My hands were stained with beetroot
My hands were sour with lemon
My hands were salt from cabbage
As I cried in your defence
"He would have kissed me on the steps
If I'd looked up, if I were not such a fool
The cue was there, you know
When he asked about my necklace."
I always wondered, so now
Where's this bold solution from?
And she said, were you a man
I wouldn't have to look.

And following the afternoon's events, a pail of renewed perspective tossed across the windshield of the days that came...
Mortality slunk through the scratch of the grass there.


Disturb the pebbled road en route to the stone-
Stony silence
/\
Kick the gutter with a shoe warmed by active blood flows
/\/\ Scoop the child up and throw the foam plane with sizzling aliveness

slide along into a vast yard, calloused by time, read the inscriptions
With a knowing keenness and carefully selected clothes, a mired aliveness
/\/\/\atop the turf or below - a crude slab signifies they once were

Consider the stories stubbed out... this is ashtray soil.
Think of the ones still spinning, as the year crept to its death!
A plume of cries and upthrown paper, variegated.
Row after row of lowly souls, failed fortunes entombed


It's a cloudburst life.

I am Lazarus!
  Come from the dead,
  To tell ’bout the dread;
      The land there is the same here,
      The souls there the bodies here,

Nothing different, but the tumid river.

To cross the river,
Is a shock and shiver
You, here , they, there
Are the same but a sigh asunder
          The living and the dead.