It’s all boiled up and caked up
Lands weep and rivers cry out loud,
Puking withered currents that rather hide
Than run
Cornstalks, excoriated and wounded,
Are scolded by thunder at night,
And lightning brandishes the whiplash of its
Whitish tongue, chiding the frightened rocks nearby.
It has not rained in seasons.
It has not dropped.
Not one drop.
But standards keep falling —
And dropping.
A citadel perhaps
Of shadows only
Making walls from the thoughts
Of disembodied men
Each satrap
Anxious with its own platform
Does not feel for us at all
I could speak to your heart
Reposed in a dungeon there
Standing on the shoulders
Of the crowd I cried
Into the mountain of silence
The voice becomes
Outside the shadows impenetrable wall
You are not our king again
Yet excoriated by pain
Know it feels the worse
When love through the body makes its course
You look so silly now
Talking without the music in your voice
And soon the buzzards shall rejoice
Yes, I can still believe
In golden mornings and angels bright
Serenading the king of light
And this fancy that we weave
Shall bleed me no more tonight
The citadel is dark and cold
It's shadow is a pity to behold.
All day I stared at the blank world
And could not tell
The words invisible in my hell
I waited for the sounds of emergency
The blinking eyes and flashing red
The petals crushed upon the ground
I waited in vain
Excoriated by pain
Carrying the debris in my brain
Of great structures of falsity
Crushing indescriminately the workers
Of Chrysler, GM and the hollow economy
Splintering their dreams
Into shards unjubilant
And I could not understand the world
Without smoke
The silence of the mighty Pele
The river a toxic brown not red
And this is May
So marginal to the memory
The horror that workers saw
When they begged justice for bread
What May is this
That does not cry everywhere
For workers and their leaders dead?
All day only my pen
Dared march the white edge of history
The fragrance of teargas
The fumes of petals crushed
Under the boots of my poetry.
All day they invented a virus
To scare the world inside
But I am a steel man
And bring no flowers to the deal.
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