You going to slip If you stay in
your corner
Your going to flip back
A dirty right angle
Your voice is gonna crack
Your words are gonna snap
If I have the opportunity
I can create a new identity
My voice only in your memory
You'll never see me again
I sat with rum and Joan Baez the other day
Writing up three poems in Bombay
One short another crooked
Yet not quite a disaster
The other long and sad
Not very bad but still not much more
Than a chinchilla whore
In her teens, plump, with baby fat
Still around her cheekbones, shoulders, waistflesh
Trellised eaves
A tooting car on Cadell Road
Dusk falling, friends out on a binge,
I alone in the darkening flat
Joan Baez on my knee her voice from the cassette recorder
Blurring the border between voice and flesh
And letting them enmesh
Wafting out over lonely streets
Climbing the Pali Hills
Sidling in stealth by private yew hedges
To caress like silk the legs of a party
Falling to pieces at only six-thirty
Prosaic, proselytizing like Diogenes in the bin
Beard straggling all over an obdurate chin
Breathe in the voice let the pictures go by
Looking for a conjuror in the sky
And confused, return
Dreams back to ashes, ashes to the urn
Quiet in the knowledge that ashes don’t burn.
They say some poetry
Is coming out of me
Juice wrung out by iron teeth
From the tender heart of a slender tree.
Smile wide, feet bare, curls tied high upon her head.
Scarlett skin from rising suns,
Eager eyes for something more.
Chirping loud while running free, she runs wild
Around the yard. She slumbers quietly in leaves,
With cuddles from a teddy bear.
She’s there but then she’s swept away
Into the ever-changing wind.
Face pale, thin skin, sucked into the frozen air.
Longer limbs for chance to move,
Trapped inside the golden nest.
Irises turned toward the sky, for hope to
Find a voice within. Trapped inside a hermit’s shell,
My senses come in silent white.
So close and then so far away
When tucked behind an iron gate.
If she was graced with Midas touch,
Or part of wheel of fortune’s till;
She’d pray to stretch her wings to sea
And never think to stand so blind.
No more naïveté or loss, because of
Silent wondering.
Throw caution to the dark and
Find a voice as free as wind.
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