People only ever want to ask me about
the poetry -
those verses about
busted up noses in outer space;
about the pros working
way down passed
the corner of Broad and Main;
about fistfights and hard, hard drinking.
But I built a flowerbed this weekend...
Twenty two tastefully irregular stone blocks
in a crescent moon shape,
filled with the blackest of soils.
The sweat of toil.
The digging.
The planting.
Exotic grasses. Asian maybe?
Purple and yellow flowers.
Zinnias or some **** thing.
All covered in a thick blanket of brown mulch.
It's a fine thing to have dirt on your hands
instead of blood.
No one ever asks me about flowerbeds.

One morning after interrogations
and permitted rest, a training day warning:
Objects look bigger than they appear.

Gunshot was fired again.
Along with flair and sentiments in fancy frames.

She was told to stand-up again
and He was told to run for his life as far as he can.
He was shot dead after a few feet.
She was let go only to allow trackers
to find the others.

Facing seducing blades and machines
in lines of neon relief, we bury in a hurry
forsaken selves.

She shakes cold under someone's embrace,
wonders about how staying together
may also be just another lie.

Sharpening blades tonight,
Oberon and the Moon covers a skeleton.

By sunrise, the towers are unmanned,
chasing and hide-and-seeks.
A survival meeting that never existed.
A radio singing while someone works and eats.

Fiber optic nerves
wires that fill walls, floors and
ceilings of abandoned and new
constructions of residential
and commercial buildings in Luzon,
Detroit, Orlos, and places in Spain and Russia.

Meanwhile intrepid distracted denials
of wireless connectivity, fills the air.
Imagine the number and speed of attachments,
connections, cravings of How are you?
How may I help you today? Is there anything else
you need?

Nature is still the same
Going out of balance, histories and herstories
swept under rug after rug.
This chosen form, inbound
provided with the only blue planet.
Now showing nothing is ever enough,
no matter what has been
already sacrificed in the past
and is being sacrificed at present:
The shifting tides assuring him
of his place while the
stormy dunes of deserts welcoming
her stillness.

Sudden improper cracks, thunder
and rain arrive on the proudest pavement
tonight surrounding the metropolis.
Inconvenient walls and static downpour
over once promising singing symphonic spaces
on coffee tables and hang-outs.

Some weary commuters take shelter
under random roofs, some
thinking of flowers on graves.
Lovers of seasons, recalling silence
and chaos like clandestine letters scattered
among shadows of cities on overdrive,
unheard and unspoken.

Provincial buses can no longer enter the metro.
Romances on the highway,
under duress tonight.
A gift of mad craftsmen
to privileged warrior classes.
Paying debts that have already
been long paid off.

The sun sets into midnight.
Heavy rain in ink black, like a
deafening incoherence from a severed arm
of a body of a messenger sent
through a battlefield. The pavements
exhales humidity,lifting
a veil towards the red clouds.

There is a reason why, always
a reason for everything. A stranger's advice
from younger years, greeting
the first waking hours of a Coyote Ugly.
Clumsily, someone somewhere messily greets
self-reliance, loving and letting go.

Another default smoke and mirrors chain
of lists, pennies, trains into
this point in history, why
herstory is buried under
rug after rug, and
her many unborn names.

There is a reason, some always sing.
Why even the most bloodthirsty Roman fears
a simple young man, speaking foolish about
life being turned against itself--poisoning its own children.

Another default zero-sum day for all this young blood,
Icing of Magic Sugar. Yet some would say,
like a warning. There is a reason
for all our civilised education, fast calculations,
our entertaining freedoms.

Our intruders fear children growing up
from the manufactured past, a terrifying beauty
that forces the ego to face its own ragged abyssmal bride-soul:
our nuts and bolts, unmanned towers and planes,
wires and frequencies escalating
into a clashing. Calling to sleeping wisdom,
claim this terrible machine of blind sight
and weak strength. Cast away illusions,
and come Home.

Peoples forgetting and abandoning many strengths
for tricks and branded promises
too easily. Beautifully unprepared, desperately new,
and summoned by its time.

From stories of many lost villages
that met with big men and machines of attack:
A fighter recalls with lost travelers
how enemy troops have captured young fighters
because they could not recognize
the voice of their true leader.



-Inspired by Lord Of The Flies. In response to a friend's poem about survival and recovery from multi-generational childhood trauma and abuse.