POETRY

MY MIND

Why do I follow Wherever I go
Instead of maintaining My old status quo?
I exit my dwelling Proceed down the stair
And wonder why now I am here, Not still there.

It seems that my mind
Likes to grip me like glue;
Like a newspaper stuck
To the heel of a shoe.

At times I'm inclined
To declare to my mind,
"I'm advancing alone,
Do you mind? Stay behind!"

I do not know why
It's so crazy 'bout me,
Or if it will leave me
Eventually.

Or, indeed, if my mind,
Like a fickle tattoo,
Might alight somewhere else,
Like, for instance, on you.

No -- it's too co-dependent!
Possessive! A pest!
Like a lover it's mine;
In my heart lies its nest.

So, I'll simply accept this
As how it must be:
That for now we're together;
As for later -- we'll see.

HIGHER PALETTE

Sitting on a crowded train
My head against the windowpane,
I watched an old man shuffle in
So pale, so sickly, weak, and thin.

He looked about, then tiredly
He clutched a pole not far from me,
And sighed and closed his eyes a bit:
There was no place for him to sit.

It would have been too indiscreet
To simply offer him my seat;
Reap silent praise a dozenfold,
Yet make him feel abjectly old.

So, craftily, as if to say
That I was leaving anyway,
I rose and headed for the door
And made him my inheritor.

Unaware, he filled the space;
Took refuge in my still embrace;
While no one on that train but I
Perceived my silent lullaby.

I felt like God, who silently
Cascades His gifts on you and me.
Likewise, by seeking no reward,
I'd struck that same celestial chord.

I loved this man, so like a child,
Whom I'd inaudibly beguiled.
Like God, by merely doing this,
I'd blessed him with my silent kiss.

Then disappeared on whisper wings
To other mute angelic things:
To care in silence, love in hush--
God the painter, I the brush.

AM I A POET?

A poet?
No, it
doesn't work that way.
Today,
in every piece of verse,
or worse,
in anything you say,
there has to be,
you see,
a thought,
a sort of underlying tone,
alone,
and in the act of play.

TIME CAME MARCHING DOWN THE STREET

Time came marching down the street
On diamond-bayonetted feet,
And snaked its prickly itchy coils
About the little boys and girls.

Juvenile eternities
Succumbed to days of half-past-threes,
And lovely aching evermores
Were bound and gagged by five-to-fours.

And I, who'd fought the tyrant's claim,
Surrendered to it all the same.
"It's quarter of!" I blindly cried,
And sneered as other children died.

From eons down to lickety-split
I hailed the long and short of it,
Committing nature's vilest crime:
Idolatry of Goddess Time.

And time, in turn, imposed on me
Its hideous periodicity,
While wild forever screamed, and then
It never spoke to me again.

And rue I do the day so sweet
When time came marching down the street,
And I, oh fool, let God's true way
Go marching down the other way.

MY FATHER

My father died today and went away
Through silent, gateless, haunted doors
Down unknown corridors of peach and wine,
Surrendering at last, this stubborn, shining man,
to the everlasting, ochre poetry of breathless meadows
Or evernumbing unencumbered sleep.

The betrayed temple of his once-bold body echoes in my mind and heart,
Inert reminder of the pale and pungent rainbow which arced its way across the years;
This bottomless child who sailed across the sad miracle of life
And touched his hand to mine.

I, acorn of this fallen oak,
Still smell him in each stale cigar,
In camphored lace 'pon old unholstered chairs;
In soured milk, in tattered suede, he lingers on:
Judicious, marbled, iridescent song.

My fire and his prudence burned and spit like popcorn panicking in a violet hearth;
Convulsed concerto of tinted tears and noble rage;
His eyes so brim with sea-deep love
I turned in skilled revulsion and stormed away in cloudy hate.

And now this kind ancestral link, whose cobalt grip upon me made me shy from him and him from me,
This obsolescent diety
Let go today and slipped away.

The universe shrieks inside my head;
He's dead.
This lucid, limpid, incandescent man,
Borne beyond the stars and starry dust to rest a while and be reborn:
Congeal again, come be my child.

(February, 1990)

HONEST ABE

I've never been able to figure why
Abraham Lincoln makes me cry.

Perhaps the reason goes no farther
Than Honest Abe was once my father.

FIRST BLACK NEWSCASTER, 1975

The saddest thing I ever did see
Was a black man talking just like me.

TO CRYSTAL, Age 8

One lovely day I found a box
That no one seemed to want--
The kind of box I'd give to Crys
If I were Crystal's aunt.

Of course I'm not your aunt, I know,
But even if I'm not,
I thought I'd send it anyway
And hope it hits the spot.

