Rainy Season -- Day 14

Tonight
it will be just the city and I. 
Just a street lamp dripping dew
and giving me silver and gold light
tonight. 
No moon face to remind me
of beauties far away,
of loves unattainable. 
No shattered shards of space-stuff
to dirty my view of the sky. 
No constellations in the shape
of faces we mourn. 
And no angels.  No.
The choir is at rest. 
It will be just the city and I,
and a blank slate sky. 
The hills send me fog to touch. 
The sky sends the rain. 
They sing to me till I wake in the morning
when my city will be new again.

---

My city is new today.
It has forgotten, for a time,
its heartbreak.  Its loss.
It has spent its allotted time weeping.
It has bathed itself inside a moon house
made of thunderstorms and mist.
It has flushed out
even its most private of crevices
and stepped out renewed.
My city is pure again.

The dirt of its streets
has been washed away. 
Not simply swept aside but driven
out by spontaneous rivers. 
Driven out past the hills,
carried over the valleys,
and swept out to sea. 
My city's houses are still damp. 
This is alright with us. 
Let the warmth of home dry them out. 
Let our bare feet feel mud again. 
Let the bucket tip
and the mop sop and soak
and sweep out even the insides. 
Let the city be clean today.

Let the parks know
that they haven't been forgotten. 
Let the grass be cut and mixed
with warm breezes and sunshine. 
And of the perfume made,
let it be the bouquet of
just-budding flowers
from full, verdant trees. 
Only, do not place the oil
behind the ears of the city
or between the breasts of the city. 
These secret places are for us
that have found them intimately. 
Do not let it drip down arms like juice
from the fruit of your neighbor's yard. 
Do not let it spray along cheeks like juice
from fruit of your own yard. 
Let it waft, instead, across the body
and through the streets.

If the city is as leaving Eden;
innocent, naked, and pure
but just for today;
then let this perfume be as entering Nod:
east of nowhere,
wandering everywhere.

The Only Reason I Would Attend a Cricket Match

I want to kiss you
under hot sun, spinning in
a crowd of thousands.

Rainy Season -- Day 13

[Pallbearers by Br. Lawrence Lew, O.P.]

[The Pallbearer Reflects]

Death in the morning makes a poor breakfast. 
Makes you never want to eat again.

We ask ourselves 'Were they always so small? 
So light? 
I remember a much taller man.
I remember a woman made of stone.' 
And the grave, why so huge? 
If we could could slide our dead
between the spaces in the rocks
or fold them
neatly
into crab holes,
if we didn't have to dig graves in the ground
as big as the spaces in our hearts
and in stead just let the marching ants
handle the procession,
then what would man do with all this grief? 
We can't really walk around with it. 
We can't really walk at all. 
Its too great a thing, this rock of sorrow
on our chests,
weighing down our ribs
and only letting us breathe deep enough
to shudder,
to weep again. 
These chains make our hands useless
except for wringing. 
These feet are bound to pacing
through halls and empty bedrooms
like ghosts. 
And at that point
we might as well be.

Rainy Season -- Day 8

[The Sound of its Own Stillness by Otto K.]


It is quiet in here.
It is loud with the sound of humming
It is cold in here.
My skin is wet.
But I am warm.
And if I could live and live
until the day I choose to die
then I would choose a day like this.
With a heavy blanket of rainclouds
weightless in the sky
to keep my cooling body dry.

Fairy Tale

Once upon a time
I would say something
and somehow your heart
would know my meaning.
It was back when
men knew the names of their Gods
and there were dragons in the earth.

Rainy Season - Day 4

In the night,
I would love you.
If the circumstances
were different.
In the night
I would love you
with my eyes closed
and my hands open,
searching out
something warm
that isn’t
my self.
And when
I found it
in the night
I would hold it
in place
under the weight
of my lips.
Maybe
in the morning
I might let up
and see the thing
that I have found
for what
it really is.
But morning
is too far
And may never
Really come.
So for now,
in the night
I’ll hold it
steady.
Steady
As a rhythm.
As a beat.
Steady
As a groove.
Steady!
Don’t move!
Or you’ll risk
waking her up.
In the night
I wake up every
thirty minutes.
Steady.
Outside
You’re coming down
The same way
You have been
For the past
four nights.
You’re not heavy,
But you’re steady.
Steady.
I stretch out over
cold sheets
And try not
to think of how
your beating
On the rooftop
And the windows
Makes the room
Sound so empty.
Sound so hollow.
Sounds, so steady
In the night.

