Listen instead to the silence
Of the eternal mother
Whose grief is recorded in no discourse
Small lives that fill only
Spaces between the lines of the chronicles,
So we may listen not to the
Silver sermons of generals,
Nor the rotund praise of Presidents
And thumping snap of silk flags,
Nor the roar of tricolored vapor
From polished flying jets,
But the silence of the picket fences
And the stutter of Atlantic seagulls,
The sighs of widows and orphans
Casting melodies on the lengthening shadows,
Of identical white crosses strewn across
The last beach of the last just war.
Any Day Now
Any day now life will
Turn its back and walk away,
Show its fangs and munch
On marinated cranium
Unable to hold a 495 page
Book within its circumference
Life which once seemed full
Of sparkling, moving matter,
Of will and love and stress,
Affections and detestations,
Passions and lordly proclamations
And discriminating exclusions is gone.
Now only the harsh corn skulks
Of promised disease and dementia
And all inclusive Alzheimer’s
Burning into brain matter
Once so arrogant and neurotically connected
Survive, “Oh, I’d commit suicide,” you said.
Well, here are my wrists darling
All I see are candy-colored pills of
Every shape and prescription staving off the ravages
Of total annihilation: of that cactus plant
Life which holds only one
Drop of water and one blossom.
Blood Sacrifice
On a peculiar night
A sacred image
Is carried by black eunuchs
On a litter and is wept over,
With regular laments which
Fall in cadences. Then satisfied,
By these ceremonies of fake tears,
A lamp is brought in next,
The shaman oils the throats
Of all those who are weeping
And once they are anointed,
The Priest murmurs to them
In his prayer whisper
“Do not fear initiates
God has been saved
For us, there will be salvation”
“You bury one idol,” he thinks,
“You weep for one idol
One idol you remove from
The Tomb…”
Both sexes are agreeable
To that holiness inherent
In the succession of the
Two sexes that the intermediate
One is conserved…
It is no longer male and
Yet neither is it female
Delighting God, the Mother
Who procures for herself
The delicate razors used
By the beardless masters
Happiest amongst men
Having seen and heard
The sweetest mysteries of
Blood…
Harrar
And out of Omega we came.
Out of the womb of the world we came,
All pleasure in feast and love forgotten,
All rancor in feud and war forgotten,
All joy in birth and circumcision forgotten.
We came, Blackbodies: the negative of light,
The perfect absorber of radiant energy.
Our black bodies, the only merchandise that carries itself,
A column of jet quickening,
Gyrating in one celestial tribal dance,
Rolling and spreading like a giant blastula thickening,
Spinning itself into the fireball of a new planet.
Out of Omega, rending the cosmos
In a season of stars, we came,
Groaning across deserts and beyond the pyramids of Kush,
A lunar landscape of mountains and black sand,
Of Basalt and Obsidian, biotite and barium,
Rock and mineral, bone black and brimstone,
From secret undergrounds, pebbled with diamonds and gold scum
Into the Hell of ghostly White we came.
In eclipsed sun we came: the negation of time.
Our women a nation of Banshee
Conned from every bankrupt and ravished Kingdom:
Zeila & Somaliland, Galla & Abyssinia, Tigre & Shoa.
Wading waist-deep across rivers:
Niger & Nile, Orange & Congo, Cubango & Kasai.
Strung out in caravans, we came, a stunned string of
Black pearls like a hundred-year centipede: one thousand,
One thousand thousand, one million, three, six, nine million, thirty million,
Sprawling over the badlands, carrying death in every heart
Across frozen wastes: the negative of earth
Torn like belladonna lilies from their roots, we came
On one savage wail, whirling soundlessness,
Lashing the hot sand of Ogaden,
The red flag of slavery blotting out sky, hope, and memory
Granite phalli marking graves strewn backwards,
Fingers clutching a chilled sun in cyclone
While murder moved …
Move murder move!
Sacred vultures pick flesh skeleton-white as
The Gods sit mute and horrified on their
Polished haunches, silent and powerless while we labor under
An armor of glinting sweat, through petrified forests,
Our mouths stuffed with pebbles so that no cry escapes,
Our bloodied lips, beaten back at every step by clouds
Of insects that cling to flesh like leeches in love,
Undisturbed by our shackled hands and bent necks that sway
In malignancy, metal, oiled with tears, grates silently: the song-less Mass
Its distant verse a children’s chant, muffled in the
Barren dust that shifts and bursts underfoot
As light as charcoal, as deep as genesis,
Move murder, more!
