A tap on my left shoulder
I am roused from my sleep
I turn and see my daughter
Who's been dead 3 years last week

She pulls me from my slumber
Humming broken lullabies
"Where're we going, dear?"
"Hush, it's a surprise"

She brings me to the subway
Down abandoned tracks
Graffitied walls like bathroom stalls
It's too late to turn back

She stops me in a room
Where people stand in wait
Silence presses in on the ceiling
Words that can't escape

My daughter sits on the tracks
And beckons me to as well
The people engrave words on brick
Like they're under a sort of spell

"Watch as it spreads"
She said in a hushed tone
I was about to ask what she meant
But then I felt it in my bones

The silence of the elders
Crashed through my throat and lungs
I felt the air thicken
Acid burned my tongue

Darkness pressed around me
A suffocating mass
I could not make a noise
She laid me on the tracks

It was all dimly familiar
The rumble without noise
The ghosts gathered around me
It was time to make a choice

Fools, I tried to say
But I choked on my own air
A shudder swept my body
I closed my eyes in prayer

I woke up in my bed
Sore from head to toe
Shaking from the recollection
Of what happened so long ago

Emotions boom
like unhinged stereo equipment
                                      pushing gusts of wind waves through the room, disturbing epic stillness,
inciting wicked rage that ricochets;
                                             fingers scrape my face,
                                             figures lose their shape as vision fades,
pain transforms to passion;
                             two broken hearts took each other captive.

I hear voices,
Sounds are striking the inner walls of my head.
Alot is going in my life,
But I'm happy to wait.
I'm happy to wait,
For the things to be okay again.
My mind needs some peace,
I wanna throw out the pieces that are piercing it.
I wanna shut the voices up that I hear,
But I'm afraid to dare.
I'm afraid of being lost in this vast world,
That is full of fake people with fakeness in everything.

Today, I am awake
Reminding myself how to be gentle
It’s a process, it takes time
Remembering how to co-create

Yesterday, I did not stir
I could barely even function
Perturbed, or disturbed it seemed
I never thought I would begin

In those days, all was still
Even the ghosts dare not speak
But even still, my house was warm
Every book held its own space

Back then, the thunder shook
And cracks became unglued
But slowly, a light poured in
Giving hope for what should have been

Now, the words come slowly
However they do not hesitate
To fill my aching heart with wonder
Heavily, a stone set into place

Today, I am noticing
Familiars that have always been
So much older than any tome
Faith works miracles out of sight

~

dark early pre-dawn

body suspended between the-dark ochre earth tones of night,
and the teal pealing notes of warning of an impending morning,
signs aborning, me rising with urgency of the leaden half deaden,
torn from the bed casket to venture into a different kind of twi-lights,
nature demanding both intake and outtake, a restoration of balance

but first a bumbling wobbling, the body as carnival bumper car,
installing soon-to-be-bruising for later examination-exhumation,
lurching from handhold crevices in the walls like crazy cliff climbers,
my balance disturbed, eyes try  tearing apart the sticky glue of night,
my sense of direction keeping me from free falling into green glass
edges of glass tables, barely, and not always, red cuts evidentiary

“my balance disturbed” words fresh formed, and a poem expulsion
required to balance the unjust scales of spirit soul and the body cage,
patch an negotiated agreement between warring cousins, just a
twenty four hour ceasefire to retrieve the wounded and the
corpses unfounded in the small copses of false shelter,
like my ancestors expelled from Spain, making escape to be
strangers in strange lands, or remain hidden in place neath disguises
of clothes of new poems, prayers for old and new gods

this new poem comes quick like a young man making first love,
for the poem has been written by thousands nights of practicing,
so ready for quick retrieving in a smattering of a few minutes,
expulsion expulsion
what a perfect verbiage to capture the night terrors, the differentials,
the procession path between what was and what will be,
when my balance restored and this poem’s completion installation
in the body of my work, as a nail disguised in the works of my body,
entering by command of the pitch black gods