God,
           do not send the sunshine
           down in thoughtless
           torrents.
Please
            do not obsess on light
            falling on all of your making,
            graciously falling
            everything on earth.
For  we
            are things of the shade,
            and the light falls too
            ******* eyes
Blind
            to all your light.

Everything’s broken, diseased, sold and resold.
The pandemic’s breath blows on us.
Everything’s is devoured in a hunger never filled.
So why do I see a glistening in the distance?

In the day dream, a forest appears on the border.
The scent of lavender and lilies exhales out.
In the nightmare,  the zodiac is ****** into
the black hole of a distant dissolving galaxy.

You wonder the miracle, if it comes,
will arise from darkness or dawn.
Will it arise from the first
natal nightmare or dream?

One night when skies have donned their stars
         And parted the lunar drapes
Scattering silent bats to afar
         To huddle with their mates,
We’ll fix our eyes northward, my dear,
         To distant lush Spring realms
Where musicians play songs with cheer
         And nothing overwhelms.

And we shall travail lovely streets
        With restaurants and bakeries,
Serving all your favorite treats,
        And just your recipes.
Here we shall build a ***** manor
        With ovens to bake tarts,
Rooms I can pen my psalters,  
        Hearts sharing each’s art.

Oceans are formed from
the dropping of our tears.
and in it we must all drown,
knowing only the cold
and the slow drifting
away of our flesh.

We watch our fathers  
live extraordinary lives
but die ordinary deaths.

It sinks our hearts down
in the gush of a thousand
memories past and
memories to be named,

into expectations
of what was and
was suppose to be,
all the “if onlys…”
of our sadness

until we hate him for it,
creating new deserts
with every gasp
until we are alone
and stranded
on our own oasis—

with our tears streaming
down our faces and
in puddles at our feet,
shouting in pretense
that our feet are bone dry,
warm and comfortable—

kicking and dancing in
that holiest of puddles
until each droplet
raises off the ground
and touches our skin,
moves across our bodies—
and we are oh so so
grateful for its touch

and the life lesson that
father was teaching
us how to die all along.

After, the awe returns with less shock.
A father lives in a quiet unannounced moment.
At his celebration of life
service all the children wear black leather.
They refuse to die, be strangers,
vow to know their names, remember their world.
The sound of traffic on the way back home leads them
to a smelly bar open this cold night.
The sirens fade pass for the party inside.
The balcony holds and holds.
Whatever war there is
it will not arrive this night.
They will likely never forget
all this dancing through vintage songs,
dancing again and again.
—And there it is. There it is—
Everything they’ve given up
to stay here and find more.

by the third floor
the weight of history
had become too much
that you wanted to
release it to the sky

by the fourth
my sister still hadn’t
enough of rolling
in its ashes
hearing the moans

by the fifth there
was nothing to see
but the blue cinder terror

so we all took the elevator
to the basement to reset
eat lunch among the relics
and walk the street casually
to the next next door Holocaust

I walk from there to there
to paint myself into black pixels,
my shadow following obediently
part of the hobbled sketch.

I draw myself
as a wobbly line,
ill aligned and always
misplaced near the horizon

Above are scrawled illegible words
written in a shaky handwriting,
below exists the gurgle of my bowels
that my imperfect ears can only hear.

I ponder my broken perfection
and hear Jesus whisper his love,
knowing not the direction
from which he speaks to me.

Death has left its imprint on me so much I
don’t know who is touching me inside anymore.

Certainly it’s another presence,
a voice apart from God.

Or is God the sum total of
all my known deaths?

My soul is an oarless canoe
afloat a lake of tears

seeking both initiation
and response to steer it.

Every death is almost next to me
entered gradually,  disappeared,

not gone. Internalized.  
Just almost next to me-

done being themselves,
but not being part of me.

Sometimes the separation,
the loneliness is so extreme

that I am moved
by almost everything,

the body of life not
touching against me,

just moving the canoe
along.

They pass the plate between them

mother to daughter, father to son,
a communion stretching to forever

until the plates are full
and father and son retire to
the living room to watch the game.

The mother advises on the adornment’s
of the daughter, the father pats the son
for his stratagems of the future.

They have always been this way and the
singing cold coming from the window

only makes them closer to one another,
that thing they do to get through
this meal and the next and life.

How many solitary meals they had
together they can’t remember.

They know not what they have
given up, if they gave up anything,

only that the meal was solid and filling.

The town exists in harsh geometry,
the forest— a fiery flow.

The wolf leaps above their soul,
a crescent moon.

Run the wolf.
Flee the wolf.

Don’t go beyond the wall
lest you be devoured.

When the wolf howls
they make work their prayer,
their protection.

They pray a whole Bible
before the night comes.

The wolf howls away.
The villagers toil in their dreams.

They pray away in their cells
knowing the Lord Protector

and the Hunter keep them all safe
and from walking freely

with the wolves
of the forest.