Orphans sway like clinging monkeys, suckled at wet nurses’ breasts,
Their mothers drowned in their own afterbirths.
Dazed tribes of virgins trample hot rock,
Believing this to be their only travail.
Stupefied magicians and priests, Banged and weighted down with fetishes,
Stumble blindfolded, chained one to the other in perfidy.
Empty mouths rail empty supplications.
Why isn’t Belshazzer here?
But then we have no writing and no walls …
Our outraged Gods wheeze and groan, carried on slippery ebony shoulders
Their godheads still roseate in the gathering dusk.
Magic is vanquished. No more will the Tribes
Prostrate themselves before Amon, Save, Seto, and Whoot, Legba and Ogun.
No longer will the Nation swallow the burning sperm of warlords
For they have allowed us and the Gods to fall into this abomination.
The multi-colored powders of the Rites
Have blended into that which is all colors: Black.
Boulders of our grief block our way like the
Palm of Shango, and the weight of Blackness undoes us all …
In the brazen glare of Harrar’s beach,
One collective scream rams the sullen sea,
Vibrating the python of the continent
As tremors of our earthquake
Ripple back towards Africa and, in that last moment,
With sea and slavery before us,
The Race, resplendent unto itself, dissolves and
All biograp
hies become One.
Death Sentence I
Every life
Comes with
A death sentence
Just as every soul
Contains a precise
Number of breaths
Allocated to one’s
Time on earth.
Kisses, caresses, orgasms
Imprinted on each of us
Are also rationed By Fate.
Isn’t it more logical
That life was
Created whole?
That after X
Number of encounters,
The world As we know it,
Ends?
Children and savage
Animals know this
And celebrate it
With games And wars that all
Lead to homicide,
Until taught
Better by their
Keepers and Elders
Civilizing them into
The belief of some
Heaven or hell
Belonging to
The Dark Ages
And the werewolf
Forests of Liebestod.
Reincarnation
But only he is initiated,
For those who have no faith
Who don’t take part in
The sacred rites,
There is no ultimate destiny
Once he is dead, he sleeps
In the Dormitory of Gloom
And Purgatory forever.
Inhaling
There is a Hindu saying
That one is born with
A certain number of breaths
And when they are finished
The person dies.
But nothing in the proverb
Explains the difference between
Racing through life breathless
And loitering through it
Waiting to exhale.
Gnostic Writings First Century AD
I am the first and the last,
I am the wife and the virgin,
I am the mother and the daughter,
I am she whose wedding is uncelebrated
And I have not taken a husband,
For I am knowledge and ignorance,
I am shame and boldness,
I am shameless and I am ashamed
I am strength and I am fear
I am war and peace.
Elegy
Shirley of Pinellas Park
Was called to our Lord
On February 6, 2008
From the Woodside Hospice,
In Pinellas Park, Florida,
After twenty-five years
Of service
In the Pinellas Park
High School system,
Survived by her sister and her brother
Her four children
Her twelve grandchildren
Her five great-grandchildren
But preceded in death
By one brother
Two infant sons
One granddaughter
And a great grandchild.
Where was I?
—June 29, 2008
Virum
How many times did I fail to kiss your mouth?
How many times did I miss inhaling your neck?
How many times didn’t I press my lips on your palm?
When I should have.
Thousands of seconds lost in the void
Devoured, gobbled up, consumed within time’s
Spectrum, which eats time, is attached to time
Vomits time until only solitude is left.
My soul racing in rivulets like rain on skin,
Dark hair curled on broad pectorals now defunct
Reduced to chagrin and stone, my sejour bereft,
My tongue catching drops of your stolen essence
While you were alive and mine, feasting
On proliferate hours and superfluous seconds,
When I should have
VIRUM VOLITARE PER ORA.
