Sunday, September 5, 2010

Color of blood

-One-

Traffic grinding along
Dirty shack streets of
San Salvador.

My hand speaks
the motion of lips
Locked in silence and security.
One slip to fall
in the abyss of lookout valleys
where buzzards keep meat
content with pickin off dead martyrs.

The color of blood is universal
Smiles and memory
Green-fatigued clowns
Swaying hearts and minds
Marked by the white hand of death
Silent weapons called music and dancing
Spring spirits from unmarked graves.

-Two-

Dogs are barking out
The spell of night
Imprisoned songs penetrate
Barrier veils
Steel bars shaped like flowers
Hold voices back
Echoing cages over windows.

The sweet breath of song
Rings in unison
With the underground passages.

Conciousness inhibiting dreams
Dreams ride up in black Jeep Cherokees
Fortune giving light
Shedding skin
Bodies waving through their
Field of vision.

-Three-

I am serenaded by sentries
The seed of greed passes on the wind
Landing in a furrow and sprouting
Far above the dark earth
Seed becomes leaf
Leaf enquires to the wind
Around the tracks of the evening
Clothed in fog
We wrap ourselves in a shroud of memories.

The seed becomes real in the speech of poetic days.


The day watches like a crow for
Dogs of intelligence.

Life rings
Tolling
Hammers return to dust and sand.

New growth like corn
Mingles with jungle bravado angels
Stark faces serious in the wind
As much as the spirit can endure.

This zone commands a red rose
Blooms incarnate blossom bending
Like the young stalk of a child
Wrapped in liberation.

Life Drama

Ivory hands conduct the business of pearls
Dreams transluscent
Transcending dreams.

Your life a scattered prism
Of worried days and regretful years.

Still
Your hands are beautiful
Carvings
Sensitive remnants.

If the mouth in your palm could speak
It would reveal an ageless memory of toil.

After seeing an old picture of Mt. Rushmore

My cousin
Has a picture
Of her dead mother
My dead Aunt
In front of Mt. Rushmore.

Only Washington is there
Sediment lines run through his wig
He stares into the sky alone
Lord of the land but a soldier and no mystic.

His stony gaze subjugating
How these Black Hills must have stirred and quaked
Under this shuddering chiselled edge
Cutting her veins and hammering
Rock dust away from eon's erosion and decay.

Craft

Creeley Cold Mountain intellectual,
Koestler's three-brained ghost,
Daddy beat at the switch,
Flipping,
Between blithe reptiles,
Slithering
In the halls of justice.

Lorca! Neruda! Snyder!
Hail to the poets !
Thoreau and Emerson wail alone.

A shack for every student
Inner peace to achieve flow.

Doubt

The faded barn leans to the west
A picture of time and stillness
I glance over my father's shoulder
to glimpse the light in the doorway.

He reads me.
Yep it could use a little work.
He rakes on.
I stand behind him smoking
Hunched over from the cold,
Arms drawn in I agree
With a bouncing at the knees.

Hieros Gamos

The moon lights the earth
With a dim uncertainty.

Look!!
There is a huge crab in the mud,
Two dogs guard the orbit of the sun.

They bark at the moon and we sit here still.

Artemis!
You have married the sun?
You who only attracts rain?
Which is your castle,
There with the forest
Lurking behind or here,
On the steppes?

Murder the Murderer

Though death be a day
The sun merely raises its glow
To suffuse the night while
In a room of silent smoke
Low candles hunger for
The blood of burns and
The death of flames.

Your eyes
The hours most love
Penetrate the evening with
Bright clairvoyance.
Watch him
Strapped to his cynicism and
Brooding with early flowers
That pluck at his flesh With
Chained petals.

Shadows form
Thrust in darkness
The shape of his killing hands
Cries
Splattering on walls in
Point blank flashes of light.

Apparition

Wind shakes the trees
A saw being bent and bowed
Rattling in your hand
While you hold sutras
Under your arm.

Maya says Abra Kedabra
Barefoot
Silent
Holding a snake flute
A soft-skinned gourd.

Perpetual Africa-cum-Dravidia
Drumbeats
Sunday-go-to-meeting melodies
Burst forth from
Fiery diamond hands.

The shooting star of mercy
Must have a bleak face
Carrying the weight of seers and
The baggage of saints.