I.
1.
The poem parses time into syllables
and the syllables reach out to hold you
in the embrace of your grandmother’s words,
the light touch of motherly praise,
the squirm of a daughter’s protestations,
the first gurgling phonemes of the womb
advancing to meaning, dissolving to memory.
2.
The grandfather clock travels in grandfather time,
its tick tick ticking replacing the shadows
cast by the sun on a circular stone
that mimicked the once holy dawn ringing out
on the sway of evergreens,
the rattle of doe hooves,
every sound collecting to the center
of the pulsating green forest.
3.
The lullabies chanted to the womb
hickory dickory dock, tick tock
its way up into the time of every song
you ever sung and remembered
until its sleepy dreams replace
every still moment of waking life.
4.
The paintings in the Louvre
are all Mona Lisas and Medusa’s—
the same **** faces
with different smiles
that become petrifying
when gazed head on
but freeing apace when
converted into frame rates
that match the time and space
of your foot movements,
heartbeats and thoughts.
5.
The pandemic has reduced
the world to FaceTime,
apart in space, time and touch:
the voice, the echoing of electrons,
the face, replaced by the screen image,
the same **** faces again without depth,
permitting no movement beyond
the camera’s border, no past or future,
just a present looped and memed ad infinitum
without a song to sing,
no dancing cheek to cheek,
until denied the reality of human time
neither of you can sustain a relationship
within the movement of this thing.  

II.
1.
Now your world exists
in the untouchable,
in shutdown,
in stopped time,
just a still life hung on the wall,
that you can only gaze at
but dare not touch
lest violence erupt.
2.
Everything is gone
in the flicker of an eye.
The black bird
with the yellow underwings
speeds by in a golden flash
until it vanishes into the forest.

III.
1.
And you are left
with the memory
of your grandmother’s embrace
singing only to you.
2.
It was holy, holy, holy,
a divine person,
a hymn,
a double beat
of syllables
seeding first into the earth
and then into you.
3.
You develop bifocular vision,
seeing not only
everything near and far
but all that is above and below
the soul’s watery movements.

IV.
1.
You remember the first time
you saw the goddess
rising half from  
the water and the sky,
dancing and singing
on the shore.
2.
Now, everything is painted
with the white clay
of her existence.
3.
Syllable by syllable her song
becomes your poetry,
a repeating chant
that entrances you
until your joy
passes beyond time,
to become the only
thing that matters.
4.
Her love allows you
to touch those things
that can never be touched
without the risk of infection.
5.
The poems written
enter through
the eye and ear
and touch the heart
of the world.

V.
1.
On your last walk
a green snake
undulates in S curves
on the trail in front.
2.
In the hiss
you hear no threat,
only love
that acquiesces
to allowing you
to touch its back,
until it straightens
itself out .
3.
In that moment
time un-wrinkles.

a black cowl is over her
deliberately shuttered
in an unlit windowless room
so when I open my eyes
she is invisible,
a lemon whiff
peeling away,
a piano c note
on a whole beat
struck three times,
to tingle skin,
ping the tuning ear,
enough to know-now-ow-w
the first great rain of her,
the steps to her
now a thousand
clear receding lights
causing blinks
needing their
very own cowls,
leaving her-er-r
r last lost space

The drought has made July linger.  The air smells of sewer *****, sweetgum, sassafras, fescue, concrete and asphalt.  

On this long summer day when the light and heat decide to linger— parents let their children play well into the night on the community’s green.  

Their laughter and the croaking of frogs in the rention pond, just beyond, overgrown with cattails,
has my dog thinking the sound of fireworks and wanting to go back home.  I see the flickerings of the early late night news peeping through the half-drawn curtains as we head back.  

I imagine the children dreaming dream after dream in the hot mist of sleep after the last door has shut.


In that moment I see the first lines of my new poem, full  of that living hurting nostalgia that everyone likes to star and comment on— a poem, that I imagine, might be found after my death by my executor.  It would be one of those critically disdained viral odes charming and popular enough to be embroidered on sofa pillows that comfort the aching backside of old widows. A poem with a hint of despair but not written in despair.   One that knows the substance of July summer nights.

The clocks leap forward and I fall back
looking for you to return from dust
blessedly
at the stroke of two this night.
¡Despiértate!  (Wake up!)
Es muy muy tarde Madre Mia. (It’s very very late My Mother.)
Gather yourself.
School is over and it is time,
not too too late for you
to teach that old song
and stay forever.

He could only understand her with his blows,
grabbing her by the throat
strangling the last words out of her,
hitting her on the top of her head
trying to knock any idea
of her making him a better man,
like his father tried 136 times before.

Yes, he remembered every blow he received
just as she took tally of all 67 he delivered.  

The next one will be 68,
halfway to his father’s count.
He will stop, he thought,
consoling himself with the moral insight
that he was only half as bad as his old man.  

Besides 69 was a love number,
a time  for her to show him some appreciation
by getting on top and blowing the **** out of him, while he turn his face away from
the tangle of her brown ***** hair
because the taste of her abuse
wasn’t sweet enough to his tongue.

He dragged her out through the fields
towards the swamp.  The old rage wafted up
and the only thing that mattered was that he **** it, ****** that *****, briefly ashamed by the remembrance of his six year old son calling her that same word in the kitchen with the equal velocity
and rage he felt right now.

He pulled his deer knife out of his pocket,
the small one he used for gutting,
placed it at the tenderest part of her throat,
the spot were frightened blood pounded
and felt the most alive.  He was planning
on burying her underneath the wreckage
of that old sorry ******* Ford,
the one he gave up trying to rehabilitate
because the parts no longer existed.  

He never noticed his boy was following behind.  
He dropped the knife when he heard
the two screams come, one ripped
through the voice box of his wife, the other
off the tongue of the son he hardly noticed.

