The bobby pin was bent,
it looked like two fingers making a peace sign.
It fell from her black hair,
and landed on the blacktop in the hot sun.
That is why it glistened.
My shoe stuck to some gum,
which had also landed on the sidewalk.
It was less glamorous,
but evidence of human life nonetheless.
Gravity does not wait
for me to finish my ambitious errand.
The sweating summer street
today is full of fragile life glistening.
I try to keep my cynic in a cage
I guild each bar so she stays
her mouth is foaming with the lies
fed by silver spoons gleaming like war planes
in the sky
Sometimes her mind is buzzing
like multitudes of preachers and popes on Sunday morning
muttering and shouting and searching
like a distant click clack of a train car
humming like a motor, a truck, or powerlines
Other times it is quiet and dark
as black as the inside of a coffin
of a small child killed by an American bomb.
Sometimes she lays there not knowing what to do
sometimes the sadness is so heavy
it's not the weight of the world
but the difference between worlds
that has her down.
Then she awakes in the morning like a bird
but doesn't sing.
She's mad but it's not the mad hatter mad
from being stoned on the lead of American boredom.
It's a sinking mad, feeling the weight
of the darkness of the caves in Afghanistan.
She rattles the cage. If she wasn't in the cage,
we might not hear her at all.
She trembles the bars
reverberating to the heart of those who have lost
too much.
Hangs in the air like the stare of a young child looking
at the space where his arm used to be,
grunting to do daily tasks,
always thinking of land mines
in the back of his mind.
Even in this one grunt I hear
a whole coughing dissonant symphony of
foreign policy. Foreign...policy?
Kink the hose of infinity.
It was not red paint but the light of the fire
which splashed when the embers moved.
The Devil himself sometimes makes appearances.
Stoking the fire brings him out of the coals.
Stirring the salt and pepper of the ashes
one loose stream of light ventured forth
disappearing into the air as he swallowed it.
Eighteen minutes left before we leave.
Didn't you set the car keys where I would remember them?
The earth is moving and I can't see the sun.
Not with these sunglasses on.
Where is your other ear?
Did you hear what I was saying?
This window is not going to go down.
I had it fixed last week.
Are you kidding me?
We're halfway there.
Are you going to get the keys or did you leave them by the gas pump?
Didn't you believe me when I told you?
No I wouldn't have known.
How would I have known that you need shades to see?
No, this isn't a time to argue.
But I heard you say...
One chance to go down to New Mexico in black leather jackets high on the night air, fixing to die on torn blue jeans that hug our knees like the riddles of ancient days. Slapping our thighs in time to jazz, wondering if our feet are too loud as we tap morse code lullabies in time to the pounding piano, heaving and sighing like a whale thrown onto a beach while the ocean roars out with its clattering sticks and snare drums, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog, it never stops and it's not going to. We will have to head out the door whether we are ready or not.
We have no time left.
Joy is not muddy. It is a vibrant river, fresh from the mountain tops. When you're feeling cold, could you be my snow? All I ask is that you melt and run to me, wearing down every haggard rock in my brain until it is fine sand. Let's walk on the beach, shall we? Take my hand. Let's skip stones and talk of old times. I will pick up a stick and we will draw in the sand. Dragging it closer to the water, the sand becomes mud-like. The stick drags, and each new design is erased, as quickly as it is drawn, by the constant lapping of the waters. What then? Will you look at me with wide searching eyes, and say I told you so?
The pigeons and I under the viaduct
see the faded colors of the mural
I touch my hands to the paint
The trains don't come here anymore,
the last train to pass here
was 1,000 Tuesdays ago.
It raced there on the way to a black coffee boardroom
I was commuting in blue jeans
to the last creative ramp to board the arc
not realizing I was a unicorn
and that there are often free tickets to the Titanic.
It's hard to explain if it was a sense of ambition
or just a sense of purpose which drove me then
but I know it's something else now.
The color is deeper, even the black of the mural
although faded, is more opaque
than the coffee ever was.
When cupid begins to play the cello
and art becomes a sky of rising suns
clouds of color soft as feather pillows
stretch up like fingers reaching for a drum
The humming of the birds and crickets too
join in this joyful melody we sing
The steady hands begin to strum the lute
and Cupid's bow goes deep into the strings
Composer's notes, nah, he doesn't bring it
He follows closely the rise of each kiss
What sheet music does Cupid use for this?
None I've ever seen, I think he wings it.
I live on Exodus Street. Things are always moving. Last night I saw the Northern Lights richocheting off of the lamposts and hovering silently above the clouds, their rainbow fireshow heaving glowing darts higher than the sky could hold. The light seemed not to run out, but to simply go towards infinity. We were in the tenement buildings, pasted to the walls were the cut-out pictures of fashion girls and stock market reports which we had painstakingly removed from the magazines and newspapers with the sharp, tart taste of temptation and then cut with the dull scissors of addiction. The office boys had circled the word "Sell" in red pen, and we had picked up all the extras in the mail room, back when messages reached their destinations and when radios had knobs and rock stars had hair and--what? Where are you going? Not you, too? It seems things had just been waiting to fall off the ledge. The lemmings were out, the zoos were full of politicians and their tiny feet were creating dust storms as they ran closer and closer to the cliff. It seems everyone was running from a bum deal, getting the "bums rush." He had been on the park bench for too long, with all of his things, and the. Falling, falling, falling.
I read a poem that made me think, I cannot write a poem at all.
It made my words just birds ramming into windows,
it made my ideas just fists busting into walls.
No, seriously, it was quite good.
It was thought out in metaphor and each piece lead to the next
I realized I have a far way to go
to lift the sideways steam engine
from the Kansas plains
and remove the debris from the prairie
and find beaty in the
sundrenched metal
and find soul in the
tipped over coal
in this
train wreck.
Basking in the glow, the ember rolls and falls
into the cool water and goes out.
I suppose that this is the way of things.
Praise the truth hold it up like Simba but keep in mind it might be deep in your heart unable to be touched by human hands