It was a lonely little box,
A sorry piece of scrap.
I had to paint its inside black
And line its little lap.
And when my work was finally done,
I took a little nap.

I could have got you something else,
Like moose or mice or geese.
But I just thought a pretty box
Would better suit my niece.

So, now I send it off to you
With all my love and kisses,
So you will know how very great
I think my little Crys is.

RAPE WAGON

Here it comes, boys and girls,
chortling down your elmy street
this fat balloony ice cream truck,
cartoonly rocking on its springs,
white and slow and tootly,
its rooftop speaker rasping the anguished cry
of yet another woman punctured
somewhere in this mellow land.

Draw aside your curtains, kiddies,
paste your noses to the panes,
scurry to your stoops and hear
the tallywhackered screeching of the real McCoy;
not the sere statistics, friends,
the foggy fathead figures summing
vulvabursts per minute,
the talk-show tote of violations past and
yet to come.
Here is what it sounds like.

Listen, listen, children;
hear the strychnine shrieks,
the ghastly gasps,
the hacking hi-fi birdcalls
of our species plundered.
Yes, this bilgy cawwing song,
this turgid legacy is yours, O little ones,
so hear it well and know the truth:
that this transpires now, every 27 seconds,
this simulated echo real in some
bedeviled backwash of our land.

Tootle, tootle,
up your alleys,
past your hedges,
down your lanes,
and through the bland portculli of
your mucilagic minds
the grisly message mows,
the porcelain buggy tocking back and forth
on fat cartoonish tires,
little puffs of aqua smoke
perpocking from its vent
and scraping like a stick of chalk
from town to town,
while crowing out its nervy dirge.

Listen:
Bread-dry fear, as wet as blood,
screeding like a hurricane,
choleric and gouty,
the lawless entry live and green and dental,
limned in bleating sharps and vulgar flats,
this crass delinquent outrage playing now
in alley, room, or park near you
in wretched actuality,
the mythic misbegotten stab
American as pie, as mom,
appearing every twenty-seven secs
in fingernailing ultrasonic sound.

Hear the sickly timbre of triumphal loss,
the styptic gasp of crushing weight and force,
the pigeon grunts to parallel al dente limbs askew,
fallopiated buttocks crushed and clawed.
Hear the tidal vomit of the doxy's throttled wail,
her seasick melt,
the blooming caterwauling freefall
of deflowered flesh, decapitated self.

A stop sign at the corner draws the mouthy wagon to a halt.
Still, the crucifying sounds shrill forth.
The townsfolk on their butchcut lawns,
with chesty nested arms,
aglower at the flinty play-by-play
of men attending to their virile sport.

Resuming round the bend the megaphonic coach,
O frightful jouncing thing with screeching maw,
moves on, its loutish pangs of conscience
pinging into daytime boob-tube brains,
the loveless coup a feedback squeal of bile and shame,
this diabolic broadcast long entombed,
the gargoyle horror mute too long.
Offend, O singing stand-in for our nation's mound maligned,
our womenfolk the tattered cloth beneath
the frenzied needles of marauding knaves.

Yes, feel it all, good people,
sense the boorish groaning in your bones,
ignite as blowtorch bursts of misbehavior
scorch the frozen reaches of your souls,
incinerate as street by street we quilt your town
with all the latest mulchy poop,
the up-to-date on rape,
the leprous crime extant, yea, even as we speak.
Permit your perfumed theses to dissolve
before the epiglottal truth,
your whitewashed figments die amid
the pustulated crowing from the trumpet on our roof.

Ding ding!
It's done,
the acid deed now o'er and full sung;
sweet silence once again for twenty-seven beats,
vanilla time devoid of crime,
the wagon briefly popsicle and cream
before it's back as brassy as before,
manuring out the knifeblade vowels
of yet another vile assault,
the seismic mewls,
the lowing souls,
the in-your-face fandango
of the seared and ruined,
the chocolate fudge of rape,
as on the pearly carriage rolls,
on to the next town and the next,
through village after village,
climbing city streets,
descending mapled lanes,
faxing door to door the plangent pain,
plethoral rage,
the purple hiss of rape;
and in its wake a comet-tail
of bricks and sticks and eggs and spit,
the bare-toothed vex and dander of the clean and pure.

Begone, O loudmouth lung,
O yowling bellows of our mutilated femmes;
destroy it, kill it, kiddies;
turn it upside down and spread its churning wheels,
then gag its pukey speaker,
split its chassis, blow its engine,
spear its twitching, twanging guts.
How dare they, dare they, boys and girls!
What gall to spit their pain and fury in our face,
when all we want and crave and need,
O tootle tootle ivory truck,
is ice cream.

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