The 137th blow his father never got to deliver,
the 68th blow of their marriage
was delivered by her, a left handed
backward elbow straight into his Adam’s apple.  

While he strangled
in the recognition of his blood leaving him
and returning,- no, not really, not ever, he thought,-
she delivered the 69th straight into his nuts,
both knowing and relishing the irony.  
It was the last joke they would ever share.

She ran behind and grabbed their child,
then both made a dash for
the two lane black tar road
thirty yards into their future.  
The first light they saw
stopped and took them away.  

The last thing he heard,
as gravity pulled him down
to be buried in the mud of his own shame
was the simultaneous half laugh, half scream
that was the lingering echo of their last caress,
his savage groan and recognition
of their last punchline vomiting out of him
as he collapsed and buried his face in his hands, acknowledgement that he was half the father,
the man, the child everyone thought he was.

The young can not write about dust.
They know only it accumulations
on floors, shelves, ***** panes.
Only the old know its subtle contours,
the futility that comes with just moving it around.
They know that the sun and stars are dust,
schools of ash that follow all life’s currents and
that blossom the new fields under Grandfather Mountain.
They bend with the promise of the long, wavering grasses,
and flowers with their variegated indigos,
everything pursuing joyously their singular futures,
swearing testimony to the power of dust’s bounty.

There is a certain satisfaction that comes
with shrinking language and imagination
to a rectangle, fitting black-and-white
words into a prescribed length and width
given human depth through inscription.

The filled sheet of paper almost
transcends its smoothness and thinness,
its very blank expression and dullness.
It reveals exactly what it is meant to say
and the colors one wants to see in it.

Move the imprinted strokes up and
it becomes the verisimilitude of art;  
move the line down and there exists  
scientific equations in plain view;
give it power- and it becomes money,
an official stamp- and it’s the recorder of
birth/death and everything in between.

All of it can drift away if unbounded and
catch fire with the right or wrong spark.

Soon, all I know will die,
                be buried or burnt
                in the bonfire,
        lost to senses and thought,
                      become un-
                          known.

            I will fall to my knees
            and become a turtle
                carrying my home
                    on my back.

                    If I cry out,
              who will hear me?  
            Who will
                          know
                            me,
                    when everything
                          known
                          is gone?

After forty years the brownstones
still seemed the same except
for the newer cars and the people
in fashionable clothes walking
golden dogs in chic comfort vests,
all living in houses he couldn’t afford.

He couldn’t believe he grew up here
when the streets were lively
with black live matter
and Gerald every summer
out there  with his roller
painting fatsfix’s store front red.

Now there sits Wray’s fancy drink café,
his name in a stylish white font
outcropping from a charcoal awning,
a cocktail glass replacing the Y, a large
BLACKLIVESMATTER banner out front,
proudly put there by its white owner.

The old El Diamantet is now
Castro’s Authentic Mexican Cuisine  
sharing space with a Dunkin’ Donuts
with expensive bicycles racked
to the declining handicap ramp.
The Mobil on Fuller- a Citgo Market.

The Meats and Greens turned Bamboo’s
and the farmacia now just  a pharmacy,
and the biggest insult of them all,
New Murken’s Restaurant which
served the best corn-beef sandwhiches
is an “eat big, leave happy” Mega  Bites.

The homebuds  had split, vanished
to memories of stinging high fives,
basketball jams and feeling up
Zoe on a fine Friday night,  the smell
of her  lingering in forty years  of regret.
There’ll be no bros coming from  these doors.

His heart  felt the sting of going home to a home
that was no longer his and no longer wanted him.
That past was a meat offering to this new block-
as if his blood and flesh had been scrubbed away
in the white wash of neatly trimmed roses behind
spiked  fences-  as if that there of his never happened.

“What was here before we came?” he imagined
the children asking the parents behind the doors.
“Nothing of note,” they would reply using the
same line the real estate agent routinely recited
to anyone who inquired about what existed
before the abattoir came and moved  on.

In the early morning rise,
my mother and I
take a ride
to the hospital
where I was born
and she has her
dialysis treatments.
Her feet,
wrinkled and bruised,
exhausted
are raised
on a leather pedestal.

They remind me
of Grandma’s
heavy black nylons
that pooled around
her ankles
as she prayed
the rosary at night
in the gentle sway
of her rocking chair,
praying through the days
and all the
joyful,
luminous,
sorrowful,
glorious mysteries,
the standing
required for raising
thirteen children
on platefuls
of morning quesitos,
revoltillos,
bowls of crema
and loaves
of pan de aqua,
three hours
of washing, ironing
and folding their vestidos,
the lunches of
mofongo, and pasteles,
the dinners of
asopao de gandules,
the culling of coins
from a big crystal bowl
to buy dulces
at Carmen’s bodega
just down the block
on Fulton and Seventh.

My mother only had four children,
three boys and a girl,
and just like abuela,
she nourished
them the same way—
standing long and hard
until her feet gave out
and her blood wore down,
in the days before
the seams of myself
unraveled in black threads
and dispersed in tears
to every corner.

In the dreams
for the reality
that never occurred
I would
massage her feet,
put the richest nard
generously on them
like the chastised Mary
did for Jesus,
bandage them in flesh.

