~
Bring your whirlwinds with you;
in the snow angel summer
bring Margot the sun.

In the hour of red glare
a rush to pick slowberries
before getting caught up in the silk.

Prisms, mirrors, lenses!
strategies for combatting visibility:
keep your eyes closed,
face away from the window.

The myriad threads of people in hiding,
they eat their own web each day,
and yet something always shines
in the heart's secret annex.

Men and women are
separated from each other,
the girls are on a train
to the Bergen-Belsen,
"white founts falling
in the courts of the sun."

Margot now cries quietly;
so silently she weeps over
sunshine and hate.
~

The good ole days were enjoyed with ease,
There was more to enjoy because of disease;
There were fewer people to dress and feed
Thanks to child mortality.


The middle-class were few and greedy,
Thanks to rampant poverty;
We could find work and be employed,
But tenure turned to workplace injury;
Illiteracy was common,
Innumeracy, our fate,
Due to the high-school drop out rate;
Polio and smallpox kept in check
The burgeoning growth of the unelect;
Minorities knew their social place,
Jim Crow was voting in black face;
Heteros ruled the ****** race,
Alphabet people were an outlier trace;
In summer and winter we were outplayed and beat,
With no Air Conditioning nor Central Heat.

Let's leave the past in the past,
There where history belongs;
Where hunger and sickness,
Lasted life-long,
With the poverty and ignorance
The minority prolonged.

We can agree times were simpler then,
But time came rushing to our quick end.

Trying to learn
Something from the
Past
Is a funny way to spend the
Future.

We look back
At the beauty,
Seeking the safety
Of our imaginations,
Knowing memories of
Other Lives
Can shield us
From the pain
Of our own
Biography.

You long to sit
In classrooms,
Captaining other minds
Through the fogs
And mists
That shroud memory.

The light you bring
Can illuminate
Or blind.
Sometimes, a dimmer light
Is better
To see through
The fog.

Glance backward,
Don't stare.
The future,
Glorious and clear
Awaits.

~
Time is a dark feeling
—the spell of a vanishing loveliness;
in the present mist
the imperatives in the wind
move less and less.

Haul away the anchor,
this is not a safe place.

Between insufficient coasts
—a land of look behind—
science is dead,
pessimism in the remaining oar,
and flies in the eyes of the Queen.
Their graves decorate the spine
on the east bank
they call Euthanasia,
each crucifix made of plasticine.

There's a discursive quality to the sea,
I can see the pearl fishermen,
the empty dancehall,
victims of latitude and eclipse.

I can see the tattered sleeves
of Edmund Fitzgerald and the pockets
of emptiness inside,
hoping to quell the hunger
of the cruelest month.

I can see an underwater country,
colonized by the unborn children
of pregnant African women
thrown off of slave ships
during the Middle Passage.

I can see myself sinking;
farewell my sorrow,
keeping precarious time
against a backdrop
of silence less and less;
its final sound being
that of seagulls
flying away into the distance
—a force of nature that’s
both solemn and inspirational
in equal parts.
~

I am the eye on your shelf
I am the scratches of ink
that rip through unbarred arenas-
when sunken bones and unburied prints
amass a clump of
galloping words
tracing measured tracks
of battles forlorn

Hence my history beckons and the
leather straps like tires
machinal; my life
reduced to rubble burn-marks
in a book that
made you look
without a care
for where-
to put it.

another whisper in the wind which once
carried its conquered careful balance
Now sits still as a spineless paperweight
propped up by the heap of dust
in your periphery

History is inherently
full of self-depreciation
studiously staging its ugliness.

It masks the truth of its beauty:

The painful present
birthing breath to the future.

© Qwey.ku 2023

Black lives matter. Me too.
Not my president. Give peace a chance.
Luck runs out. I like immigrants.
Power must be challenged by power.

Equal and opposite reactions.
God is the answer. Love is the answer.
Walk on the sunny side of the street. Meat feet.
Learn to drive. Wait for the train in the rain.

A girl gets sick of a rose. Mock orange.
Mediocre presidents, unnecessary wars.
Triumph and humiliation. Meditation.
Sometimes I’m tired of being me. Therefore.

Subaru. Suduko. Haiku. Hulu.
Stop on red, go on green. Orderly neighborhood.
Too tired to be angry. Too tired to do homework.
Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.

College campus. Saguaro, cactus.
Million dollar movie. Aliens in the bleachers.
Full length feature. TED talk, lecture.
Breathe in experience. Bring sentience into an expressible state.

Events pile up with or without an identity willing to organize them.
Events in their mere chronology make no sense.
Inability to transcend own interests. Inability to find one’s way.
Vacations and accomplishments accumulate late in life and early on.

Late in life I struggle against my insignificance.
The straight way lost. Concentrate on this: Thy will be done.
The straight way misplaced. Get over it. Someone tell a joke.
Love. Vote. Join a committee or a party.

MLK made the jump from race to class, dreamed of a brotherly nation.
Is this feeling nostalgia for the past or occipital neuralgia?
Knee surgery, plywood factory. Lost lover, lost city.
Old friends who are dead to me but still here.

Somewhere there are flowers among railroad ties.
True love between ****** partners. Dusty villages and vast cities.
Popper v. Niebuhr, impeachment inquiry.
Hassid and Muslim dress codes. French fashions.

Watch for war, **** and shower. Do the limbo.
Pay bills. The very thought of the rosy dawn makes Jack ill.
Big comfy couch, a nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day.
A long day’s journey into night. Truckin’.

Death comes for the archbishop. Private Ryan and Big Red One.
Absence of knowledge and intelligent beings who make things happen.
Life’s brevity and the time taken to carve the canyon.
Decibel level and ambient noise. Captain Carpenter and Mr. Flood.

Nothing but ocean, self-aware organisms and the longing they provoke.
Unit, corps, God, country. Zip code. The clocks and the docks gone and       no smoke.
Achilles and Hector. Wills and losses.
Continued existence and most of history.

A holy condition. A warrior’s position.
Walk with a limp. Don’t complain about pain.
Truth may be ascertained by considering your uncertainty.
If everyone votes and every vote’s counted, time is the mercy of eternity.

finding our way back again. to what? this is a steep question. I am drawing this map of words, today we should speak of what is, the roots of words, this silence their soil, these words vehicle for the inexpressible.  Gaza strip, day 52, Jordan foreign ministery says Israel is busy with genocide. what else is trully new, for sure not pain, a fundamental law unrecognized by physics. the paradox of time that goes deeper into words when we feel them. the center cannot support itself exposed in cruel eyes. fall and rise of a time we lived in sometime like in a house with no windows. reality is and is not in the same spacetime simply unreachable, untraceable, incomprehensible. someone speaks in a low voice, another speaks more with the eyebrows. the door opens to the dance of life, and who is riding the dance. brave minds and collapsed bodies, I didn't want to be here today, she says. one feels disgusted by the expulsion from eden. I am looking for the secret garden where the mind of the body grows, but I don't know it. I am looking for a theory of absence. this is a story about the impossibility of story.  we have to listen and forget so that life goes on