Parade

 

It's just business
my need
and yours
kids with drum sticks beat stretched
skins in the mild winter grey
kids in folding chairs flagging
passing flatbed trucks dressed in drag
we sent our sons to die
we send our sons to die
how I begged in bent prayer to take
their place
using every sales technique taught
on Mrs Jones' summer porch
in some celibate auditorium turned
tomb
after midnight
rehearsing charm school script over eggs
every morning
singing it's a
it's a
it's a
great great day to be a bookman
but the Lord ain't listening
he ain't being sold
"must be something y'all put in the water"
he ain't got a place we can sit down

so this is just business
I died a long time ago
when I was rent from my destiny
by cowering
by loud decibels I couldn't detect
in my left ear
someone else's son was sent to die
what started in Africa passes the
Main Street throng
throbbing pulse of parade
in lock step marching child soldiers saunter
in high school colors
on a soft grey wind the pomp extends its
touching thread through my threshold
this heart is for anyone
anyone who wants what's left
take it
if you want it.

TA

Sunday Sharing

 

Sharing this Sunday
with spent spool of spoiled
intertwined porcelain penmanship scribed in
crystalline signature across my faded wall-to-wall
carpet, long lost of its mongrel musk,
that canine perfume and dullard droll witness
to an ongoing amalgamation of orgasms
plenty,

With serpentine spirits woven in spider's
spongey webs spun in the complex columns of my
intestinal fortitude, moxie of grit and concrete chasms
where climb
and claw ghosts of all kinds of unfortunate
natures, in spinning rags of silver smoke
cast spells I am obliged to carry forth,
either in clodpoll quarters or fancy my phallic
fingers do go dancing,

With a clawing echo calling to-and-fro from
the cleavage of my breast bone to the red wet
lips of my lover's lonely lilt, in her own
criminal intent clove to the core of her heart
with a mother's strength
while I crushed that sweet dream she
called life from her black lungs deep, no plumbed
compass felt bottom below,
she was known to dream in continuum,
in boundlessness,

Sharing this Sunday
with a coming darkness,
an exodus of the day's last luminous moments
retreating in collapsing colors of scarlet
and cinnamon, misfits in mosquito slippers slip in
a low voice tacitly into the low light lingering
signaling to the local denizens in all directions
a lonely
white man
sleeps on the open prairie tonight.

TA

At Invisible Shadows

 

This idle pervert standing pensively
atop your grave, the threshold
of my captivity, in curled signature,
in chrome and lace
and every wet rivulet running in
rapture
from the source of your libidinous spring
to the sea,
overlooking the outstretched famine of
my unfulfilled ambition with
cast eyes
and a voracious appetite, my craving
in unfolding bulk,
my design culled from a craftsman's
calloused hands, an unclaimed
warranty of insatiable dreaming,
hooded but exposed
on public display,
this whistling breeze playing
me
like a forest god's whimsical wooden flute,
you'll find no immunity to magic

in the marrow of my bones, the
collected years of my decay, the
spittle forming at the edges,
born
a madman cursing at invisible shadows,
haunted screaming to no one
in particular, no one
in particular will listen
anyway,
you're there, in that empty corridor
between sunlight
and where ever you are, in
your unforgotten absence.

TA