The little memories
are unremembered
to the world
except for
the faithful sons
and daughters
who recall only
the clinking of
thirty shiny silver pieces
placed silently
into their open palms,
betraying the reality
with the buffing of memory
into better hopes and dreams,
a poetry
of bruised feet,
blood,
the scent
of good Boricua cuisine,
the silent
watching  
mother
asleep.

Perfection can only be seen in the descent,
the glow of spotlights colliding to true whiteness,
the realization that grief touches the ground.

Mary, they say, you never experienced birth pains,
but the linen folded eternally beneath your son
shows that his final blessing transferred all  to you.  

Your tears wash his feet, and I imagine,
you wiping them dry with your hair,
a doting act of love he passed to his disciples.

Your grief remains in your soul.
Only the pain is collected in
the last descent of angels.

I feel the slow bump when
the descent must hit the earth,
the slight stumble to awkward reality.

I wash my feet everyday to honor
the perfect glory I’ve been blessed to see.

Note:
This is a memory of the 1964 World’s Fair where I saw the Pieta in the descent of an escalator. I was seven and  the experience lasted all of fifteen seconds, roughly the time it takes to read the poem.

Because I can not bury my father in the sky
I burn him and spread his ashes on the ground.

He loved birds yet did not feed them crumbs—
just  caught them in the color of their being.

He would watch the mower plow the field,
watch the hand fill  the feeders with seed

feeling the tranquility of the man-made pond
drift towards him as he pulled the blanket from

his chin and felt the breeze ruffle his baldness,
the bed as high to the trees as a house allows—

all the doors open to the day
                                  the night

the house receiving guest after guest,
the tables inside-outside spread for feasts,

until the last smoke of him singes my nostrils
settles in my lungs (this strange son of his),

floats above the branches into every nest,
leaving behind the clock spring in the fire

this nonparent of the future, this fruit
of his, leaving no seeds of his own.

I have to sew my memories
inside the lining of my coat
to keep them close but not inside,

something to take on and off
when cold grief needs warm reflection
or remembrances flash painfully bright,

when chemo and radiation
makes it difficult to feel my teeth,
tie my shoes, retrieve the hem of a future

through the barbed-wire fence of past life,
the cancer, the bad brother that shoves me
through, leaving me bloodied and betrayed

but safer in the ways of nothingness,
the death of my bawling infant self
that I just begin to fathom.

I lack the humility to pray for less,
just close my eyes and find kindness
for the coats I sew for others in the dark.

The poem rumbles in my brain
and wakes me at three in the morning
as if my devil branded me with his pitchfork
reminding me of our inspired bargain

My nemesis love calls me to the fiery sheet
his impish pride burning praise in me
that swears fealty with ****** words

Oh poetry
how your satanic verses
chum and shudder in me
sharking nightmares to dreams
and my words to the exquisite limbo
doomed to fall short of true divinity

The poem squatters in my mind firmly
fixed in the ninth circle of treachery
offending my soul
crushing my heart

It takes and takes and takes
and never gives not even
granting the guilt of ***** lucre

Words are my blood
Poems **** my veins
My quick-fire brimstone lines
are my epitaph

I am both cursed and blessed
to this addiction
yet I hope this passion never cools
only  flames and reflames

Oh Poetry immolate me
burn me to the purest ash
leaving a diamond legacy

The poem is not a song
but the fire inside the song
the sulphur mistaken for honey

Oh dulcet sounds why and thank you for
making me an exile from life and tomorrow
a lonely sad witness to the world

Why and thank you for
fating me to this fiery covenant

He lacked the skill to make it true, the crib,
so he  assembled it from a wordless diagram,
an ark of 5 panels, 32 screws and bolts, 3 tools-
tightening it just enough, until the memory
of its creation fixed solid in his soul, well past
the 1000 days of the child dreaming in it,  
the 30 years of lying unassembled in attic dust,
its existence cradled, tightened and retightened,
in lullaby and bedtime rhyme- until the child
reached his Jesus year, and needing a
second-hand cradle for his soon to be first born,
noticed it in the growing dawn and dust and
thought “Dad, I know I have the screws for that.”

Wise are the parents who give
their children difficult names.

Names that are a chant to God,
a sacrament with every utterance.

Or names that light a fiery rebellion
in the mulling brain.

Names that speak of the glory
that was before the slave ships.  

Names that display the wonder of sky,
the Eagle, Buffalo, Wolf, Deer.

Names that should hurt and choke
when mispronounced.

Braves names spoken
by brave and unafraid people.

Names shouted loud by those
who fearlessly, openly love.

Those who dropped their names
in the easy English soil, reclaim them!

Speak it in the accent of the old country,
the tribes of the African plain and rivers,

the screech, rumble of the clouds, creatures
that gave you your forever sound.

Gather your jewels from the ashes.
Mine them until they get their attention.

Collect the pieces of your lost continents
from their miscomprehension.

Your difficult names predate centuries
of their arrogance, ignorance, prejudice.

You are history
not their rewrite.  

Don’t explain your name’s meaning
to those who have forgotten your story.

You are the original and
they are the stereotype.

Bend your syllables, vowels
into a new understanding country.

Keep your difficult names
proudly unassimilated.

Keep it
your home.

Due to the pandemic the children are not coming.  
The adults will set a table for two and wait for the zoom chat after the game with  
the Dallas Cowboys and
the Washington Football Team
formerly known as the Redskins.

