Thoughts of Nothing vs. Something

Wait Child,
I'm coaxing you out of your
suicidal shoes.

I'm blowing up your brain
with my hounding mystery.
The sharp corners of my
divine mouth come up
in a slow survey
of your noble struggle.
You will never know,
some of you are smart enough,
lowly enough, reverent enough
to realize this
one
very lonely
truth.

Most of you try to know.
Amusing yes,
but this entertainment
leaves a bittery taste
in my mouth.

Do I do this for sport?
Watch you play your ignorant
act out for me,
you my puppets.
Going only where I tell you,
satisfying my perfect whims,
if you can call them that.

Child, this does not seem true?
No wonder.
I don't blame you so much
for standing with your
feeble knees halfway
into the pulling mud,
and cursing my name.
Hoping like bolts of lightning
flashing in your retinas
that I'm not there.
Hoping that I'm imagination,
how clever and most high
does that make you?
Something that once was dust.

I will not make you a puppet,
so please,
I invite you to think these things.
Live on them,
gobble up this delicious ambiguity
and call out your meaningless existence
for what you believe it to be.
Spend your days drifting,
and your nights
carving god into your own skin.
Carving your own name on your forhead.

Ah yes child,
clever you are and friendly,
manipulating your way through life.
If you have enough luck
to have that choice.
If you are only my flesh and blood,
how selfish does that make me.

Child.
I am not you.
Never have I been,
and never will be.

Look at this world!
Don't you hope for the sake
of the starving
of the dying
of the lonely
that I am not much like you?

And you look at me with
your thin suspicious eyes,
and ask me why I created.
Why I spoke suffering into being.
Vindictive, that's what I am.
A big unknown form in the sky
looking down through the dirty clouds,
and sneering at your bloody sharp lives, and your groaning.

So here we stand,
in an uncomfortable embrace
if you, dearest,
can never learn to accept the impossible.
How will you live with me?

How will your shaking finger
resist pulling the trigger
of the pricking metal gun in your salty hand?

In reality, you're not alone,
but there is not a real crowd either.
Most people like breathing,
laughing too.
Don't you?

Let me show you some small things.
People.
You should know that people
have sparkles of value,
you can see it in their tears
in their carefully chosen smiles
in their hurling clumsiness.

What if I told you, child,
that heaven was true laughter,
and hell was stretching lonliness,
icy, endless misunderstanding.

What if I could promise
that in the end
there would be no shimmering harps
and fluttering wing filled clouds,
but only relationships that always
felt perfectly real?

No dissonance of separation.
This perfection,
the complete spotless openess,
the understanding you've
hoped recklessly for everytime
you put your trebling lips
onto someone else's.

This understanding that has
rubbed sand in the eyes of
your spirit,
everytime it is successful
in hiding from you, once,
so frequently,
again.

This whole knowing,
will be there
living, thriving
in eveyone else's eyes.

Dear Child,
you will have that understanding
dripping down your cheeks,
and you will never hurt anyone again,
and no one will ever hurt you.

On a discovery of love.

1.
Love
I waited for you to come.
You came in the sweaty night.
sweat wiped off by an
old hankie.
The moon changing shape
and color on its whimsy.
Until it finally settles
on African bright orange,
so juicy I could eat it.
Maybe tonight
I'll fly up and swim in its juice.
No cheesy moon for me,
and my dreams of love
will be original,
if I have anything to say
about it.

2.
Love
I waited again.
You came in the dew drop morning.
The sun muffled by clouds
sending its warmth in small post.
Coaxing the birds
out of hiding
for a morning show
to an audience of me.
I held my heart to the birds
on hands and knees,
bowing to their creative forms,
and they flew it up to the sun for me.
For I am Icarus this morning,
and my wings have melted.

3.
Love
Again, I waited.
You sent Gabriel to me.
The horrendous glory
of this sacred celestial
terrifying my pagan heart completely.
I am a heretic,
trying to build my own wings.
So sure and proud,
bound to fly away,
and escape my prison with the birds,
but I have failed
and I crouch in defeat
under the majesty of the Ethiopian trees.
Afraid that they will destroy me
in their superiority.
But Gabriel comes,
touches my heartless body,
for I have sold that at the last,
and where his hands
had been I discovered
new wings.

