Pull them from their soap boxes,
these poets,
these preachers,
these dreamy-eyed sleep wreckers,
these shivers in the night.

Their words are made of anxiety,
this shaking,
this thunder,
this stirring of the water,
this pungent drone.

Tell them we are sleeping.
We do not wish to wake.
Tell them that our ears are filled
With mud from the stomach of lakes.
Shut them up, whatever it takes.

Drown them in the current,
the walking,
the awake,
the heavy-footed neighbors,
the bare-hearted teeth.

Sometimes I fear that your arms will pass through me.
With the wisp of uncertainties,
that you will reach for comfort
and find the wind lonely.

Sometimes I fear that one day you won't hear me.
With the clamor of fools,
that you will cup your ear
and hear nothing but indistinct drowning.

Sometimes I fear that one day you might see me.
With the drab of a pauper,
that you will look intently
and see an impoverished soul.

There is a part of you in me that wants to run;
A fear of sameness that once drove you from the sand.

There is a part of you I am looking for in my chin;
A boldness that lingers somewhere hidden under my teeth.

There are parts of you crammed into my shoulders;
A stubbornness filling up nearly every doorway.

There is a part of you in me that is smiling;
A pride like when you call me your son.

There are parts of me that are singing,
I am certain it is your father's song.

I have a heavy taste in my mouth.
cinnamon sticks and sage
broken wisdom in sound words
I have the earth on my tongue.
cloves and winger squash
thirsty for sweetened rain

Please keep talking.
Bring me home.
Each brush stroke inflection
Stokes fires of resurrection
Bringing back memories of
Baseball diamonds,
Karate lessons,
One-room school houses and
Overlooked blessings,
Of hills so high that we
Named ourselves kings
And of our fathers' shadows
That reminded us
We were yet princes.
The sound of your voice
Is unearthing ruins of me,
Of blueberry fields
Where we stained our clothes,
Of the sulfur we often
Held in our noses.
In your ebb,
In your flow,
It echoes more clearly
Than my heartbeat:
Will a tree forget its roots?

I have no inspiration,
five poems to write,
three cookies on a plate I bought to avoid washing
and seventeen hours until I redefine home.
All the anxiety of numbers decreasing
and years parading themselves like Thanksgiving day.
Larger than life,
not Really flying,
more easily enjoyable in front of a TV
than filling your lungs with the smog of 6th Ave.

ambient glances
transpiring from ashes
and airborne oceans
my senses surfing
the evening glow

honeycomb lights spinning
restless with bees
and could-have-beens
and what-I-might-do-
if-you-were-downs

it is April
in every sense
of the word
incense swirls around a
strange foreshadowing

Would you be angry if I howled?
You awaken sleeping fires inside me
more primal than modern words can express.
You look as if you are dressed in the moon
with Orion around your wrist and Leo on your neck.
Such pendants chase the pedantry of speech from my mind.
There are no steps in your stride.
You move about teasing laws of inertia,
kissing gravity on the cheek
as if to acknowledge his feeble attempt.
I have searched all of time and space for you
and you have found me speechless.

Would you be angry if I howled?
Threw my head back and let loose my lungs?
There is a wind in your eyes that stirs my soul.
Sentences that made sense not two minutes ago read:
is the moon you pretty as not as... what?
letters strewn across my tongue fall into my throat
you are a category 5 lunar storm
coating my eyes in moon dust and shine.
There is no man in me so eloquent
as to answer the ancient beauty I have seen in you.
All I have found is a cartoon wolf
with his heart popping out of his overalls
and his eyes on fire with the moon.

A stripper does not command the same feelings
when there is no music
when there is rain
when there is **** beneath their feet
when there is no stage
when they are
naked.

Step off stage,
peel their eyes from your skin.
Layer after layer
of pervert,
of bloodshot,
wipe the trails of loathing
they leave behind.
Take a cotton swab to your navel
to dry your mother's tears.
These are nothing you haven't seen.

