You have to start
by finding things
to burn.

Turn the island
into a tinderbox.

Fill your truck with driftwood
and detritus hustled up from
derelict construction sites.

Scavenge plywood scraps
and lengths of two-by-fours.

Find a spot beneath the dunes
and dig into the still-warm sand,
your rusted shovel syncopating

with the rhythm of the waves,
crunching into the cool dark
hollow of a deepening pit.

By dusk, the hole will be capable
of containing everything you want
to burn.

Set the shovel down.

When the darkness
finds you all alone,
take the lighter fluid
in one hand
and a match
in the other.

Wait for the
wind to die.

If you do it right,
the orange embers
will crack and rise,
truant children
ushered home
by pacing stars.

If you do it right,
the smell of salt and smoke
will stay with you for days.

If you do it right,
the bonfire will
bloom like a flower
and consume itself
all night long.

In the morning,
your work will
have healed, doctored
by persistent currents
and the extinguishing
sweep of high tide.

Tonight the ceiling fan
clicks with every turn.

The bedside clock ticks
and tocks in moonglow.

I close my eyes
and one by one
the light bulbs in
the house explode.

The darkness
becomes me,
I think.

I wear it silky black,
a spider-tailored suit
imponderous as ether.

I focus on the anesthetic sound
of a future breathing inside me.

Memory folds like
an obsolete map—

a distant archipelago
of diminishing stars.

Years ago, I’m sure,
we married in a copse
blue with wild hyacinth.

Tonight the satellites
cut like diamond tips,

lugubrious orbits etching
across a bedroom window.

Dawn always blooms with
the sound of breaking glass.

Our house is a black box.
We drape every window

but one, a pinhole
to capture the sun.

At night our eyes go dark as ink.
Our memories marbleize at
the edge of the bedroom.

Come morning,
we are nothing

but inverted images
fed by shared light.

You tell me to smile
and I braid your hair.

Upstairs, the children
develop like ghosts.

I put on another record
and the dark disc spins,

its needle lulled
into grooves the way
you are lulled into me.

We could almost dance together,
but the couple at the window

will not move until
we come into focus.

The girl in the black
bathing suit swims
through my dreams;

her orange eyes warn
me that summer
is coming.

An inescapable
swelter of air
threads itself
through the slats
of picket fences,

crisping insects
and terrifying
an army of black birds
bivouacked in the trees.

I hear the soft explosion
of hibiscus, red petals as
bright as belly wounds,

and the heartbeat
of the dog panting,
stupefied by the heat
of a relentless star.

Up and down the street,
abandoned children call
out from the bottom of
empty swimming pools.

I slouch in an aluminum chair,
trying to get black-out drunk
on warm gin and tonics.

The tidy rectangle
of grass around me
ignites in a legion
of slender flames.

I remember the dark room
and my father’s deathbed,
his whispered, final words:
dying is thirsty work.

I strip to my underwear
and fantasize about ice.
I pray for the neighborhood
sprinklers to spring to life.

The prison bus
passes this way

every now and then,
surfacing without

warning—a leviathan
of metal, grease, and glass

its dark windows secured
by squares of rusted wire

its diesel engine heart
spewing exhaust that

turns morning rain
the color of seawater.

The prison bus
does not stop
for stop signs;

red lights are nothing
but violent memories
strung in an overcast sky.

When the bus strikes
something in its path

the prisoners bounce
slightly in their seats,

lifted into
impartial air

liberated
momentarily

by the familiar
co-conspirators
of blood and laughter.

In his dreams,
the guard who
drives the prison bus
circumnavigates the globe,
plowing through clouds
of insects that shimmer
like fuel above the road.

My younger brother still fishes
when he can, when the weather
is agreeable, when he can afford
some tackle and beer for the cooler.

He sits alone on the river bank
and smokes and drinks and waits
in the shifting shade of cottonwoods
for the unmistakable pull on the line.

He fishes whether
the fish are biting
or not. He is intimate with
psychology and the placid
deceit of undisturbed water.

My brother is an angry man.

As kids, we fished
together on the dock
and killed them
with our hands.

Careful not to kneel
on scattered hooks,
we baited the lines
on our knees a foot
above brackish water.

We dropped fish heads
off the edge of the dock
and watched them float
down, almost out of sight,
settling into final stillness
only to snap back to life
(or the false throes of death)
by the white claws of *****
picking them into oblivion—
goodbye eyes,
goodbye gills,
goodbye teeth,
goodbye scales.

Brother, I don’t remember anymore:
was it triumph or merely shame
that left us shivering in the sun?

We never cracked the mysteries of Pittsburgh,
and Baltimore bled out inconveniently before

our eyes, another nervous snitch knifed outside
the corner convenience store in broad daylight.