Tap, Tap
See me? I have a baby
and no shoes.
Shoeless feet
covered in frozen mud,
and you are rich with money
and everybody is poor,
in one way or another.
Spare me.
My angry stomach calls
to your pale skin.
I am humble enough to be
a spectacle.
I will take your charity,
I can't afford pride
like you can.

Gloria

"I'm sad," her eyes said.
I haven't a bed
I haven't some food
I haven't a shoulder
of someone older
I haven't a tear.
What a strange child you are
Gloria dear.

"I'm sad," I said,
You haven't a friend
This I can mend, I swear.
Sit on my lap,
my arms close the gap
and my voice sings
"Gloria" in your ear.

Crouching, crouching low
wrinkles making happy trails
over her hills and valleys.

Every step breathes small pains
of an age of cutting the ground.
The bright night of an african moon,
sings her to sleep
as it has done for decades
and in the morning,
Sunday morning,
She puts on her best
and sings the morning awake
blissfully out of key.

Deep Children

You strain me,
deep children of 2AM
with your holy clothes.
Well, holey clothes of course.
On the blood mud soil of this holy ground
you are gods among men.
The sinews of your legs,
under your charcoal sheets
push the plow of yesterday,
hard for life.

When I stood,
ugly in comparison,
white as a moonbeam
on your hallowed ground
I remembered,
that my love would ask me
from outside my safe place in his arms,
why you were black.

I will tell him that the
dark punishing sun of the
African sky,
threw some clay into the kiln,
and burnt your stately shapes.
It charred your skin dark
and you,
sitting dear in your brown toothed ignorance
subconsciously tell me through your eyes,
that I am the blood soil under your feet,
and your sweating, rotting ways
may always or sometimes
stand chuckling knowingly over mine.

Excuse me miss,
Do you have children?

Children,
No. I thought.
I've never even loved enough
to make those.
Those new people.
New people that grow
inside a real belly,
inside my belly.

I took way to long too long to answer.
Speaking, I say,
No. I don't have children.
No children and I turn
to face my impression in the face.

She is beautiful and haggard and black.
Haggard and struggling
to hold a child dark and as beautiful.
Her child.
He sleeps soundly.
Limp and safe,
strapped over her chest and stomach.

Desperate melting chocolate eyes
ask me,
Can you hold him?
Hold him while I put this on my back.
I have to shop,
and I don't have anyone to help me.

By that she means,
No one to love her,
no one to hold her hand,
kiss her and the dusk dark boy,
help her in the grocery store.

In the grocery store I take him
into my childless arms,
press him to my ignorant stomach and chest.
My hip holds him.
My hip was ready for children.
But only my hip was ready.

Sound

I hear the running of a new beat
not the clashing, but
the simple addition of another birthed voice.

It does not have an identity,
but there is a pale hopeful
glimpse of a new way of moving.

Movement calls to the
hands of the drummer,
and the senses deep in the palm
pushing, grinding, sounding, pounding
the tradition of a generation.

This said pale sound
tunes itself to the mouths of the old.
The new hands, the smart ones,
take their cues from tradition.

But they are not the same people.
Neither do they play the same song.

Lent

The sky roars blue
the wind colors on our hair
the ocean wraps its arms
around our aching brains, and
the eyes of millions of desperate
humans rip apart our hearts.

White, furious warmth, you
looked down at us
and began with a pleading overture.
clues to a faded existence
riddled with unclaimed splendor.

Even with the snapping, bellowing
mouth screaming at us to listen,
we tied down our thousand thrashing thoughts
with a schedule.
We were blinded
living in a bombed black world.

Next, furious warmth,
you gave us a meal.
more than we asked for.
But we are ravenous creatures.
We have teeth growing
between the folds of our skin
and we ate.

Yes dear one,
we ate as if we had never
tasted before, our millions of
sensing teeth melting hard into
your crawling, leaping, growing creation.

We filled our stomachs
until they poked out of our bodies
and then we filled between our ribs,
up our throat and out our ears.
Love, the food stopped tasting delicious,
then it stopped tasting good.

Furious warmth,
we slapped your right cheek,
then we slapped your left,
and we screamed a gut wrenching,
throat ripping noise.
Because all we want is for it to
taste delicious again.

And you said quietly,
my beauties, my loves,
Stop Eating.