Find glass where it is not broken,
Break it.
Pull on your face until you can see your cracks
echoed in kaleidoscope reflections.
Let your tongue swipe your teeth
and slurp down the dollar bill smile.
Chase it with the cat that was
swimming in your eyes.
Imagine what you would look like dead.
Make silly faces in broken mirrors.
Turn away before they fade.

Shake your head in your hands
until music flies from your ears.
Shake harder.
Spill the hypnotic equilibrium they sold you
Watch the room start to sway.
Sit down.
Stand up.
Find your legs.
*****.
Heave,
feeling there is much more poison
than will ever come out.
Cough into the air,
knowing your hands are sacred.
Wipe your memory on someone else's sleeve.

Walk to the door.
Let your profession slip from your shoulders.
Become human.
Become blending into the crowd.
Become busy with something in your hands.
Open the door, then your umbrella.
Do not breathe.
Take five steps forward and wait to exhale
until your hear the door slam behind you.
It isn't healthy to mix the sight of rain
with the smell of broken pianos.

Walk forward.
Out of your shoes.
Wince as the concrete speaks to your heel.
Bathe your toes in the nearest puddle.
Let your umbrella slide from the warmth of your hand.
Watch it fly.
Notice the people.
Move your sight from the ground
and rest it on their chins.
Realize you're wearing no clothes.
Pull the confidence down and off of your walk
and turn to the closest alley.

Step off stage.
Peel their eyes from your soul.
Become an individual.
Forget "the people."
Notice the persons
wrapped to their noses in professions and smiles,
confidence and ignorance pouring from their eyes,
heads tucked low beneath charcoal umbrellas.
Smile.
Without trying when you hear the clouds roar.

Stop when you find there are more walls than bodies
and the smell of ***** is stronger than your own.
Forget your smell.
Open your mouth.
Forget your taste.
Bend your knees and raise your head.
Close your eyes and feel it rain.
Scream.
Strip the religion from your prayers.
Scream the ineffable confession.
Forget your body.
Drink the rain.

there is no music
there is rain
there is **** beneath your feet
there is no stage
you are
naked.

She laughs.
With a smile and a sound
She paints the walls with sunshine.

When she laughs,
There is no tomorrow,
Her voice giving life to hallowed now.

She laughs when
The smell of love and music
Is stitching its kiss in the sky.

She laughs.
With eyes like no others I've found,
And leaves it all behind.

Mother Nature,
green-thumbed,
with eyes of purpose,
with floor length gowns,
went about her morning gardening.

Singing to her crops of we,
the skin of her feet tracing mountains and reefs,
granting rain to the thirst farmer patch,
her scent driving men to humility.

Lungs filled sharp as she winced her eyes,
at the sight of blood she grit her teeth.
The urban thorns were growing now
and choking blossoms of unity.

Remnants of her song now ghost,
the sky grew dark as she approached.
She snipped, with hurricane-force sheers,
and trimmed Louisiana's coast.

On April 26th, 372 B.C. Plato was the first man to inflict injury upon his own dreams.
Not the forms casting shadows in his cave, his literal dreams.
At 6:35 a.m. the impish snarl of a water ***** crept into his Utopia of an
all-you-can-eat gyro cart overturned at the corner of his street and roused him
back to consciousness. The ingenious design of his Clepsydra quite obviously complete,
Aristotle came running with the awkward stride of a sleepwalking adolescent
to see what his master had done. When he arrived he saw flying,
two pots of water, an air-compressing submersible chamber and one water ***** reed.
Aristotle quickly collected the shattered pieces and noted
that this broken pottery was more real than time itself.