They will double their Thanksgiving feast of
Burger’s Hickory Smoked Spiral Sliced City ham,
Betty Crocker’s Cheddar and Bacon Scalloped potatoes,
Bake House Creations Crescent rolls,
oven roasted Brussel sprouts with bacon,
sliced acorn squash with a brown sugar glaze,
and a five cup Ambrosia salad of sour cream,
pineapple tidbits, canned Mandarin oranges in light syrup, organic flake coconut and mini marshmallows
marinated until the marshmallows get gooey
and impart sweetness to the sour cream.

The Trump over Biden over any Democrat arguments
will thankfully not happen this year
and blissfully never again.  For this year,
at least, things will seem to return to normal.
The miracle will go by unrecorded, unnoticed.

They are secretly glad they don’t have to dress up
in the Pilgrim and Indian dress embroidered
with wild turkeys, Indian corn that creased around
to reveal the vast wild fields and forest ready
to be explored and traded for beads and
promises of sharing the American bounty;
the ugly Garfield the Cat sweater over
the crisp white shirt and black slacks
bought at the J.C. Penny liquidation sale.
Today Dad will proudly wear his
aqua Miami Dolphins jersey,  sweat pants,
socks and comfy ‘Phins black briefs
with the not so stretchy waist band.

Go Tua,  memories of the
undefeated Dolphins 1972 season,
the big Thanksgiving brawls of 1977
spurred by Conrad Dobler
***** hits on Bob Griese,
the Dan Marino five Turkey Day
interceptions against the Dallas Cowboys
in 1999 that was the final sunset of
a first ballot Hall of Farmer career
danced in Dad’s head.
Mom just wanted to catch up on
all those Dark Shadows soaps and
Housewives of Whatever she missed.
Dressed in her blue angels nightgown
she rolled her eyes when
first football game of the day switched on.

They vaguely dreamed of the days
when his hair was thick and black
and hers was long, golden and easy;
all the trips they planned
and sometimes took
where they climbed bluffs
and overlooked storybook plains.

Today they would look at each other
with the same everyday stare
and notice their wrinkled hands
and clink together the strong, cheap wine
poured into leftover mason jars.
They toasted each other
and whatever would come next,
the decades of side by side,
their great good luck,
the incoming Zoom
of children and grandchildren.

Luna moths flutter in the captive night light
of early December, strong, determined
to mate their way to the electric crackle
(invisible as a secret trapped in the soul)
emitting from the machine in the eaves.

Their disintegration illuminates the dark
with ultraviolet pulses and heavy musk
drifting to mouthless, abandoned mates,
antennae feeling their starvation, extinction,
the end of all their brief cycle of lust.

The creatures in rockers spend the night
brushing the remnants of their death
off their cheeks, cuffs and hair—
absorbed in their dark loneliness,
avoiding conversation with each other,

The widows miles away feel the tug
of a mouth and mandible forming,
a dream of a shout and tear evolving,
the rock, rock, rocking waves telling them that
they soon will feast on these creatures clothes.

Note;
    
Luna Moths have no mouths and thus cannot eat.  They exist for only a week, being born to mainly mate or die of starvation.

This old house painted in faded  pride
knows me well.  I did not learn to walk here,
but I did learn to leap- and do it mightily.

The old dishes have been broken or thrown away,
replaced by new ones with new owners. The taps
stiff with old age and rust, surely have been replaced.

The comfortable chairs, the linoleum, the tile,
the **** rugs, the step up altar where my
mother was married, are probably leveled flat.

I can only see your outside and imagine your
many renovations in the sawdust of time,  
atticless, cribless,  old beds churning  to new beds.

While I lived there, you were a good soul
who kindly accepted all bidding, and I can see, donated your good bones to other’s  futures.

Other places I have lived have been less generous, tumbling into disarray, illness,  nature’s destruction before I could even build a future in them.  

I can feel the ill winds blow and know that this new abode will be more of the same, filled with unfated things never settling down into their rightful places.

I thank you, dear old thing, for your graceful love.

Pick a day.
The random date generator chose:
January 13, 1835
There are still generations formed
from those that fell in
love, married,
birthed sons and daughters
on that day.
Each an unrepeatable existence.

Family lore and crests
enshrine the first kiss,
the birds that soared the sky,
the color of flowers in his/her hand,
words spoken and written in the heart,
the dress she wore,
the beard he had
and discarded or kept,
the Fahrenheit/Celsius of
the exact hour, minute second
of their first heat,
the time that their fingers
stopped accidentally
brushing against each other,
the number of teeth
shown in the first smile.

Count the time
from first hello to last goodbye.
Enshrine that number
of seconds, minutes, hours,
days, weeks, months, years,
in the tales told about them
by their children.
Knit together
all the overlapping
welcomes and farewells
into the colorful threads
of all the houses born and fallen.

I look at that history
and I love you
solidly in the echoes
of all the past.
You fill my time,
even my sadness.
I have gazed too long
Into the light of you.
I only see
the burnt-in after glow
of all the whiteness.