Salt Lake City was too pure, too white,
theocracy carved into a wafer of snow.

We grew tired of watching Los Angeles
pleasure itself in the sun like a **** star,
interminably tan and vacuous.

And Chicago was too ******* cold.

So we settled here, where streets turn
the soles of our shoes to palimpsests

where every apartment elevator
offers a wall of infinite buttons

where grocery stores stock their shelves
with bottles and bottles of octopus ink

where neighbors open their curtains
and stand shimmering in moonlight

where weather mixes with nostalgia,
creating immutable, poetic forecasts

where water tastes like redemption
and the skyline rises like a chorus,

so much taller than the cities
we inhabited when we were

alive.

This waiting room is painted of pain,
featuring faces with mouths down-turned,
impatience taking up these empty seats,
of family members already lost,
we feel like the least loved
in the mighty grasps of almighty fate's
crushing hands,
we feel like the last patients
to be visited during the night shifts,
by nurses and doctors,
the times of day when the most dust
is swept back to the humble soil
by an unseen, yet not-so-invisible bashing broom.
the old fan - barely hanging -
is closing in full circle,
a whole life lived.
dull curtains, some unhooked and five minutes to falling,
alongside the walls' stripes
designed with a print of doctors' usual words,
"I'm so sorry for your loss."  

If life truly begins at forty,
then hers ended at the starting line.
this would be a misplaced and mixed metaphor
if it weren't for olympics silently running in the background on the tv
reminds me of my mute cries, surprised eyes bulging, gaping mouths with no sound.

It ought to be a preventative measure; just a routine operation
a possibly cancerous lump.
I am flipping aimlessly through these magazine pages,
each catching a tear-drop for the dog-ears
(whoever reads them next will turn the pages over better).
Some puzzled maze pieces fall out of a box,
my baby cousin tries to gather the cardboard paper of a family tree picture,
but the least important twigs are lost, and the last friendly branch found missing.
The many portraits that make up the landscape go away from time to time.
It was just a little, smallish lump.
these news are hard to swallow.
my eyes are peeling onions.
my throat is winter-hands dry.
mum says she saw her the most alive
a few odd minutes before time clocked aunt out.
Grandma's sister blames herself for suggesting, advising, and in retrospect putting "pressure".
neutral colours ***** the Scrubs' floors,
hypothermia lurking in the corridors,
but the coke from the vending machine is medicine lukewarm.

It was a game of musical chairs,
But when the seven trumpets sounded,
the stools remained still, they stood facing eastward in hexagonal formation.
An angel ascended, the remnants were six shadows now.
With a plot twist, it's less players each round.
Who dies first wins, I've tossed too much soil on dust, my hands are *****.
We wash our hands clean with this paraffin.
Open-casket, the last sight took my breath away - the whitened clay still one,
but with the breath of life taken away, by the One, who giveth and taketh.

It's also winter our hearts,
dips of grief, dabs of black clothing, grim-reaper the thief, we still loath him.
another weekend
another sad-a-day
another funeral.
And his life was a summary,
too brief a breath, as the contraction is.
No sympathy to bother saying
"I am".
Public or private hospitals, dark clouds gather above all.

Twenty-twelve was a scar,
for four years now we are still scooping our scabs, from the bottomless pits,
that fell from ever-fresh wounds picked at a tad too prematurely,
so very early.
Some of the things we will take to our graves
will take us to our graves, as we exhume our pre-mourning selves.
And hurt still drops in drips,
red-bottomed-sticky feet from the blood-washed tiles,
the pain and the paint in permanent.
Some matters you can only think about
when you are half-awake and half-asleep, because these nightmares
are too real to be dreams.

uThixo Ovayo unoNobantu, nabantu bakhe bonke ngamaxesha onke.

~ by New-Black-SoUl #NBS

The rain desires nothing but begins nonetheless.
One drop falls, alone at first, followed
by another and another, until
the neighborhood windows weep.

Across the street, her husband turns
his palm to the sky, steps into the storm.
His black umbrella blinks awake,
like the hole he creeps through
when his wife is sleeping, when
the window is open and the sidewalk is dry.

It can’t be helped.

It desires nothing,
but the rain, with
a million hands,
ravages everything.

My brother’s in the army;
my sister’s in Detroit.
Momma lost the lottery;
Daddy’s in the joint.

The abattoir is empty;
the kitchen smells like steak.
The cows are off in dreamland,
but the butcher is awake.

The dogs are in the garbage
snapping over bones.
The garden is a sinkhole
choking on its stones.

The furniture’s on fire;
my heart’s a trampoline.
Once a week I wash the floor
with blood and gasoline.

There’s liquor in the freezer
and a hatchet in the shed.
I always clean my fingernails
but forget to make the bed.