On September 21st, 712 A.D. a small village just outside the boundaries of
Chang'an, China came dangerously close to taking the life of the palace
astronomer/inventor/sleepyhead. Crowding around the door of Yi Xing, the
townspeople tore their robes and wailed for him to put a stop to the
incessant clanging. Xing, who had apparently overslept and was still
clinging to morsels of fading dreams about his young mistress, stuffed his
face into his pillow, muttering eureka, after first having chucked the
two clay pots, handful of stones and plate-sized gong out the front door,
much to the amusement of the assembly of drooping eyelids and torn pajamas.

In the year 1235 A.D. tortured residents of Baghdad began associating their
daily and nightly times for prayer with the ringing of their eardrums from
uninvited chimes.

In 1493 St. Mark's Clock-tower polluted the once-pure Venetian air with
hourly reminders that we are all yet one hour closer to our inevitable death
and the priests of the day called it humility.

Levi Hutchins of New Hampshire turned to a pine cabinet, brass clock and
mechanical gears in 1787, and for the first time gave himself the ability to
choose when he would hate the morning.

In 1847, French inventor Antoine Redier began making money off of people's
early morning auditory masochism.

Lew Wallace, the morning after completing his masterpiece novel "Ben Hur,"
awoke with a fiendish beeping in his ear and proceeded to invent the paradox
of the snooze button.

In Spring of 1942 the war in Europe raged and all U.S. alarm clock production ceased.

In the Spring of 1943 well-rested factory men, confronted by their foreman
upon arrival at 9:15, erupted the words "my alarm clock is broken,"
forever placing the excuse in the deep pockets of slackers
world-wide.

To all of these respected men of our history
Who have thought with their hands to create
The foundation of a society drowning in Starbucks,
I wish to express my sincerest ingratitude.

I lie awake in bed at night,
Licking the bitter taste of reality from my cheeks,
In the company of Plato, Lew Wallace and Yi Xing,
Wondering what dreams will be stolen from me.

I have fallen down holes one hundred words deep
And with every slippery movement of my tongue,
My world seems that much darker.
I have formed sounds in my mouth good for nothing but regretting
And released them as poison to the ones I love.
Droplets of toxins filling relationship coffins
Faster than the undertakers can have them prepared.
I swear, on whatever is meaningful to you,
I was not born with silver ***** in hand.
In my youth I spoke truth with the purest intent,
Building mountains I would climb to feel closer to the sun.
But as my feet grew longer and my eyes grew wider,
My ears learned the ways of treacherous men.
The first time I felt myself falling it was fun.
The rush of my own voice ripping its way past.
The second time I felt myself falling it was fun.
The thrill of the drop made my heart stand still.
The third time I felt myself falling I heard drums.
Faintly at first, but no doubt, they were drums.
There was the sound of skin, stretched over emptiness,
Shaking in the wake of a violent hand.
My eyes folded narrow, slipped shut, opened wide.
I could not discern whether I was the drum or the hand.
Both shaken and violent, empty and strong,
My skin stretched over my ribs and under my fingernails.
Seventy words down in the hole I heard the pulse,
At ninety words began the droning.
Matchless tone, like piercing your lungs
And listening to the shout that escapes.
At ninety-five words I hated them collectively.
At one hundred words I hated my self.
I have fallen down holes one hundred words deep.
Please excuse my silence.
The darkness that looms one hundred words deep
Is sticky, and icy, and true.
I am not afraid of heights, only of leaving them.
And I refuse to fall in front of you.

Keep your hands to yourself!
     If I have to tell you one more time to stop touching her
     I will duct tape those fingers to your knees so help me God.

Fresh from the womb I felt her.
My hands clawed the air and found her smile,
Before my eyes opened, before my ears could discern,
I felt her love, palpable and near.
After the synesthesia, when her finger no longer sang,
I felt the warmth of her neck as she swayed,
Dancing to the honey her lips spilled in the cool night air,
Her touch was more music to me than rhythm,
More primal an instinct than survival,
I would die holding my mother’s hand.

Bubbles were so much more fun before they became personal.
I spent hours chasing invisible globes
My father created from a mixture of heat and lawn chairs.
I have spent years chasing invisible globes
My peers have created from a mixture of insecurities and histories of cold.