Sixty degrees and clear.
She dies -morning hospice shift
while I’m getting ready
to visit her.
Waxen in her white bed,
arms bruised and quiet now,
mouth wide in a gasp
as if in scream, as if saying
ah, no!  Both eyes closed,
turned down for my visit,
denied all further light,
sky or even ceiling.
I touch her hand. It is
cold.  It’s only been
two hours. At the threshold
I see the elevator.
I’m not ready
to drop down that tunnel.
I go back and kiss her forehead.  
Outside, the clear light types her life.

We exist in
unkeepable bodies

and in the bending over
we decompose

for we are
are but the
memory of grief

that soft bodies
leave when they die.

She didn’t want this wedding dress
to be a widow,
alone,
encased in plastic
in the unused dark
of the closet,
moved after spring cleaning
to the basement
near the leaky window,
after five years
moth-balled to the
old unopened hope chest
of her mother’s closet,
weeping, weeping, weeping
for the man she lost,
subsisting on hope angels,
decaying, yellowing
a luminescent ghost,
a ******,
never to be worn,
never to be adored,
never to be passionately wanted,
just praying, praying, praying
and attracting only moths.

Wait, wait, wait,
after all these years,
it’s the granddaughter
touching it,
measuring it,
sizing it up
and seeing it
doesn’t fit her dreams.
will never
fit her dreams
and putting it back
without a second thought.

The grandmother
touches it yellow lace
and realizes it’s not
good enough,
worthy enough
to donate to
the local goodwill.

She doesn’t have the
heart to put it in the trash
and the scavenging fury
of the gulls and crows at the dump,
or cut it into cleaning rags.

It’s too old to go back
to the closet.
and the hope chest
is overstuffed already.

She takes it outside
in the bright clear light
and places it on the concrete pad,
douses it with gasoline
of the highest octane
and throws,
the last cigarette
she will ever smoke
defiantly, sadly on it.

She watches it return to the sky
in  candolescent congratulations.

With the start of NFL football yesterday, I must salute those brave and patriotic players and teams who take a stand against police brutality of black people. I must share this poem and video that my Miami Dolphins shared.  I stand in complete solidarity with the Dolphins on this issue.  

https://twitter.com/i/status/1304186433054420992

It is authentic? That’s the mystery.

Or is it just another symbolic victory?

Now there’s two anthems. Do we kneel do we stand.

If we could just right our wrongs we wouldn’t need two songs.

We don’t need another publicity parade.

So we’ll just stay inside until it’s time to play the game.

Whatever happened to the funds that were promised. All of a sudden we got a collapsed pocket?

The bottom line should not be the net profit. You can’t open your heart when it’s controlled by your wallet.

Decals and patches. Fireworks and trumpets. We’re not puppets. Don’t publicize false budgets.

Ask the pundits and we shouldn’t have a say. If you speak up for change, then I’ll shut up and play.

If we remain silent, that would just be selfish. Since they don’t have a voice, we’re speaking up for the helpless.

It’s not enough to act like you care for the troops. Millions for pregame patriotism. You get paid to salute.

Lift every voice and sing? It’s just a way to save face. Lose the mask and stop hiding the real game face.

So if my dad was a soldier, but the cops killed my brother, do I stand for one anthem, and then kneel for the other?

This attempt to unify only creates more divide. So we’ll skip the song and dance. And as a team we’ll stay inside.

We need changed hearts. Not just a response to pressure. Enough. No more fluff and empty gestures.

We need owners with influence and pockets bigger than ours. To call up officials and flex political power.

When education is not determined by where we reside. And we have the means to purchase what the doctor prescribed.

And you fight for prison reform and innocent lives.

And you repair the communities that were tossed to the side.

And you admit you gain from it, and swallow your pride. And when greed is not the compass, but love is the guide.

And when the courts don’t punish skin color, but punish the crime.

Until then, we’ll just skip the long production and stay inside.

For centuries, we’ve been trying to make you aware.

Either you’re in denial, or just simply don’t really care.

It’s not a black/white thing. Or a left/right thing. Let’s clean the whole bird, and stop arguing about which wing.

Then, Flores faced the camera, and concluded:

Before the media starts wondering and guessing, they just answered all your questions. We’ll just stay inside.

She dances alone,
the black child
in the yellow dress.

Alone amongst
the black and white oxfords,
the ivory Buster Browns,
the brown penny loafers
with smiling Abe Lincoln’s
looking up to her
from the confines
of their penny keepers.

Her white socks touch
the polished mahogany
hopping silently to
the beats of Chuck Berry
and Johnny B. Goode

She imagines hearing
her name in the lyrics:
Go go go
Go Joanie go go go
Go Joanie go go go
Go Joanie go go go
Go Joanie go go go
Joanie B. Goode.

She is loose but precise,
careful not to leave a mark,
correcting every footfall
with the more perfect
ballerina form
she saw once in
a Moira Shearer feature,
the one where the dancer
dies in the final act.

In the background she hears
the white throng under the
blue and white stripe panels
of the Republic Theater
dance to their own rules
a mess of governance that
obeys its own inane logic.

But then not one of them
had to sneak in through
the backstage door
when her brother, Marcus
chickened out at the first
“******” spited his way,
denying Joanie
even the indignity
of a colored only entrance.  

At the still point
between the lyrics Joan
finds the real dance,
the one intent on hiding
a choreography of grief,
a sadness, a defiance
she shares only
with her shadow.

She imagines herself
a joyous, living, wondrous
thing at play,
a girl reborn into a woman,
a dancer over America.

