A motel becaon breaking over open road:
broken lights, missing letters, a postcard rack.
Speaking to the dead, a medium in cheap gold;
crystal ball card table in a gypsy shack.
Love lifeted the breath and slid a phrase under it.
A seeing-eye choir: "look, Hallelujah."
1.
I try to keep the policy simple exactly 12.7% of what I see,
I then "sing", or "rap."
A strange impluse, to be sure, but I grew up on Blowed tapes
and Bergman flicks,
subducting weeks in a terrent of dollar books and Roxy
matinees,
so it can only make sense that I'm looking for a light
to live between sleep.
But no over-black-water-broke search burst, in stale smoke,
no swan-necked neon sign hanging burnt in the backbrain.
"And if you evanesced in that old overhead spotlight right now?"
There'd be another in my shadow before the next beat hit.
I rap in the hush of space for the sake of sucking from
the heavens
one particle of gas at a time, my body's fill, holding out
for one day
when love may lift my breath and slide a phrase under it,
O Hosanna.
All the while guided by the quiet light strained
through wings strung in unfinished webs,
the light that coils spiders in death, in vain, to resist
the gut-thread of their own suspended forensics.
2. "people pass'
W.G. Sebald died in the middle of this song, new novel and all.
Like King Dipendra last June in Nepal: crowned in a coma
and gone by morning.
And some number of self-shattering Palestinians
A Vietnam veteran hospital team mimes a game with phantom
limbs;
'cause hit head-on or along in bed, people pass, piece by
piece.
"Some jumping out of buildings, some on their knees in
prayer."
A string of shopping carts arced,
a strip mall headstone, under an overpass,
in memory of one who froze a week before,
and in the highway swish of a midday rain,
glimmering like the thin bones of stained glass saints.
3.
"Heaven, I don't know if I've -- whether I'm going to be able to
preach or not. I never know them things, but uh... this little
weak man you're looking at, I realize and understand..."
"You're blind, baby, blind from the facts of who you are."
... And who you are in a molecular, American sense,
is a dust-extra in an empire's ruin rehersal,
and to cover one's eyes from oneself is inevitable.
They still pray for rains on the dry high plains,
while I've been chipping my tongue
on the tough shell of his name;
threaded fingers straining broken breath to a wordless burn
the the bend of a crook of a neck meeting hands, hiding palms.
And a blindness falls,
shining out from the daylong unraveling
of the first light wtitch.
The white of the subtitles awash in sunlight,
sucking the date stamp and first words with it
under the wide lens of a new day.
(So can I get a notarized witness?)
I'm twenty-four, still the little brother of a reverend,
writing the bars out, washing them away,
lying flat, floating phrases skyward,
and once in a while even falling asleep smiling.
But wake up as if spilled out of a mid-day matinee,
first eyes clutching for dark;
I take cofee and turn to A-25, the Op-Eds,
where the letters begin:
"Editor -- What short term memories we have."
And the seeing-eye choir's like,
"Look, Hallelujah."