When I am gone my heart misses you.
When I return and you extend your hand
I begin the conversation I have had with myself too many times to remember.
     They don’t mean that they don’t love you.
     But doesn’t their heart feel it too?
This magnetic pull of our celestial bodies
Gravity drawing them together until they would join in the enigma of unity
Nebulous at best I would call your reaction
It seems you would rather keep me in orbit,
Just close enough to peek at on cloudless nights,
Just far enough to let me take the asteroids on my own.

I want your hands all over me.
Since birth the world has removed itself from me,
Carving borders and barriers, walls and fences,
And the immutable space that is between you and me.
Deep in my heart waves the flag of rebellion
Held in the hand a young boy thrusts high in the air
Forever kept in the age of innocence,
The age without fences,
When it still seemed right to embrace the ones you love.
He is wearing a baseball cap and cowboy boots
And wants to know why you feel so cold.

So here we are, floating.
And I’m asking you to fall.
I am asking you split your bubble at the seems
And leap into my arms full of fear and free of expectations.
I will catch you and press you close to my heart
Where the children of the rebellion meet.
We are not falling, we are jumping.
And the heart of the earth has missed us so.

Avalanche pending
The look in a drummer's eye
           Bury me alive

I will swallow broken bits
of the apologies you won't let me give
until I make my stomach filled
and dense enough to sink.
Pulling on my heart
with fingernails of memories
and memories of fingernails
and voices mixed with mine.
Mixing wine with vinegar
in the corners of my mouth
I'll spout and spray this canvass
with the tragedy I want and have not found.
I am still louder than my heart at times.
You know this all too well.
Tooth and molar pass my tongue,
Swallowing culprits one by one.
Lift my jaw above my head
And use my heart to think.
Drink the offering inside my veins.
Use the knife I spoke to you.
I will be lying in the field of somber pauses
Where you first helped me to speak.

When I speak,
It is not so much for you
As it is for me.
Every word,
Echoing in the ballroom
Between my teeth,
Sets my jaw to dancing.
Sibilant whispers
Tickle the tip of my tongue,
Kissing the hiss
Of sunlight on daisies.
The hum drum of mountains
Growling at the ceiling,
Like a kitten purring
Against my nose.
Oohs and Ahs,
Medicine for my cheekbones.
Such ointment as vowels
No doctor has seen.
When I speak,
At times when no ear is listening,
It is not so much for what
As it is for how.
Every word
Stretching time,
Composite peace.

Crawling,
nimble fingers curl,
green tongues speaking,
the prairie grass buckles
under weight of the fickle wind.
Cool weather and farm dust
thrown from its right hand.
A solid left hook
burning holes in its pocket.

Words:
Road blocks
On highways
Of thought.
Plato dreams
Of speaking
Utopia.
The cave grows
                   dim.

Stories spin webs that catch time as it passes.

Hours wrapped in spider's silk wait to be devoured.

Let me tell you a tale,

Some other time to consume your time,

A tale that will leave you hungry.

Indiana Jones never finds his life empty.

He will live forever on gifted hours,

Given by those who need.

They will keep on needing,

Trading their lives for stories of others'.

There is no poet like a knife.
There is no rhyme like dance.
The first time I held your hand in mine
Was the only love poem I have given you.
Fists full of dirt
Beads of sweat on skin
I have understood God the most when it rains.
When elements collide and my face becomes water.
There is no profanity like absence.
There is no obscenity like callous.
The last time I shook my father's hand
Is the only praise I have known.

He has torn down the temple.
Stones lie scattered across the sand.
In his anger he has cursed God
And stormed into His dwelling,
Making mockery of angels and eating sacred bread.
He has torn down the temple.
She is lying scattered on her bedroom floor,
Drenched in the paralyzing stench of incense,
Her ears bleed with sacrilege.
The curtain is torn, is torn.