The seed planted with our small help
becomes a crop.
The flame carefully kindled by us
ignites  civilization.
Now we must
**** our blighted hearts
to feed the moral fire
of our hungry minds.

The bus driver sees people as they really are:
survivors & corpses going for regular treatment,
shadows & lights moving in a tunnel,
loved & loveless reflections in a rear view mirror,
like him, the sufferers of whole-body vibrations
of the potholes & uneven pavements of the road,
the sedentary motion breaking their backs
until everything is saturated in grief, anger & pain.

In the swing room among the crack of eight *****
and the other drivers sullenly chewing their lunch
he writes a history of the young father struggling
with a stroller who slips on without paying,
the obituary of the white ghost with the
5 o’clock shadow who boards at the hospital,
all notes for the melodic line for his sax solo
at Johnny’s that night.

His fingers touch the imaginary valves
& before the movement is over
the road chants for his return.
He puts on his blue cap,
tucks in his shirt & straighten his pants.
The abuse is almost immediate,
starting before he can sit and close the door.
The engine revs with the  melodies of the city
& in the harsh notes, he hears the smooth variations
that will drive him through the long night ahead & home.

My grandmother was my oracle,
speaking stained insights in a Spanish
I hardly understood at the time.  

My offerings were small but true:
kisses, hugs, “I love you” on paper scraps
translated by my mother for her knowing.

It was as if I had written them in blood and
it became a forever tattoo of her heart,  
a pumping cross, always giving and forgiving.

The yield was quarters, dimes, pennies
doled out from a repurposed wide-mouth
banderilla jar for the corner candy store tour.

She lived in a temple of rust seeping down walls, paint cracks, peeling checkerboard linoleum,
chipped ceramics, relics broken and glued back-

an unsanctified housing of brittle bones and
striations of hands and feet, sweet blood,
passed from thirteenth child to second son.

As my Spanish improved I was able to praise
the oracle with all the many spoken and
scribbled ways of Latin gratitude and adoration

under the watchful eye of my mother and
the care of twelve others who still lived
within the realm of her unwritten wisdom.  

When her vision stopped and her blood
no longer flowed she was relocated with
all solemnity to rest under a Boricua tree.

My mother doled out her oracular inheritance
whenever I stumbled, wandered, questioned,
encouraging me to write it all down.

Now, she is mere dust in the echoing wind
and I am a childless prophet who appreciates
all the oracles that came before my time.

When the giant bagel fell from the sky
everyone complained when it blocked the road.  
Even when children cut it into pieces
and passed it out, lathered with shmear and lox
the town folks refused to eat the manna.
A host of angels descended to clean up the mess.
The town folks rushed to the angels,
still neglecting the heavenly bread.
When the last crumb had reascended to heaven
and the angels began to flap their wings
and take flight, the town folks begged them to stay,
but they would not. Instead, they left behind
a talking chicken to remind them when the sky fell.

The Pandemic has closed
the theaters and cinemas.

On stage a lone actor commits
suicide in the loneliness.

On screen the two lovers run to each
other against the march of soldiers.

The actor’s death is an extravagant fake,
a nod to the art of dying a good stage death.

The lovers perform ****** asphyxiation
until the man seems to fall deeply asleep.  

The actor pulls the dagger from his neck,
red silk flowing freely from his throat.

In the light motes coming from the projector
Sada realizes that Kichizo has died.

The red silk now entombs Sensei Omiya
like a gown as he reaches out to Sada’s cry.

Sada kisses Kichizo for the final time
as she removes Kichizo‘s blade.

Sensei Omiya drowns in a swell of red silk.
“Sada, my child, what shame have you brung?”

Sada cuts Kichizo’s ***** off cleanly carrying
it inside her as she madly wanders Tokyo.

The projector clicks off, the house lights fade.
The transformation is done.  
The performance is over

Notes:
The lovers story is based on the plot of the Japanese film In the Realm of the Senses by Nagisha Oshima.  The theater story is intended to be a subplot of the lovers plot. The theater plot is also intended to invoke images of Japanese Kabuki theater.

It’s simple- how to live, that is:
live and die each day.

Strive to live each morning
as if it was the first:

pull the colors around you
to something that lives
beyond the eyes.  

Treat the world not as Adam:
something to be touched,
named, collected, defined—

but as Eve:
the sun as an ingenue
something young, innocent
not to be defiled but protected.

Live each night as
if it were your last:

set the table for the next
person who eats after you

clear the roar of your mind,
shroud the alarm clock,
deaden the tablet of light,
glance out the window and
see the light beyond the dark.

and before you take that long sleep
praise every surface,  
baptize every living thing.

Oh, when the sun yields child
to the soft caress of the night

After the sun has gone.
After the sun has gone.

That lifts the wind
after the sun has gone.

The last  of wonder and awe
That turns life
from a beach shell echo

to  a cornucopia
after the sun has gone.

Life without a shell must
shake out the shadows

live full to overflowing
less it dry after the sun has gone

leaving the child still, beautiful silent
in the beach tide after the sun has gone.  

After the sun has gone.

The Great Horned Night Owl
screeches my name and
I whisper back that it’s wrong.

Look around the block, across the coast
there is the soul that you seek.

She shifts to the closest oak limb
tapping just outside my window.

