to sleep
where clay grafts
to thorn
how to make phone calls from the land of the dead
First of all - and this is not as obvious as it sounds - there must be someone among the living who might want to talk to you. There are many among them, indeed most, who refuse to acknowledge the existence of the dead at all, let alone talk to us. Second, a Nokia will not do; neither Samsung nor Ericsson, Sony nor LG ... what you need is blood. Blood is the medium, blood is the wire, blood the handpiece and blood the service provider. This knowledge is old as Odysseus, older in fact, but it's still news to some. And blood is not easy to come by; you can't get some if you ain't got none, which, for those who are paying attention, takes us back to the first point. Someone has to want to talk, someone has to share your blood or give a little of their own; if these two conditions are fulfilled, there's only one more: you have to get them when they're sleeping or when the barriers are otherwise down. Drunk is good; destroyed by grief; in love; or any kind of extremis of fear, rage, doubt or pain. Guess there's one thing I haven't said but most of us here don't need this to be pointed out: you have to have something to say. This is not a complex thing to grasp: scaring the hell out of the living, though perhaps a little brute in its simplicity, is quite enough to make the connection worthwhile for some. Others among us are more ambitious: we want to be remembered, we want to be missed, we want to be loved. Some of us even hope to put those poor benighted souls to rights. Even, arrogant as it sounds, to show them how to live.
Prude Child
The wind breathes sour milk
and men's cologne
through my open window
I talk endlessly to a six year old child
He's small and intelligent
so is my hand
The gates to this house stay open
letting travelers and sinners
stray from reality for some time
They march through tiled hallways
in high heels and rotten soled boots
He's her lover, her brother, her father
She's nameless to him
I told her to stay awhile
rest her high heeled shoes on my porch
and men's cologne
through my open window
I talk endlessly to a six year old child
He's small and intelligent
so is my hand
The gates to this house stay open
letting travelers and sinners
stray from reality for some time
They march through tiled hallways
in high heels and rotten soled boots
He's her lover, her brother, her father
She's nameless to him
I told her to stay awhile
rest her high heeled shoes on my porch
The Traveler
We're in danger of Hell
Long lost amongst smoldering trees
Eyes the follow smoke paths
brushing lazily against the hollowed night sky
Embers that defy gravity, logic --
drift endless in the wind
These feet find solace in trudging
aimlessly
A telephone call from the land of the dead
I dreamed that my mother rang me up on the telephone to talk about my sister. As she began to speak, the vague annoyance I always feel when she initiates conversations like these, surfaced. But you’re dead, I said. You’re dead. Am I? she wondered in that guileless way she has. I don’t think so. I’m in Perth. Later the place where she was shifted even further into the west but I cannot now recall where. It was anyway a place of cacophony, a place of voices: my sister, certainly, was there; perhaps my father too. And myriad others.
Ode to Beauty
O beauty, beauty the great boundaries of your cutting blaze is the throat that preach the holy way known to the souls lost in the armpit of a shriveled city where what remain of the overgrown growth hoping to gain a foothold is the resistance of the concrete to mother the motion of grass. Beauty you are my Venus of ashes, my cold sealing wax of new graves dug in the palm of my hand. Beauty you are the seawater breathing hundreds of tongues full of tears that rush upon the breach of my thighs. You are a mountain of heavenly lies ancient as finding yourself struggling encased in a plastic drop. You empty the sky. You are the sleepless skeleton that we pray by, lay by, and in vain wait by.
O beauty, beauty shall I kiss your hair that hides the summer birds, your cheeks flush with worm’s blood grounded in a gorge grinning its grain gorgeously by the geese’s cries. Shall I keep you safe in my breast pocket of tenderness taught to the young who keep their youth tight between the shoreline of their fingernails? My pockets are filled with gravity, yours with the rose’s thorn fix for making torn love’s fluency bleed with the blood of angels who worship at the chemist’s shoulders.
O beauty, beauty forever defying the whispering motion of who you shall call to task, you are my hands I take them from you, you are my legs mad with your strength, you are my eyes eating the quite, low mourning of an exquisite cry, you are my melancholy telegram issued by the governor of cold fishes, none is your equal for everything is caught in the tail wind of your pulverized breath. O beauty, O moon the same, O sun that drain away beauty’s face from the terrify cover of everything caught within your middle age grace where the rivers runs like deserted streets sweep by a wind lost in the corroder of landscape of the city.
O beauty, beauty when will you be washed away, when will you cub your waves, when will you taste the equilibrium of gunpowder used as your shade against the musical muscles of the brave? When will you remember the wreckage of eyeglasses and the millions of pigeons that people the accommodated sky? When will you free us from the machines delirious by your perfume, fragile by a blue perspective that sleeps in a circumcision?
O beauty, beauty you are the tambourine of my memory, you are the bare back black boy that builds industry nursing at the breast of the Mississippi ignorant of St. Louis. Few are your column of comrades, few who will weep at the gasoline of your feet, you are the first fire fruit eaten, and you are the nudity of a Sycamore leaf falling at the crack of dust dawning; the split opening in night hiding under cars. No one will avoid you. Many seeks to repeat your delight, yes many; the given boy and the gave to girl that plays at prostitution, even your enemies with the sleeplessness of their hurtful poison are sons and daughters of your bitter beauty born in the belly of a burned beast roasting its nude pillow beside the bride of breeze in branches.
O beauty, beauty, solitary in the public squares where classical pagan pigeon outwit man with their inscription writ in feather. O beauty you are the museum of mirrors where-in is seen the unforgettable statues of intimate tree trunks and your timeless blushing beauty that burse the brute who buried you in the muzzle of a gun. Awake O beauty with your genuine antiquity of tongues, awake my dark haired lover of the enormous weight of water. Awake you furiously abandoned science of ignorant. Awake you rusty secret held in the blood of poets that cry your suggestive wisdom, your voice is caught in the equilibrium that probes the motion of a child on the run.
O beauty, beauty we cry out to you as a wounded leaf to the wind, you are the murmuring landscape of our target, you who were murdered by the astonishment of nocturnal desires held in the knife hand of a fluid compliant against the Gods who have abandon all the little animals within your arms. You are the evident of your epidemic. You are the ecstatic insistency that hesitate and tremble your strangle suffering of the heart that harvest a profusion of miracles held in a pleasing face, the non-evasive face utterly beautiful as to ensnare the criminal from his extraordinary deeds done down by the disheveled docks doped by trash. O beauty, beauty stripped of the anger of forgotten things, beauty delicious as atmosphere and flamboyant as the free odor of the triumphant sexual desires, cavernous and corrosive that commands thee.
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