Yesterday folds our vital documents
into its briefcase and steps onto a busy street.
Busses lunge on asphalt, rolling
knotted muscles and emptied pockets deeper
into roads where dogs and paper
blur the lines between news and ****
Lovers, condos, taxis, and sidewalks
pray to scrape up rent. Tomorrow crouches, ready to spring
and ****** us back into the boxing ring.
I sit at the Earth's end,
an old, fractured, water-worn dock
cradles me and fixes the scene.
Yellow sails swimming the jetstream
hang on to the red dinghy whose wake
sets my eye upon the far shore.
Coney isle ‘cross the murk-warped sea
holds ancient homes like a tapestry
holds ancient threads that you can see
in some museum for a fee.
For the residents at Rosses Point
this is no end –
wit starts their children’s dreams
and holds them to life,
roots them in communal grasses
that grow and will always grow.
I didn’t know
that where the weed-stalk masses
life’s abundances overflow.
But where are their riches?
Cast in ditches by roadsides
where three hundred years of smiles,
vein-pulsing beliefs, busy thinkers,
sweet upswept streets,
all put wealth –
the heaping of coin
upon coin till nothing can breathe –
aside and laugh. They live,
surviving as they happen.
Inside the crumbled watchtower
I fling passion onto thought
onto nerve onto pen onto page
and then am limp,
like the carelessly treaded sage:
a child’s footprint.
What anguish did the watchers know
looking through the barred stone walls,
their travelers still gone?
In the swirling, swallowing night,
that drops like the judge’s gavel,
I write images of the sundry
numb-fingered seaside –
the birds call through the salt-stained air.
Fly, fly till you reach my words
that are split among a thousand minds and cities.
Fly till the grass overcomes the tread,
till the sun succumbs to lead
poisoning and dawn’s jaw drops dead.
The lighthouse, the sprinkling showers
from the clouds that shroud and mask
the would-be sky, guide
the heart that falls inside my throat –
two hundred tons of blood
beat through its bulge –
I’m alive
and live on, like this unhampered ground.
The sound of ripples and the rustle
of reeds bring me back
to the time-broken dock.
I sit and remember my friends –
calmness soaks in and through my bones –
I am and will always be;
and when memory fails and fades
I will float the channel of everything,
beach upon this shore
and will be the grass and nothing more,
till history becomes the future
and the first layer becomes the core.