We bite the dust every morning,
spitting gray powder, like desperados.
Firebirds nosedive in forewarning,
perverting the trees into hell’s tornadoes.
We taste sooted smog on our tacky tongues,
dragging all our shadows of remorse.
Finding no habitat for our wheezing lungs,
we long for the rain’s fecund watercourse.
We find Death Valley spreading like a contagion,
and dodge parched patches, bruised and baked by sol.
So delirious our meandering, we know not our region,
our infernal night camps reek of cinder and wood coal.
We chant, not knowing the meaning of an arcane lyric,
unsure how to summon the recondite eidolon of Seth.
As city shells smolder, all chronic hearts await some mantic.
Surely hell will freeze over, so we wait with bated breath.
Until now, the skies were only blue or gray.
But today, wrathful Cacus set the sky ablaze.
Today, the spectral smoke choked ochre sky mirrors
exploding wildfires unleashed below.
Today the tarnished jaundice sky measures
the crumbling Constitutional edifices,
the raging roving injustice burning
everywhere across the land.
Today as thousands are driven
from their homes, the pestilence
spreads across the land,
killing hundreds of thousands.
Today the sooted grimy sky
reflects the deceitful lawless tyrant,
all his crooked crony stagehands,
his white nationalist army of tormentors,
as their raw sewage floods the rivers and streams
of our theories.
Today this climate rampage
has nothing to do with climate change.
We bask instead in the political climate
of aberrant delusions.
Today this inferno in the sky,
this ceiling of hellfire,
suffocates our oxygen of dreams.
Below, the Constitution provides
kindling for the flames
ingulfing our democracy,
the fuel for our conspiracy wildfire,
our rite of passage
to the underworld.
Published: Dissident Voice 10/18/2020
strange how the day shuts down, suddenly bleak,
as when the dawn crested three-quarters past six.
cumbersome eyelids befriend pen and ink —
outline of skinny trees, lack of stars,
hush’d homes — fig leaves do not hide them.
visible neighbors smoking chimneys.
the sooted smell of winterscape
as she falls fast asleep.
12/18/2019
Deep within, settle our diamonds of hate;
Descending, slowly through our mind, heart and soul.
Hurts refined and ignored, forgotten in fate;
At first nothing but, a burning lump of coal.
The black-sooted singed wound, is hidden within;
We put on a smile and voice, 'nothing is wrong.'
The battle of flesh, rages with slash and din;
The coal's journey to diamond, moves along.
Rough in shape, we cut a gem to perfection;
Overcome with our deftness, we hold dearly.
Slipping down toward heel, without detection;
Hurt pressed to hate, remaining a hurt merely.
Some diamonds sparkle, destined to adorn;
Ours collect in mass, near the Achilles' heel;
Grinding and cutting, until tendon is torn.
We slam to the earth, only able to kneel.
Confused and dazed, we simply don't understand;
Calling God, we are given the strength needed,
To pass these stones, as easily as grains of sand;
Only then, can we stand, and proceed unheeded.
Just as we are, we were made to be
Straight ties, ironed shirt and no sense of
identity.
Who are they, they asked
Are they sooted white or just black as
snow.
They talk as would an aristocrat but yet
that hair betrays them.
Pitted deep in their heart was a sense of
longing but neither could they share their
earnest hope, to them it was a ragged
belief.
Faith was always an unspoken ethic of
their courage. They told them " In order to
grow you must cut at the base"
The thing they would fail to realise, bearer
than fiction, was their true voice. The voice
that told them the clothes they wore were
of alien decent. The Suit they prefer most
was of the barest cut.
Who decided against my choices? I left
bread for you and yet only the flour
mattered as if only you could eat the flour.
Must not the flour be moulded first to form
you bread. Why is it then that I have
become the leaven in my progression.
