WAITING FOR A THUNDERSTORM
Waiting for a thunderstorm
just me and the moon
and these deserted streets with their heritage lamps
and tungsten suns
swarming with frenzied insects
like the brain of the occasional crackhead
who’s made a hoody of the night
and pulls it down tighter as he passes
wondering whether he should have asked me for a cigarette.
Lines from sad songs like lingering smoke
from distant fires
curl through my head
like the ghosts of roads I once walked
then break off like old shoelaces.
O and the faces
like blossoms from a tree
hidden deep in the night
suddenly crossing the moon
like birds with messages and destinations
not meant for me anymore.
Kids wives lovers friends.
Imperatives of tenderness
like the first sight of her
shy and naked
and the first angry word
from his mouth
that ever passed between us
as we both stood in silence
knowing the weld
would be stronger than the original bond.
The first scar to ever write alif on my daughter’s skin
like a tiny sabre of Kufic script
you could touch
only if you were very very careful
it was so sacred
she revered it like a holy book.
The first time I ever realized
making my son breakfast in the morning
as he usurped my chair like a throne
and shrieked with laughter
daring me to uproot him
like a baby tooth
that he was fathering me
as much as I was fathering him.
And we could both feel the new ones growing in.
Evanescence of time
releasing the flavours and fragrances
of wounded flowers like cultish elixirs
into the humid night air.
Auroral phantoms of past raptures
gather and disperse
and gather again
like radiance and rain
like carnal intensities
red-shifting into the spiritual immensities
of an aging star.
A squad car slows down to check me out
and I expect any moment
to be talking to a cop
like a fast food attendant
at a drive-through window
but he decides I’m not a threat to the food chain
and cruises off.
And what could I have said to him
if he had asked me
what I’m doing out so late and alone
if I’d been in the mood to be accurate.
I’m watching water lilies
banked along the star streams
bloom and perish like Cepheid variables.
I’m remembering all the women
I’ve ever loved
teach the green phoenix
how to burn in the autumn like sumac.
And then eat my own ashes
like honey from an urn
without getting them all over my heart.
The uncontained contents
of an intimate stranger
passing the closed gates
of a more habitable solitude than mine
listening to the picture-music of his past lives
brighten the wind with fireflies
with the spearheads of weeping candles
guarding the entrance to
as if there were no return address
on the uncensored love letters
that expressed the innocence
of our tragic insight
into the mutability of love.
A furtive young man bobs up
like an apple in a dumpster
in the grocery store parking lot
and stares at me
as if the whole world had root rot.
I make myself as inconsequential as I can
and pass on
wishing I had enough
to take him to Mac’s Milk
and buy him some pizza pockets
that four and twenty blackbirds
don’t fly out of
like a nursery rhyme
that’s as real to him
as the seagulls and crows
he shoos away from his garbage-can
like fierce competitors
for a place in the ark
of his peerless lifeboat.
Humans live to eat to be hungry.
Life eats life to live.
It’s incestuously symbiotic.
It’s cannibalistically psychotic.
It’s a perpetual agony machine.
The big fish eat the little fish
and the little fish have to be smart.
This one swallows like a silo.
This one steals food
from the begging bowls of children’s mouths.
And that one
makes you think
he’s as sweet as St. Francis of
as he brushes the flies off a butter tart
and smiles like grace
over something he found half-eaten
and cast away as he is.
Sweet mother of God
have your breasts withered
like the collapsed parachutes of emergency airlifts?
No more manna?
No more locusts and honey in the wilderness?
No more milk of human kindness?
No more galaxies at the spigots of your tits?
Just this ferocious squall of hot toxic vipers
falling like acid rain
down a dry wishing well
that ran out of holy water
like a gnostic mirage
in a hermetic desert of stars?
Are you past the age of child-bearing.
Are you laughing with Sarah
at the very idea of giving birth again.
Have you come to the end of your rope
like the bloodlines of great nations
in the loins of hapless prophets
sacrificing their sons to you
even though you asked for goat
in a holy war of sibling chromosomes?
Are you finished for good
with morning sickness and messiahs?
Have you had enough of immaculate miscarriages
that rise from the tomb
like a man not born of a woman?
No more loaves and fishes?
There’s a genie.
There’s a lamp.
But no more wishes?
There’s a prayer mat.
There’s an oilwell.
But no more flying carpets?
There’s a fortune cookie.
There’s a message in a bottle.
But only this afterlife of lottery tickets
and instant wins
that rip the wings off the heels
of mercurial chance
and alchemical hopes
of turning base metal into gold
with instant defeats
that are as quick on their feet
as turtles and hares on steroids?
The fruitless anomalies of a complex man
bewildered by his own helplessness
not knowing whether he should
insist on the birthright of food with a fist
or open his heart and his hand
and give everything he’s got to give
though there’s as little protein
in the names of his mythic ideals
as there is among the hungry ghosts of fame.
Estrangement and outrage.
The savaged dignity of the cornered
eating their own hearts for the courage
to face their sacrificial lives again another day
like the strategic retreat of an ice age
trying not to do any damage
as they gouge their eyes out in their dreams
and silence the birds with their screams.
Sometimes I think the radiance
I see in the stars and people’s eyes
whatever they’re looking at inside themselves
isn’t so much a function of light
as the shriek of murdered mirrors.
But way leads on to way
and by the time I get down
to the willows on the bank of the
I’m alone again in my own agony
and the willows sway
and the river flows
and the eternal sky
does not inhibit the flight of the white clouds
everything in passage
a water snake riding
the wavelengths of the moon
like a mirage of dead seas in a desert.
And the deep unsayable sadness returns
to pervade and saturate the mind
with ephemerids of the heart
that resonate in time
like the last flowers of the summer.
Translucent simulacra of past familiars
who once possessed me
like occult seasons of the soul
that scattered like leaves and water birds
but made such an impression
upon the waters of my life
they’re indelible reflections
left untouched
by the summons and imperatives
of the long seances of the heart
and quick exorcisms of the mind
cooling the swords and grails of their passions
in star streams exalted beyond thought.
Focused like a drone strike
hunting frogs among the irises
a wild cat disregards me.
A fish jumps at a mosquito.
A flash of long distant lightning.
The shorter circuits of the fireflies.
Headlights slashing through the dark groves
beyond the train tracks
that intersect the road by the cemetery.
Elephantine clouds labour for a mouse of rain.
But every drop a star globe
and the whole of the moon and the sky
in each little tear of a world.
Beauty in the pain of departure
comes like a consolation
and leaves like an alibi.
The willows have lost their flowers
and soon enough their birds.
Some people are buried deeper than others.
And some are at a loss for words.
And some rely on bells
to temper the severity
of their disciplined farewells.
Each of us reaches out for the other
as if we could touch time itself
and gentle it
like a feather of a breath upon our skin
that for a few unborn moments
that last longer than life
makes light of death
for not knowing where to begin.
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