"...a black woman
in a white house
built by slaves..."

Everything is asleep
and in pain, in love
and dreaming
about another life
I say to myself,
it is time I take my own
lookout, unfaithful
sailors know they can't
see a thing but they keep
their place on the prow
out there in the darkness
where boats are colliding,
oh yes, they are blind
or awake feeling the dark
like light, like those levels
of cold and heat underwater,
you know what I mean,
when you are dreaming
or in danger, that place
where fish live and sleep,
sometimes I think I understand
everything,  but I know that
I am wrong, and incredible
as it seems, the shadow I see
when I'm hung, I want to think
of hideouts in the mountains
where a man can go to die there.

My coat is black
like the nights
I have long forgotten.

I left heaven
for the taverns.

I did my readings before daybreak
when the moon was far aloft,
but the nights got longer.

I kept putting things off
hoping I would discover a star
I knew was there.

Now I saw logs
and leave the leaves
where they fall.

I believe there is no sanctuary
for me in this subdivision
of dreams, cathedrals
built by unknowns

I am like grass
cracking their concrete,
I was carved by a stone knife
in the mountains
where I learned to speak

I am the rider called death
bleeding in my sleep,
sitting in the saddle
with Dark, the black man
and his crazy blues

I sink down like a diver
into the deep water,
like an unknown poet
going down with his ship.

Listening to the sea,
that dark looking glass
like the watchboy they ask
about the night, my brother,
the black mirror you see,
I know almost nothing about,
I heard a dirge of burning longboats
like the songs the dead sing
to put me to sleep, my death,
if I could tell you about it,
my Captain, I would but I slept
right through it, not dreaming.

When I sleep
a wind blows
over strange lands
I don't know
and I feel like a lamp
a stranger is holding up
looking for a way
through a dark field
I will walk through.

I know paradise
has never been lost
and so it can never be regained
like the moon, a one-eyed girl
in sandles running from the Marines
and the stars are her sisters
hiding in the dark bamboo,
only sixteen dressed in black
falling out of a tree at midnight
a rifle in her hands, a bullet in her heart.