bloom

America, You were my first love affair.

Do you not hear your infants,
crying? The voices, clamoring not for a single thing
but clamoring? Everywhere, flooding the streets with our
ideals, night lamps for midnight postman? Have you forgotten
your orphans? Chained in desolate row houses, still believing
in your dreams.

Brick by brick, history stands mystified by it's irrelevance. This rare place of flooding mounts, chained by your history. Our walls are fragile, does our house
lack a foundation? our ill fed thoughts, congesting the hallways, lingering cigarette smoke, the carcasses swept into drains at dawn unnoticed.

Where is your Buffalo now? The twisted steel of forgotten ports lingering where no ship docks, stolen promises collapsing in unused factories. Why did you discard us?

I read your discarded postcards, phantom images, what is left
other than our imagined selves. Do you hear us? weeping through your streets, phantoms lingering in your walls.
Are we ill advised foreigners? Is this our vigil? Have you laid a rosary over our stones, have we bent in the willows, flooded the cemetery, where is the night
watchman? Have your loco-motives halted, your mines collapsed, has the passage from east to west ceased? Where are your majestic ships? Do you hear the sweeping chorus of the strange fruit planted in your cotton fields? Your wind carried us, do you see? Have we yet to become the flesh of your soil? Does the odor still linger or did it dissipate? Have we really become ill advised foreigners?

after the Rubicon

This morning, stigmata,
somewhat a surprise.
Drank a few beers, bled,
watched the blood trickle down
pitter-patter to the floor,
Rorschach test patterns.
Or Chinese ideograms?

Wrapped my hands in gauze,
brushed the teeth in the tub because
the sink was again clogged --
constipated? A metaphor?
I squatted there, brushing,
like a mendicant praying,
imagining giving myself up
to a higher power, up to
something or someone higher.
Mind tends to wander,
while squatting, wandering far,
yet always coming back.
Thank goodness.

Biscuits in the oven,
I read Plath
until it was time for work.
Glorious work!
I sent a text message to a friend:
Middle aged man prepares for day,
stumbles over empty bottles.

Clean shirt, jeans and sandals,
unsubmerged from the pile
heaped in faith on a chair
near the closet.

Outside, sky high,
seagulls wheeled,
alight in pentecostal grace.

The streets were full of young horses.

I want to wipe your tears.

we could shed our mask, could you imagine?
The touch of my flesh against yours at dawn, our silhouettes outlining
the last building before the end...
Am I etched into your flesh?

I dream of writing a post it note;
"Went to the store, be back soon."
Would you slowly drift away or
would you wait until i returned?

You could be the captain, I could be the captain,
maybe we could both be captains and finally...

I dream, absurd claims to justify myself.
All i know is my love.