It must be Spring.
The begonias are vomiting diesel
Again,
Leaf blowers are whining like scapegoats
Condemned to die
Again
In a swirl
Of garbage and leaves,
And I don’t feel like being alive today.
Time corrodes the clock,
The clock devours the day,
The ocean destroys the dock
‘Till the vessel floats away.
“When I have a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.” – Vincent Van Gogh
A mystery consumes me. I pass the morning in ardent search of last night and furrow my brows as though dreams would return in the grooves of my forehead. That is not enough. Nothing is enough. I never can go faster or slower than one second at a time. My enthusiasm teeters between the unbearable and the blissful. I want to scale the heights of human knowledge, to create art, kisses, love, peace…but the next moment carries the enormity of my desire, and I fall upon the ground of my being like an electric charge in a puddle of amino acids. So I continue, neither collapsed nor elevated. Every sight I see, every thought, however subtle, every word I read or write only adds to the fury: nothing is enough.
She isn’t loud, but neither is she quiet, the breeze.
Her whispers are parcels lost to time,
Her hem a memory that rustles upon the sky.
She carries a timeless correspondence
Penned by writer we cannot know,
Delivered to a lover we cannot see.
Where is the future? Surely not beyond my window!
Surely not in the leaves that listen to the past!
The breeze trembles before she is shaken.
I stand to face her, the breeze.
She reminds me of a nameless something;
She is a sieve collecting dreams in air.
I too am a breeze, I tell her. I too swirl
And swirl and swirl, ad infinitum.
The cold light of winter filters through dusty windows,
Mixes with the buzzing of fluorescent lights.
I hear the slow shuffle of frayed jackets rustling,
Half-broken chairs straining under the weight
Of half-broken men and women and children, chipped
Tabletops holding like Atlas a world of Styrofoam
Cups and plates, plastic forks and knives,
Warm meals consumed by frigid bodies, minds, souls.
Love is a measure of time; the beams
Of life’s architecture; the reams
Of sky, the book of hope, the seams
Of garments torn by ceaseless dreams.
The arc of history is long, but it bends not toward justice
When bent by the powerful that say, “Just trust us.”
They cloak their lies in suits well pressed,
Cowards by injustice dressed.
Your skin is a nation, a boundary, a frontier,
Your body a parliament where gods
Decide the future of the world.
When I touch you I partake in history:
Together we legislate in lips.
They beat a drum, they beat a drum:
The sounds were vicious, cruel and false,
A ceaseless din that left us numb.
O how we danced this dizzy waltz
Into a chasm of injustice made!
The vigilante doffs his mask
To face the fury his secret wrought,
To emerge from the dark, in sunlight bask
And seek the truth his parents sought;