The Seal
Stranger when you place your delicate hands on me, write your dreams on my left side, undo my hair suddenly and for no good reason, stranger, when you place your mouth hot as Alexandrian sand that cools my parched throat like well-water, place your mouth on my mouths, one and then the other, until I taste myself, stranger, when you weight my flesh desperately, burden it politely, mold it and kneed it and penetrate it asking and giving no quarter, stranger when you take from me that sound primordial which in silence quits me with the stealth of a rain-forest beast fleeing, stranger, when with a finger I trace your lips, that debauched mouth (voluptuary) (you) (egoist) with that cynical left side and that right side dissolved in sensibility Stranger when I tongue your breast as hard and as flat as outlaw destination, stranger, when your nostrils narrow, your cries escape cries I extract with feral tenderness you! your arrogant silences silenced, stranger, when I scan your face, beauty-ravaged-male-body the Rector rectified, done in under mine, reversed when that hour strikes, I think ah, well: well-loved stranger, when will we be friends?
Le Lit
Sullen blizzard of white linen
Lying rumpled
Under the morning sun,
Last night’s pressed flesh
Still glowing like the flickering shadows
Of a silent movie,
Contours still raging like burnt-out onion skin
Dry and flaking with
Tiny ridges where a thousand drummed dreams
Swim like microbes.
Pale, rider-less white,
Turning as the sun turns
Into a melancholy monument,
Spent sheets with the pillows on the floor,
Whistling like Memnon at dawn,
Blue-veined as Carrara marble,
Frozen into Alexandrine History,
A tombstone fashioned by some
Second-rate sculptor
To support his family of ten.
Summits like a crumpled Sphinx
Take on a life of their own.
Mesas and mountains rise and fall.
Lake bottoms and craters breathe and sigh
Strangled and tortured in the
Tangled limbs of a forlorn and
More than slightly ridiculous lagoon,
A neglected memorial from the Great War,
Expensively made only to be disfigured by
Disrespectful children.
I ache to soothe those troubled peaks of lust,
To calm the kind contusions of the night,
At least to lay a wreath on you
And sit silently
In my cripple’s chair,
Relieved to be alive but not happy,
Straining to read
The half-effaced and fading legend
In Roman letters …
HERE LIED.
Love Can Die
Love can die.
I never knew that,
I never knew that
Until
Now.
Sitting across the table from you,
My heart,
A hard green apple
Swaying in the breeze
Of petitions and denunciations
Without falling;
My heart
A steel ball bearing
Gliding smoothly round
The clogs and pistons of
Disillusionment.
Love can die.
I never knew that,
I never knew that
Until
Now,
Sitting across the table from you.
My eyes,
Two raisins
Dried beyond relief,
Beyond any juice,
That lovely wine-love, dark and pungent,
That still might spill,
Slipping down my throat like
Fingers sneaking around my breast,
A leaping heart,
Stunned into silence.
Love can die.
I never knew that,
I never knew that
Until
Now
Sitting across the table from you.
My lips
That once took yours on mine like breath,
Stacked like a deck of cards
The fool strangled,
My clenched teeth, black coals,
My tongue, a steel oven raging
To tell you to Stop,
To Stop,
To Stop
Before I have to tell you myself that
Love can die.
I never knew that,
I never knew that,
I never knew that,
I never knew that,
I never knew that,
I never knew that,
I never knew that,
I never knew that.
I’ve Traveled
I’ve traveled
Across the dewy small of your back,
Down the ridge of backbone like a lonely skier,
Soothed steely flanks,
Held on to your skin,
Kissed damp hair blinding me,
Frail childlike hair, now darkened,
But you were so blond
When we were young.
We’ve traveled,
Left many a mauve flower
Wizened on blue sheets;
Left many a moan
Echoing down dark hallways:
Night sounds that crept past
The nursery where we slept
The clutched and rapturous
Sleep of children.
Together we’ve traveled,
Fingers clasped in that death grip
Of sibling love,
Beyond the Pale,
Beyond the pale
Poppy you press again and again
Into the perfume of a wearied heart
That gleams and creaks
This dusty afternoon.
Beside me, you’ve traveled,
Followed me down steep, slippery stairways
Into the entrails of that reprobate mansion
Demolished, abandoned, and condemned by all,
Thus the most perfect and intact of all places:
The barred light of your cell where
I brush the cobwebs from your eyes,
Press my hand on secret parts,
Rest my head on your breast shuddering:
Brother, I’ve loved you.
The Albino
The absence of color,
Is that the answer
To a moral question?
White African,
Walking negative,
Are you
Magic?
An ancestor called back
To prove the soul survives?
Everytime a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released Page 13