Until the concluding of my affairs I will not
find understanding of what They culture.
the headiness of now
swirl of keystroke and ideal
new pages
new thoughts
flying on ether
buoyed by excited neutrons
flared by the plasma
of a thousand faceless pens
type it
spill it
splash it on out with a careless eye
falling slow on burning diodes
bundled up
like a mind's autumn harvest
fed to a soul's hearth
dripping with embers
spilt out sooted and crisp
acrid, yet sweetly
an incensical fog
ladled out
from that conjuring elsewhere
sharp as raw silage
sweet as the dew
gathered
gather it
grasp it and renew
bottled summer still shining
uncorked and flown true
so shed the word wonder
baring all the mind's eye
as rapt galleries wait breathless
for every poet's emotional try
rhyme it
(or not)
choose time honored formats
(or not)
but truth be it told
rhyme scheme and meter
can be both lover and shackle
but in matters of the prose
dip your heart
deep into that rarefied font
and evaporate
into
honeyed fog banks
of verse...
The crowd is drawn like magnets
Drawing flecks of finely splintered steel.
They stand and stare
At smoke-choked, charred remains-
Magnificent Medea.
Her ashes slowly blow like dust
Upon Atlantic breezes
Rushing over achromatic beaches
Soon to rest on Adirondac majesty.
Death is silent still like Medea's
Ashes on the evening winds.
And in the early dusk that follows dust
One sooted shape is left;
Like a child makes an angel in the snow.
Bouquets of roses spread upon
The ground around black-sooted angel -
Aromatic, multicolored sweet bouquets,
Giving vivid dignity to death in final pose.
A tall thin man with thick white hair
Stands straight and still
Above the remnants of his queen;
He once was hero and marine
In distant wars before Medea
Stole his soul and made it whole.
The cattails cluster'd round
Medea's marbled pond
Are crying muted cries
As they bend and bow to something
Larger than their friend upon the wind.
A single night-hawk flying by
Ackowledges the cattail's cry
As it dives above narcissi trumpets waving -
Modulated bright and bulbous yellow
In the twilight's dim and faded light.
After so many at the World Trade Center died
And after the carnage in the Bronx every night
Coming over this trail of blood like tears
Where that angry disenfranchised foot, booted
Start the course of searing pain down the inner thighs
The fetus left in tumult on the floor, the womb that cries
Cracked dreams in the veins again, visions sooted
After all this, and the time of sorrow banging on the door
An irreverent, debacled stranger I never met before
I could not stand in the fuming ash of day without just anger.
I turned in rage to find the tree
I supposed Frost too in his woods seek interminably
And all I saw was the beast
Skulking near the manger
All I saw was the beast
I fell,
On my knees but not for surcease of mortal pain
I held the wild horse of heaven in prayers bridled rein
I was searching for a woman
The infernal mother who abandoned me
To a serpent's care
I needed a confrontation with Eve
And heaven to absolved me
From what God should have done
I knew in the light
that shone on your lovely head,
that awoke the jewels in your eyes,
and the diamonds in your smile,
that it would never leave...
Not once more would I ever breathe
an air as sweet as that you've breathed
once upon a moon-kissed college breeze.
Oh, if only to touch your skin,
drench it like the hot, naked rain
as you purse your luscious lavender lips
and dance away on your bar-sooted feet
to be the sun that lay beside you
in your bed as you awake
if only to feel your greater warmth
and your heart beat, just once, for me.
The nights we laugh and shoot the breeze
are enough for a lifetime of memory.
Yet always will I find matters of the heart
difficult deserts to cross when all alone.
A kiss, a death-
but not for a moment I wept,
for I shall ever feel...
your presence in my heart.
By your side, a servant to remain
happy and haunted by my silent sin.
Seeing this end, I trudge onward unflinching
eyes wide open, fearless, to certain doom.
Focus me to the horizon
Let the clouds slip into my nostrils
Let me inhale the deep pools of carbon life
I start to loll
As I forget what watches are
The strange figure in the dark sooted suit walking on the brook
I sit in my chair in my room and imagine him
I’m traveling far distances
The mind mells with Moorish determination
I beg for focus
Tauting the mast