There is a shell I have never broken.
I watched you check your mail.
I had already found my keys.
I waited.
You waited.
You knew there would be no mail.
You watched me scrounge for my keys.
There is a shell you have never broken.

You have grown heavier and heavier with each hour of talk.
When I met you I could just make out your silhouette on the horizon.
Thin as bird legs, you danced with each gust,
Teasing my eyes like candle flame shadows.
With each word I caught falling from raspberry lips,
Words I wiped on my chest to keep them close,
You grew wide and tall as a redwood forest,
Shielding my whitewashed bones from the sun.
It used to be, that when you moved, my heart kept walking.
My blood runs stronger than canyon-cutting rivers.
With each conversation you are deeper and thick,
Behind you the sun whimpers over the horizon.
I can see sides of you your silence once held,
Fooling my ears and turning my head.
But you have grown heavier with each hour of talk,
When you shift, my heart strings pull me to your side.
Your every step directs my inward thought.
Should you chase the setting sun to far stretching oceans,
You would tilt my world and my love would roll,
Head over heels until you saw fit to stop
And I could bask in your shade once more.
You are a giant in the eyes of my heart,
Heavier still with each recitation.
I imagine that years of words will swell,
Until I can just make out my own silhouette on your horizon.

If I could convince you of one thing,
I would convince you that you are worth it.
These arms are much to short and far too weak
to rip through the curtain of time,
but if I could convince you,
I would brush hours with my fingertips
and leave palm prints engraved on the days you didn't feel loved.
Reaching back, up to my elbows in  pools of your story,
sifting through the silt built up at the bottom,
twisting knobs and turning dials
until every time you heard his voice or her voice say
'you will never amount to anything'
instead played back
'you will never stop amounting.'
Spry young saplings, planted at the river's edge,
you will never stop growing.
You will always find strength when you lift your branches to the sky,
be it deep in your roots,
you will stand taller than northern pines,
taller than sycamores that split clouds with their leaves.
Believe me now more than your memories,
you will do so much more than survive.
I would spill this pain I see melted in your eyes.
With all of the righteous fury a sinner can muster,
I would destroy those times you were told
that it's never ok to cry,
that you must live like prisoners inside your own bodies
with emotions covering up the windows more and more each day.
If I could convince you,
I would swallow every steel bar you've ever known,
Giving you back your mother,
Giving you back your father.
I would fill myself with cages
if you would know that you are free.
You are free to live life as you have seen it in the trees.
Stand tall, and drink from the rivers of love
so few are willing to share with you.
In turn, share your rivers with those who also believe.
I would not erase the pain you have suffered,
for I would not dare touch your strength.
I would ask, that when you feel the wind,
like the breath of God, stirring through the trees,
that you would stretch out your branches and weep.
Water the ground that has brought you so far,
embracing every waking moment
that you might never again live in dreams.
If I could convince you of one thing,
Change your mind about time,
showing you that you are both past and present
staring boldly into the future,
I would convince you that you are worth it.
Whatever "it" you could imagine "it" to be,
Know that it will never measure up to your leaves.

Resonate my veins
Setting my love in motion
Your satin voice
Finding frequencies of truth

Reach
Beyond my dim reflections,
Around the imperfections,
Down the hallways of my heart.

Reach
Because I feel like I am sinking
Beneath this sea of thinking
There's no one with arms that long.

I don't even know what I need to know
To believe You are who You say You are
And that everything's going to turn out grand.
I need to see Your hand.
Reach

I left the seat
in the front row
of the place
with too many lights
for it to have been
that dim
dripping in music from head to toe,
from hip to soul,
listening to my ears and their lobes
ramble on incantations of unknown songs,
enchanting nuances strung throughout their chatter
like puddles strewn across concrete,
like grey matter,
like static
but much more in tune with nature
and far less understandable,
weaving my thoughts through new-found looms
stitching patterns of fumes,
gasses,
smoke and the solemn ashes
of melodies burned alive
under a nearly full moon,
under skies that humm
with the clanging arrival
of moments to be counted,
marked,
measured,
treasured for their value
though it elude all reason
because seasons do not lie
except for early spring evenings
when the lights are fading
and the music you heard playing
is quick to
leave your tongue.
It was all said and done.

