speed, speeding, sped

Pedal to the floor,
driving fast as hell,
sometimes the only chances
are the ones you take.
Lost highways, American horizons,
road maps used for beer spills,
the feeling of a gun
pointed at my head.

Those were
the old days,
the road days.

Now I'm middle-aged,
settled, pacific.

Not sure what's coming next
but I hope you're there
to see it.

naked stars

In the
Voyage of the Dawn Treader,
there's a great scene where
a boy repents his Wicked ways
and embraces the Good life.

His wickedness is in fact so wicked
that it changed him into a dragon,
not that bad a fate until you realize
that in the West, unlike the East,
men kill dragons for sport and treasure.

Well, in any case, the boy repented
and his scales began to fall off.
Aslan helped, his big furry paws
peeling off the scales to reveal
the human underneath.

It's a beautiful scene,
noble lion and naked boy
beneath the Christian stars.

**

(postscript)

"And immediately there fell from his eyes
as it had been scales:
and he received sight
forthwith, and arose,
and was baptized."

Acts 9:18
King James Edition

way of the samurai

Note posted on the 'fridge
this morning:
need party food.

But the messiah hasn't arrived
yet.

Underneath the kitchen chair,
the kitten sleeps,
curled up on her blanket.
Her whiskers twitch.

She knows.

exile and the kingdom

No confessions were offered up today
in the church of the Ascension.
No prayers were heard.
No hosannas were sung, no wafers
were consumed, and no wine was spilled
on the cassocks of the altar boys.

Instead everyone gathered
in the plazas and the markets
where the news spread
like evangelical fire.
Merchants closed their shops
and all along the watchtower
soldiers kept a steady vigil.

God's voice spoke in dreams
to pilgrims on their way
to Santiago de Compostela,
final resting place
of Saint James the apostle.

Riders were approaching
from the south.

la ciudad

Beautiful island of second chances,
wet leaves on sidewalks and
sepia-toned storefronts.

You were discovered by the poets,
colonized by the merchants
and invaded by the priests who
came looking for the hand of God.

When you were young men fought for you,
for their right to conquer and own you.
With their long phallic swords and their blood
they came and they fought and they stole.

Beautiful island
I first read your books
in the summer of my crossing.

In glimpses, now and again,
a vision of your one true language.

morning commute

The whole thing is fraught with peril!
Distant with my book, leaning alone
against a door of the L train,
sometimes distracted by cute boys,
sometimes never noticing the mad
preachers with the hidden hands,
this is no land for the lost.
Bumping along, the car fills with humanity,
all of us perhaps busy with our busyness,
eye contact at a minimum,
the train is like a waiting room.
But then the stop, then detraining,
and the platform and the stairs.
The whole enterprise is fraught with peril!
Misjudge the flow of the crowd,
get shoved trackwards, backwards,
misjudge the stairs and get trampled
by ever-marching shoes and the rat-a-tat
of soaking wet umbrellas.

Don't drink the Kool-Aid!

When my ancient, crumbling regime
finally gets tumbled down,
brought down low by the boredom
and general fed-up-ness
of everyone around me,

it'd be nice to hope for
a warm, soft bed
and a forced exile
somewhere

but no, there's a fence post
planted by itself near the city gate
and there's a man out there
in the noonday sun
busy sharpening the point.

I know just where my head will be
someday.