Et Quoi Donc?

Et quoi donc,
Après le silence d'un an;
Des bâtiments perdus,
Des maisons versée,
Des corps fondus?

Et quoi donc,
Après un tremblement du cœur,
Debout sur des pieds immobile
A la chasse d'une voix qui se cache dans les ombres de mes mémoires?

Quoi donc après une vie chanceuse,
Un départ maladroit,
Un adieu qui répercute dans la tombe d'une mère endormi?

Les petits mots m'arrives;
Doucement,
Lentement.

Find the Music

Find the music. On the street.
In the subway.
Out of the tinkering technology that renders the trombone an anachronism.
Find the music on fourth street in a city that isn't jaded,
Inside of a body that lives
Even when it rains on Saturday.
Find a body that validates,
That sees the truth of this present.

Now ride back and meditate.
Sit on, whistle and, write on the low (low) timber of that which has yet to happen.
Live on the lie that you can fix the past,
And ride, ride inside of the music that you do not own.
Ride.
Ride for the truth you do not know.

Letters to Ayiti

Last time I wrote, I folded the text, and sent it as a letter to an undetermined location. Without an envelop.

The last time I wrote I was in a desert populated by mercenary cactus seekers. They stole all of the cacti and left all of their water bound tightly in your calabash gourds.

Last time I wrote, I was on a packed car, in a rattling vehicle on my way to china in the body of a nineteen year old who was trying to show me what it was like to dance as an scientific experiment: "We must know why we move, to hypothesize the end.'

I've never been to China and she only went to China to go have a peek at the billions of curios in such a curious place. She spoke the language--but she never greeted anyone.

I held on to her words because they gave me meaning.

They gave meaning to the place right below my ankle that continuously hurts when I remember all of the lives that I have forgotten. And I stared quietly at the movement that shook her tiny toes and left her eyes static, glued to the thing that she could not understand.

She never found the cacti.

And I stopped writing because I relished the emptiness.

It is a longing that cannot be expressed, a destitution that cannot be defined, an ache that must be situated as agony because it has no cure and no mortality and I have found that it is only justified when I am most small in the back of a closet, inside of the negative imagination, reinforced by mindless isolation of multiplying paper. I am a reject replica of a misspent journey, bound by the terms of my tenure and nurtured by the rabid impotence of that which is anchored in the middle of the sea.

The landscape of my insomnia has room only for the perfumed and nameless cottoned trees that give fruit in the beautiful night to the sounds of the Ave Maria and the wailing of the many-named mother.

A Poem's You

An anonymous message, today-

It wasn’t from you.

You, being Divine Wholeness.

I wonder if I could ask you

To manifest,

Beyond narrative and Meditation,

As new media

Accessible as guidance

Into beauty, into connection.

You, being Earth,

For whom I do not cease yearning.

What if I were to lay my body down

On grassy property,

Melted into you

In plain view

On a New York world

So unbelieving

In liberation

And soil?

You, being Mother,

Warrior,

Co-signer in living and existing,

Leaving messages

In strange places, blocks

With strange ideas

About a world made of fabric—

Textile earth and threaded limbs.

You are no longer a question.

You are laughter that eludes me.

Prayer

When asking for me,
Don't be afraid--
Do it out loud,
On the water;
Call up a tempest
In my name.

Go ahead and laugh
When you find me,
Multiplying in the fire
of your candles.

Your house is small,
and you tower
above the daunting blaze
Of black magic.

Ayiti

In my absence, you grew

Uncontrolled

Fevered

In the throes of a seamless puberty

Riding wild

With file and machete

Consuming rape

And lending fervor to

Scandalized waste;

The prostitution of a voice

That you scarcely let me hear

And a face that you forbade me to see

Out of fear for the moment;

A present

Sans architect

That performs the deconstruction

Of sacred-ness

In a voluminous movement

That defies recognition.

You are burning without grace,

And I am shamed beneath the snow banks

Of your unrepentant talents,

Cold, in exile.

Sainthood

Even after your last exit,
I’ve yet to finish your altar.
It has become vast.
I included all manner of things to make it more meaningful.
I acquired by the pile,
fast,
And at first, I was stealthy—
Hair pins, needles, rusted coins, wine bottles,
Acute angles of broken mirrors and bottle caps without words.
I was good.
I traveled north to find the perfect pine needle
But it died before I returned and, still, I kept it.

