Black History

I am descended from pharaohs

I am wild but royal from the chin up

I slept in the shadows of pyramids

I spent a sleepless night swirling in a Sea of Reeds

I was sold by my fellow man into foreign familiarity

***

Spent sleepless days parting seas of cotton and cane

Dogs at my heels

Sleepwalked for freedom through locust-plagued darkness

Dogs at my heels

Spent summer days cool as hoses parted my clothes

Dogs at my heels

Marched for freedom with my fellow man on the Mall

Dogs at my heels

***

Wild, royal, chin up, crawling success' pyramid

Looking eastward to Egypt's ancient wonders in ruin

Each effort as ephemeral as the last  

Writing on the Wall

One black man's essence plastered in pure white

like the pillars of prominence that preceded him

One black man's tireless gaze towards the east

where the sun shares a new promise per day—

illuminating the Tidal Basin's tepid pool—part

mystique part memory and part morgue for fallen

and forgotten cherry blossoms drowned deep

like dreams deferred—waiting and wishing upon

the wisdom of the stars that see through the frost

a germinal generation ready to spring forth....

Remains of the Day

Sunshine soothes winter

weary twigs after day's rain

Sparkling droplets dive

with Olympic form

towards mirrored pools shining

like golden medals

Wilderness

Old day fades

and a new darkness fills my room

While an unknown pleasure

surrounds

my prostrate body

in 5.1 ways

White lines pulsate

from my belly as

Ian Curtis emerges front and center

His shadow plays tricks

on the crowd as he

dead fly dances on the stage

Hook, Sumner and Morris

restore the old order

of melancholic rocking rhythm

Shearing my sinews

leaving them waving

detaching muscle from bone

creating another bloody disconnect

Curtis breaths into my open sores:

I've been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand

Could these sensations make me feel the pleasures of a normal man?

These sensations barely interest me for another day

I've got the spirit; lose the feeling – take the shock away.

Suddenly he falls ill again

He twists as Hook turns again

He writhes as Sumner riffs again

He drops like Morris' sticks again

His epileptic episode is my episode of tears

Too many years spent in the wilderness

Too much truth fallen in the shadows

Too few bother to look there

Another bloody disconnect

Immigration Reform

November is a necromancer: each year he conjures a perennial haunting

He sends October's spectres to pluck the apple-red,
Valencia-orange, lemon-yellow leaves off the trees

Then he beseeches the buried dead to
corral the indigenous fallen close to their roots

Finally he summons Jack Frost, a foreigner with a heart as cold as ice,
to blow the colorful natives westward along a trail of rain, sleet, and snow

Oktoberfest

Where the hills are green
The pumpkins are orange - beer
turns brown at sundown

Fatal

September is the month when things begin to die in bulk.

Costco Sam's BJ's Wal-Mart: where we can buy one-cent conversations and call it a deal.

Our relationship is a tree is a traffic light.  Green leaves falling.  Yellow turning.  We've run the red.

Fuck

Another 

Talk 

Another 

Lie