One more highway home

among the trees and stargazers,

convincing my eyes

of what my ears have undone.

There are times I wish you would throw out the canvas.
                                        Be as reckless as I love you to be.
Let loose the hold you have fixed on this earth and plunge
               Head-long into the ocean, daring yourself to breathe.
Brush your fingers across the coral until your voice starts to bleed,
                       Then paint the sunken whale bones with your song.
                  Drink chestfuls of love until sobriety loses meaning.
        Tell the world your secrets while it sleeps in your arms.
  Speak with the grace of battering rams and truncheons.
                                       Stretch your mind until it weeps.
                                             Collect these tears in bottles,
                                               Break them on the streets.
          I would hang your soul on my refrigerator door
                                            Any given day of the week.

Run River Run
for your life
for ours
for farmers' daughters
for future sailors
for explorers
for the dead
for valleys
for power
for stories and lies
for nakedness
Run River Run
for your life
for ours
for history
for health
for the money
for the living
for fish
for fires
for ears and eyes
for necessity
Run River Run
for your life
for ours
Run from your mother and never go home.
Run and keep the wind company.
Run River Run
with your pockets full of gold
for your life
for ours

Twelve handlebars and six left feet
Plow their way through arrogant Spring
Catching mouthfuls of melodies that swim the air
Stuffing twenty-two pockets with laughter
     Spitting seeds of care
     From cherry-stained lips
     Into the gulfs of ever afters
Slinking their legs and elbows through rafters
To spy on the honesty present in dreams

Walked in like B flat
Slow music playing
Heels clicked like staccato
Dress cello imitating
Blue notes sunken
Drunken with the motion
Of the left right sway
Spin, dip, heads floating
River more than ocean
She never stands still
She don't shoot the breeze
Heart-breaker, shoot to ****
Then she transposed the thrill
B harmonic minor
Tango, stomp, clap
Somebody shot the dress designer.
Violence in the night
Gasoline on the floor
Swift step matchstick heels
She adores the
White
Light
Like coconut cream
Musicians bathe with the moon
Sleep with its beams
Play until the world
Seems to burst at the seams
Set fire to the rivers
Inhale the steam
Descend with the fifths
Never rest on a trill
Cut the drums, spotlight
Let her transpose the thrill

orange like beeeee
careful beeeeee
cautious beeeeeee
irrationally aware
of the world around you

red like tooooo
night toooooo
stop tooooooo
hesitant when the moment
calls for action

blue like weeeee
were weeeeee
aren't weeeeeee
are drowning
in oceanic air

Pray.
Fold your hands or raise them empty.
True worship is in the sand.
It's knowing your coasts.
Knowing where you stop and where the Mystery begins.
Setting invisible standards on scales
you will never step foot on yourself
and being completely ok with that.
Empty hands are easy to hold on with,
so he squeezes with all his might.
Tighter with each missed meal,
tighter still with each cold night.
He holds on to the stories of Sundays,
of Lion's dens and wooden boats.
So that in the darkness of poverty's grave,
He prays.
Staying true to that thing with feathers in his soul,
he finds laughter amid storms
and wrestles smiles through the pain.
He grows.
From some invisible seed planted some time ago.
Grandmama's kitchen was a regular glass-walled greenhouse
And there wasn't anybody around
that could look themselves in the mirror
should one day they take to throwing stones.
Pray,
Mama told him.
So he closed his eyes and spoke.
Truth to remove the cold,
bread of spirit to fill his hunger.
But when he opened his eyes he felt pain in his side,
so he prayed again.
Knees on the ground,
he expected the earth to sprout cheerio trees,
the clouds to rain blankets,
and Grandmama to come around the next corner.
Such was the mustard seed.
Often times he slept after prayer.
Not always of peace.
Sometimes he was afraid his eyes
would see the same world when he opened them.
So he held them shut and saw Grandmama in dreams.
Pray,
Mama told him,
for patience and peace.
His empty hands still raised,
Still empty,
he gazed into the rafters of the one place he felt safe.
Singing songs of Sundays
and praying like Friday nights.
He felt light wrap around him,
rainbows he thought,
because he liked the colors,
and he learned while he was hungry
to pray.

