ship I cannot even see,
and you anchor beside me on the grass
trying to find, for a moment at least, the course we both once knew.
Unlike you, the stars don't change, no more than do the arching silhouettes
of stranded trees, earthbound as though marooned on an island
declaring there to be no state of grace.
Tonight I prefer their stately company to the unexpected tracking of your course
that seems to me to be a pirate's thrust,
not a civilized adventure.
Underbrush grows
in wild abandon,
hides white-tailed deer.
Their tracks
cross my path.
As I sit quietly
on the stump a doe
may approach
with frisky fawns.
At dusk as I wait
in silent expectation
a buck may surprise me
with his grace.
Sometimes, Lord,
you seem to be hiding.
I reach out
but cannot quite
touch your hand,
look but see only tracks
where you once walked.
Are you waiting
for a quiet moment
to surprise me?
A rocket breaking free
from Earth's gravity is,
by dint of direction,
traveling a trajectory
into outwhere.
No limit is seen
to what is outer,
but what is inner
offers with its
infinity a rainbow
and a promise.
Let rocket people
point their probing
within if they would
make discoveries.
Far-going rockets
may be today's
Tower of Babel
reaching out and up
to an imagined
material heaven while,
nearer than our nuclei,
heaven is hugging us.
Copyright Notice: Copyrights for all of the above poems remain with the individual authors. No work here is to be reused without permission from its author.
