There is something to be said for purpose,
Is there not?
The lilac tempts the bee,
The politician seeks the voters’ approbation,
The poet pursues greatness;
We embrace like rough hot stone slid against rough hot stone,
The space between us vanishing, a horizon in lifting fog,
The back-and-forth sway of stomach in breath a ship that
Approaches then recedes from the dock,
Each approach staccato with the hum of two engines
Dying in our chests: put-put-put, they seek to anchor
In my garden I have sought to wrest from nature
what’s untamable in both of us.
What grows here, grows because I have knelt
in the dirt, have spread seeds, have weeded and pruned.
I will bury you in poems,
The words like leaves
Cascading around you,
Drip, drip, drip until
You and the moss
Are indistinguishable.
I am monastic, yes, but not a monk—
Austere, ascetic, I abstain from drink
Yet, sloshing blood, my heart, engorged and drunk,
Trembles like a pen that spills carnal ink;
See how I slur my words? The Book beckons
But the night seduces with pages soaked
Think of a moment in time,
See it happen and then pass,
Rewind it, speed it up and slow it down,
Turn it in your hands like a jewel
Or a relic,
Observe it through the stained glass
Of a microscope or a Church window,
Taste it with the tongue of memory—
The jasmine and vinegar
That fill to brimming the vase of history.
My heart with desire tense, I knew: naught
But this blue eve of bloody stars, of wounds
Raw—the sighs of one who is oft distraught—
Could this, my manic body, maroon
Where brave souls go to find the bliss they sought;
America, how I thought I knew thee well!
Land of the West, of golden gleaming hope,
Of the People’s answer to Dante’s hell;
We who with freedom and slavery cope.
Do not be fooled by the fool,
The man who flaunts and struts,
Whose words are empty but cruel
Like the waiting grave a genocide abuts.
“The breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack.” – Shakespeare
The power of fire is not that it burns
But that it distracts:
We save what burns because it burns.