Sing.
Mama's voice chimes bells.
Daddy's words raise hell.
The spell of music speaks doors into the night.
She steps onto the moonlight highway.
The melodies frozen in her ears from before
thaw and play their instruments
bringing life to dream-singers.
It's no coincidence
she was born premature.
It seems everything in her life has come early,
so she set her clocks ahead
and listened to the bells chime,
something like mama's voice.
Her home is a choice,
but not hers.
Instead she stirs the *** of muses
mixing salve for all the bruises,
not to her skin, he's not that stupid,
but for her bleeding heart
and broken mind.
Sing.
Purse your lips and cover your ears.
Conjure a tune from down in your belly
and make **** sure you guard all the exits.
Close your eyes and let the medicine
of cello strings and cymbals
back up the voice of your bones.
Don't let the melody presume to take words.
Your mind is caught up, trapped by the pain.
Just let soul **** tumble and fall
and rise, and climb and stall
and leave it all behind.
Let mama's screams blend in with crescendos.
Let go of this world.
Dip your toes in the timbre of streams.
Hands over your ears, don't forget!
Don't forget your form.
Forget the violent storms.
And if you're spun,
spin into helices.
Your DNA twisting into treble clefs,
hug the transformation close.
Who knows? You may sprout wings.
Sing;
If only a half-hearted whisper.
Sing yourself to sleep tonight.
And hope mama's voice still chimes in the morning.

Dance!
She told him.
So he drug his feet across the newspaper
turning headlines into layers of ice,
gliding just over the surface of a world
to him forgotten.
Boom!
The bass dropped and his heart nearly popped out of his chest.
His ribs too visible beneath his South Pole
bowed, creaked and shuttered
but muttered something about,
something about feeling alive.
Clap!
A series of muscle convulsions.
Shutter glimpses of the unseen acts of lightning
looking for a cloud to call home.
This one bolts into the highest thunderhead
and waits to be told to go. Go.
Sshhhh!
The sound of rain blinks from his eyes.
He squeezes the fruits of life
and serves the sour mixture to those who look on
with amazement and terror,
soaked in his story of craze and misfortune.
Clap!
This corner raises walls to his perception.
This is the metaphysical explanation,
God can be found in his dance.
This is where his last meal came from
and he won't leave the next one to chance.
Boom!
B-boy breaks down the laws Newton discovered.
Spinning until the world learns to turn
so that the seasons bring rain
on the just and on the unjust,
not just those who can afford to ignore each other.
Clap!
The applause brings tears to his mother's swollen eyes.
Swollen with pride and shame
of the things she's been pushed to, and pulled from.
She's reaching above the waves,
he's dancing his way from hell.
Sshhhh!
The ghosts now dispersed at the first sound of silence.
Their consciences are begging
more than the boy's pride will let him.
But their shoulders were born cold,
and the boy skates for nickels.
Clap!
As if God Himself were impressed
by the display of acrobatics set in rhythm,
the storm system raged and umbrellas dotted the streets.
Camouflage for his tears, he thought,
he always has what he needs in its season.
Boom!
The soul-box pumps out the old clocks.
Time has folded itself, molded itself, so it's no shock.
Rhythm and blue depression mixed up with B Boy steppin',
It's harder to find a meal on cold pavement than you'd think.
Dance!
She told him.
And he sinks.