poetry

Just how are you supposed to respond
when you watch a revolution die?
How do you not become a hardened cynic,
or bleed away into rusty apathy,
crushed under the thumb of the oligarchs?
All lofty idealism I had has turned to despair,
as I watch these shameless rich
try to sell us on their false morals
and pretend that they aren’t all corrupt.
When the river freezes over, do the fish beneath perish?
A voice in the wilderness guides this lost wanderer.
It speaks; its voice restores true north

Be they a hundred years old,
patriarchs of conquest cold
nodding on thrones of porphyry,
never have they seen, like Mehri at ten,
what she had witnessed then,
When metallic brutes of prey
stole her father’s breathing dear,
bedimming the daylight’s way,
bloodying her beauty clear.
In the playground of oligopolies,
of dirty old orders of war which sear small birds still,
ambulant, benumbing hostilities
ravage the biophile ethic of Summerhill.
The loess of bellicosity
in Badsha Khan’s tenacious hills

Did you see them?
The Indians.
Sitting against a wall on St. Mark’s Place,
All those many cold winters.
This street was once a stream, he said.
This island was once our home.
We slept on the big round rocks, hot in the sun,
And the women smiled.
You could fish there and live forever.
Now our hands are always dirty
And will never be clean,
Until the Great Day
When not even the liquor man will look for us.
Now you talk with the hand signals of the hunt.
The rocks are hot in the sun.

Vines attach
their grip
while continuing to
expand in proportion
just as my heart
is set in place
with you
yet still growing
only so
I can learn
how to love you
even more

My guardian angel hovered over me one night,
In a glowing halo,
Sparkling so bright
That I had to close to my eyes
To be able to discern what He wanted from me!
See you, said He, see you the reality of the world
See you the suffering, the anguish of unlucky souls
See you the chains which bind them to their actions
See you the impositions which have been forced down their throats?
Pray, you live only by swirling to the beats of my tunes
You live merely by seeing up to the tip of the nose

In the sewers of time lie the detritus of humankind. The left-over sediments that smolder or get swamped by the putrid waters or pushed deeper into a hard soil by the stubborn fingers of relentless history marching on, often muddying or reddening the channels running underground the cities.
And they were called out for cleaning the debris and the flotsam. The ghosts that dived in or out of the warrens crisscrossing beneath the City that rose vertically on that network discharging the noxious and the dead into somewhere- someplace.

I crawled like a bug and dug
myself into the dirt,
sequestering myself from my “own,”
free from the surface,
deep in the dark
like night in a forest
I foraged, in the shadows
In search of a bodiless quiet.
Up above,
the skies rage with anger,
while down here, in the earth,
I’m free to roam, inching closer
to the cloister of a hermit hole,
a purity of isolation
like Christ in Gethsemane.
I’m safe here, eating the dirt,
while above “they” feed the ego.

Skin and Bones, she lays there…
upon a sickly hospital bed life raft.
Insides vice-like, stomach cramps
and nausea throne-rule the abstract day.
It started as ‘Self Control’
but, quickly disintegrated
into a foe-less War…
objection-less and unimportant.
The Feeding Pipes
worm into her barren soul,
sustenance is such hard work.
She folded her Spirit up
and locked it inside a minute, narrow box,
then hid it somewhere out of reach,
upon the thinly veiled cusp of consciousness.

in the screen
that filters
that shelters
us
from stories
we tell
we once
told
those catholic
we learned
did hold
the hand
that forgives
flies and other insects
sometimes clung
were they too
blessed
when those bells
above
were rung?
was it mean
there to hang
on wings
on legs
the truth
and fib
between
what we yearned
and what we learned?
did they fail
before that rail
to raise in buzzing

To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.
– Samuel Beckett