Family Tree

They come from far and wide
once a year to mingle and snack
on catered shrimp and small talk

in the long line that snakes around
the room to the open bar besieged
five deep, the beating heart

of the party until the string band
starts up and everyone hits
the dance floor, limbs loose,

knees high, hair down, skirts hiked
generations of farmers and drifters,
rail men and conscripts, schemers

and failures, a cacophony of native
brogue and broken English, long
lazy vowels stretched to breaking.  

The men have my nose, the women
your eyes, but neither you nor I claim
the crazy cackle coming from

a skinny gal with electric
hair or the flat, vacant gaze of
a fellow in coveralls,

hands like hay rakes, yellow
fingers balled into fists.  The bar
closes at twelve, they start to drift  

away, arms draped, propping each other
up, telling the same old tearful tales,
falls down wells, battle axes

to the head, starvation in alarming
numbers and many iterations of
pox and croup, ague and catarrh,

bilious fever, dropsy and the flux,
melancholia, milk leg and screws,
a miserable game of one-upmanship

savored by all as they disappear
into the night, fore-bearers eyeing
us at the door, polite yet taciturn,

playing things close to the vest
mum on the matter of the higher
branches of our family tree.

Driving In Ireland

Try buttering toast with a tulip
on horseback.  Skittish nag, twisted chaps,
flogging a slice, reins in your teeth,
waving a battered Black Parrot  
heading a slow parade.

Should a primitive tribe be civilized?
Are we civilized or savage?

Leave them the aborigines to their home
in peace
their abode in the depth of forest.

But where's their abode?
we cut the jungle and made road
where would their babies be born?
in the smoke of engines blaring of horns
so hard for them to birth
on the dwindling patch of their earth
our Paleolithic ancestors' living fossils
who with iron will
fought bullets with bows and arrows
now falling by the bullies of progress
begging for last living space.

Leave them the way they lived so long
unspoiled with their own education and culture
let them retain their own way of life
and not make them civilized the way we are.

Reading,
         Reading you,
Reading me:
Symphonic emotional intelligence,
Words like a violinist.
    I carry them with me
Inside my mind applying reality,
       The unreality passsing out of me.
The poems speak like see through natures,
The clarity of my discombobulation.
      You all become real.

   Archives of the souls
    Instantaneous connection
        Closer than
Touch:
Your words resonance with every
Fiber of my being.
    Your words
Invent more words,
    Your emotions tie
The world's shoestrings,
    The experience shared
Is a reality of musical theatre
    And it kills the silence,
The silence of the mind.
     Your words are movement,
Be it from a past,
     The metaphysical dance,
A kiss of gentle air,
    The idea is a life living
Recovering from the enigmatic plague
Of ignorance.
    Though I see the bird sing
My heart stops when it I hear it
Through your words;
    Connectivity.
Reading is not reading,
    It is saying what your silence says,
Art becoming life in an echo of YOU.
       The words that I understand:
Yes, the pain is also a gesture of reality,
     It lets us know it was real,
Your tears,
      Your secrets,
           The murmured past,
And as I read it becomes as the
Sun on morning dew.
   Beginnings,
Endings,
    You become apart of me,
I become part of you,
      Not words
But music in the silence.
And the moment will come
When you hear it too:

The poetry:
Crystalline humanity.

From the rooftop
I see the houses sleeping in moonlight

(My chance ascent to the roof
for a space to be aloof
begets this poem)

I know this stillness is deceptive

behind the half glow neon panes
or the wooden ones shut tight from light
beyond the dumb walls of white
tears and smiles are flowing
also grunts of despair
moans of flesh upon flesh
stopping at the skin
or going far down to that misty spot
and even far past all them
two hearts holding the flame
of years buried on the bed
a child still in their head
or there but really not there
somewhere too wide to build a bridge

(Thirty minutes past nine
the toy houses in the moonlight shine
in their chambers holding life not seen)

And I atop one such house know
it's time to go down the stairs
to take up the script again
and write and act and write
for the length of night.

I buy a shirt, a blue shirt, a button down.
I drink a glass of wine, a red, a Malbec.
And I watch.
I stand still in the midst
of the St. Cloud Market.
The crowd—that singular being—
jostles and jockeys and talks
in broken English.
I chew gum, cinnamon gum, Nicorette.
I feel my habit inverting, bending, becoming mechanical.
And I must flirt and be moral
with the shopkeeper who looks a little
like me.
And I must revert to an irrational, emotional,
childlike state as I buy three pirated DVDs.

The crowd forms a circle instinctually.
Three women dance slowly in the center.
Paper falls from the sky, newsprint, a day old.

Gunfire, the sound of it, its slowing of time.
No one says a thing
and no one's feet make a sound and
every child is perfectly behaved
for one relentless moment.