Bruja Buho both witch and owl
my grandmother called her,

this white night tapper
defiantly staring into my soul.

I listen to her caw, trying to detect
the trapped echo of others inside
but hear only my own.

It ruffles its plumicorns
reasserting its power over me
even in the past blinding light.

Its fluting has always
followed silently behind.

The final shape of this shifter
has always been me,
its imitations always my song.

She takes flight and
stands in the sky
denying me heaven.

She commands my ghost
to roam the earth forever,

my fate to be a
warning to my children.

She denies them her guardianship.
She denies them her wisdom.

She curses their sleep  
to nightmares.

They will only know
her banshee screeching.  

Her appearance will be
their disease and punishment.

In the bony circles around her eyes
they will see my torment
and my mimed warnings.

And when they **** her,
denying their fate,

they will see the sky again and
wear her feathers in their hair.

It was the light that told Vincent,
the one which always told him the truth
reflected his soul’s desire,
the glistenings of his mind,
that this mass of  gnarled roots
would be his last vision.

He could feel the gun smoke
creeping into his soul,
corrupting his thoughts,
the very rays of his world,
even his beloved
hog hair brushes and pigments

as he walked the Rue Daubigny
pass the Church at Auvers
he needed to canvas in June
when the flint of its history,
death, faith, passion and beauty
impelled him to create,

pass the wheat field absent of crows
which made the world seem more
beautiful with its darkness
hovering over the light of July,
diminished now to ordinary light,
smoke, haze and fog.

He felt his world constricted to
a blue room with a blue bed,
a blue chair wedged in a corner
draped in blue shadows
which could not be mixed
to the perfect colors.

When he saw the gnarled roots
exposed in late afternoon July beams
he knew that he would not live
to see the first dawn of August,
that this would be his last
perfect beautiful, silent spot.

He painted smelling the gun smoke coming,
the smoke turning into a bullet
as he passionately tried to  capture
life itself frantically and fervently rooting itself,
as it were, in the earth and yet being
half torn up by the storm.

The hot night rain drenches me in sleep
opening a bow to prayer
amidst the lunatic birds swarming
in the dark heat.
Magnolias are split in dreams
heavy with bolts and tears,
flowing in the cascade
of cracked mirrors.
All is unmoored from my memory,
surviving on communion.
Dear Jesus am I not more profound
than thy mad swirl?

When I look at the sky its blueness mixes
and cycles with thunder, lightning and rain.

I notice, the  vulture, content to feast on leftovers of once
beautiful things, fly  with the same majesty of the hawk.

At night, I see the stars burn bright and smell the rain’s petrichor snake off the worn sides of Racoon Mountain.

Yet, I the only thing that is neither sky, bird, mountain nor star,
wonder, spend so much time wondering, if this is peace or joy.

I want to greet the new year
with 20/20 eyes,
knowing that cure dances
on the edge of hope’s grave
and that in this biblical year
of flood, cancer and death
that grief is just a
short term companion.

Tomorrow time
will step me away,
leaving only memory
and the long walk
to the horizon.

Five smooth stones David culled from Elah’s brook,
Shepherd knowing  dense ones to fit sling’s crook.

He released the first on Goliath’s shright
the giant falling back dead with the smite.

Goliath gazing into David’s eyes
felt his blade render head for David’s prize.

Head held high, high and tight, in David’s hand
Goliath gawked at where his body land.

He cursed David ’til his progeny’s end
and Scopus  Crusaders in next revenge,

slung fiery stones onto his holy grain,
his children inheriting Sauls migraines,

Absalom, Absalom! their refrain roars
as they smooth more stones with nuclear cores.

Notes:

The Scopus Crusaders are credited with the invention of the first catapult—really a giant slingshot, that launched fiery boulders at the walls of their enemies.

Saul was the first King of Israel.  He suffered from migraines that made him attack others.  One of his aides was David who suffered brutally when Saul was having one of his migraine headaches.  David later, succeeded Saul as King of Israel.

Absalom, Absalom was the cry of grief David shouted when he learned that his first son, Absalom had accidentally died in the branches of a tree he was traveling under.

The core of a nuclear bomb is about the size of the smooth stone that David slung to **** Goliath.

The poet signs his words to the deaf.
The screen behind exposes his faulty hands.
He is silent.
His hands a fire.

He knows there will be unintended words,
new meanings to old and familiar lines.
The muddle is his creation,
their new meaning, new poem,
both treachery and rebirth,
their dawn and twilight, their light and moon,
both hawk and silver fish gliding, swimming
high in the silent moonlight clouds and sky
of the noisy rewrite of their imagination.

He reads his words on their shirts.
Cloth sells better, than ten thousand books.
The swift river of lines comes in their colors too!
His restless words settle in for the show.
He feels like a naked stranger in an open door.


When his hands stop, the applause comes.
The deaf are enthusiastic clappers.
Something about getting off on the vibrations
created by their hands, he figures.
He’s happy when they come up to him,
signing new syllables
to be printed on upside down books.

The pain is gone and
I am ready to write about
everything beyond the fear,

ready to bite into the
muscle and bone
of the world,

to put away the dagger phrase,
all the losses of my life,
ready to live in hope’s recesses.

I am poet enough to
make you taste
this hidden fruit,

see beyond all
the sutured sunsets
of existence.

It will not be all
kisses and music, but  
it will be terribly beautiful!