The first of many guests arrived,
And while some never left,
I didn’t complain.
They brought things,
Added to the art.
They played music and it allowed me to dance with a posse of rodents
Who came bearing gifts—
Shopping carts, toilet seats made out of faux wood,
Pottery and silver teeth.
I was onto something delicate.

I ate fever-bush for strength,
Consulted daily with the sorceress from the brothel across the street.
She told me to look for you
In the stark pillows of each hour.
I extinguished the light,
Kept a silent vigil.
The roaches rioted;
They tore apart the wheels of your chariot,
Chewed the immaculate symbols of the most potent prayers,
Gave wings to the drums ,
And together they flew to where you had gone.

It was a most flawless betrayal,
Executed at night.

Break

My feet are cold;
That is the constant.

Impotence.

My fingers beat a tune
From the scratches of Red Maroon
Fingernail polish that chip on principle.
I do not abide fear.

I am fearful;
That too is constant.

Sun-Dried To-ma-toes

Borrowed decadende sang in my prepubecscent body as I contemplated
the depths of taste.
A red moment lush with the magnitude of near flight
fleshy rich fruit totured and mumified
Pungent and aqcuired
Depth packaged in secret guilt.
I felt pleasure in unshared senses,
Righteous claiming,
A wealthy mimickry of self.

Sad Interloper

The guitar, unheard, is to be imagined as
Sweet evening is speeding to unfold
Before noon has reached its peak.
The hiccups of time are melding into
The very moment when the subject, arrived,
Forgets the purpose of the journey
Which, is reason, that cannot be remembered.

Flying forward smoky signals,
A tamed beginning with a protruding sternum
Bends to a massive figure.
The fading notes of past instance
Are cease-start inside of a mouth so small
That it must have been formed yesterday.

The song is minor, trembling
Each chord tragic
With forewarning
For the intangible moment before
Life sparks beneath thin threads of hair—
It moves a corpse,
Tenured inside the bowels of her kin.
She wears pigtails,
A patchwork of blues
And a belly of rocks,
Beneath translucent skin.

There is no powder on my feet

If you come looking for me,

I’m just a ways down yonder—forgive me, I shed my clothes.

My feet are clean,

And skin is jaundiced—

Yellow as it suffers stagnation

It contemplates inaction.

My palms are cemented inside the earth

Where the wind chafes my knotted spine.

My breasts hang heaviest,

They sway me ‘round my sphere—tormented.

Here I suffer.

Now, I watch

—and I am planning your song of welcome.

I will free you my jailer if you bring me my spirit

And together we will pray and eat

From the earth that I am chained

We will dance, in tandem, on the streets of Ash

Where we will stir up sacred powder and

Find healing on foot.

The mystery is a goat

It begins with a kick,
Like the pierced belly
Trailing along the whiny music
Of the misunderstood first letter.
It was beneath the power of the slow beast--
(which boasted one kind of sanctity
that moaned infinite mornings
and milked marvels)
a human race
not unlike the thing that hung
and bleated universal depth
within the longitude of ahhh ahhhh's.

I wasn’t angry as it gurgled blue.
Batting at bee bee bees.
Or, maybe, I was
When I heard the cackle of the ee ee ee;
It bit after the revving of tongued absence.

And it was subtle
As it rose into the blow
Tortured like the last beyond,
Which wasn’t tortured,
When it smiled final—?

Premature rupture of the tap tap tap,
Begs us to return once more for the ominous breadth
of the suspended

Goat, grinning a dare
With immeasurable fortitude:
How long would it take for the hibiscus--
Even the hibiscus, to grow naked.

Exhibit A

Inside,
the clock, useless,
shows no mercy
to the watcher
behind layers of
glass walls
and open screens.

Outside, a sign:
"Photograph: Freedom"

Morning Tea

Desperate palms grasp

a singeing heat.

Better to burn—

than to feel

the first frost,

beneath dying feet,

latching onto mother’s green.

Diffident Winter

White flecks fell

abashedly

from up high.

I watched

unmoved,

by Her concession.