Rainy Season -- Day 3

You think you can fool me?
You think you can come and
rough me up one day,
leave me bleeding slow the next
then come round and smile up
and pet up, and sweet up.
“Ay, cooch.” And “Do-do-dahlin”?

I had a grandmother
that had a separate bed
in a separate room
behind a door with an inside lock
because I had a grandfather
with a separate love
for another young brown thing.
(Fifteen years in an oak barrel?
Baby, me and you
we gwein bruk out!)

I have a puppy weh been a puppy
bout eleven years now.
when ih see me kick off my slippers
all up to now ih run.

So weh mek you think
a little bit of half-assed sun
could mek I come out
in short pants
and no shirt?
Cho!  Might be fool di talk,
but nuh fool di listen!

These Hands are Deadly

It starts with the hands.
It always starts with the hands.
Other men have words.  I don't.
My words don't work.
My words don't work like that, they can't be planted
in such shallow dirt as your ears.
They won't grow there.
My words don't work there so
I don't plant them there.
I plant them in my mind and in creases
between pages, between journals, between ideas
and they flourish in the tight spaces there.
Tight like embraces.
Tight like anxiety flooding my lungs.
And when they blossom they come like springtime,
flowering through cracks in the sidewalk.
Through cracks in my ribs.  Flowering
through fluffy clouds on blue days
that look like my grandmother smiling. They look like
beautiful things.
And their fruit filled vines sprout from my ears
and my mouth
and my eyes
and crack masts on ships.  And turn every man
that ever made you feel less than what you are
into dolphins. My words are fruit
on a sacred vine.  Fruit
that will become a sacred wine
a wine called poetry.
I squeeze the fruit with my hands. It starts
with the hands.

It always starts with the hands.

These are powerful hands.
These hands are dangerous.  You should beware
of these hands.  Don't let them touch you.
Not even in handshakes.  Not even in touches to your shoulders or elbows.
Before you know it you'll be giving me your name
for no reason other than I asked for it.
That is the very first symptom.
That is how it starts.  With the hands.
Don't let these hands open doors for you
or pull out chairs for you.
Don't let these hands catch you when you stumble.
Don't let these hands offer you sweaters on cold evenings
when we are talking late into the next morning
about life, and the universe, and the things that are in it.
and the fog, and where it comes from, and the things that are in it.

Oh!  But if you're already here
then you've already fallen prey to these hands.
Perhaps you were foolish, but its more likely
you were tricked.  For these hands are devious.
These hands have nothing good on their minds.
You could tell when they brushed the hair from your face
that these hands really wanted to touch you.
And then, only to hold you
steady while these lips have their way with you.
And all the while these hands have been doping you
into something pliant.  So that you lie still
while they move from innocuous stings to
tracing smokey paths along your hips,
over your thighs,
up your belly,
down your back,
across your breasts.
And you will hold your breath until
these hands press electricity into you
and make your heart race.
And make your toes tingle.
And leave you gasping.
These hands will beckon you to come
like springtime.

And then you are done for.

Be very wary of these hands.

Rainy Season -- Day 2

You can’t trust a gray morning.
You can’t put your trust in anything
As big as the morning,
As big as the sun moving
From one sky to the other,
As big as the song of everything-that-is
Rising into a higher key,
If it stumbles and falters
And can’t make up its mind.

When I open my eyes I want to know
That I wasn’t the first to do so today.
I want to see that the angels
Have already been hard at it,
Painting the bougainvillea and hibiscus.
I want to forget that
Bird nest nuh got no roof
And think them hollery one in the ficus
Mussy had brukdown all night
And still cyan’t done.

My morning muss mek I want
Missing things.
No, no shower today.
Too cold.  Too grey.
And the sound of falling water?
Much too common today.
No cleaning today.  Might need that dirt
To reach the street side
The way this water rising.
No talking today.  No singing.
Too much of that babbling
In the drain outside.
And too much rhythm on the rooftop,
Accompaniment for too much frog song.
Too much laughing.  Too much drinking.
Too much sighing, gulping, thirsty earth.

Rainy Season -- Day 1

You ever hear something coming for you?
Like the wind rushing around to make way
for the hand of God to come 'round
and give you one good bitch lick
to your ears-corner?
Well that's the first day of rainy season.

When you could stand somewhere so high
That you see the hills surrounding 'Pan
And watch the mists rolling
Off the mounds where Mayan bones are kept.
When you can hear the trees' whispering
Grow to screaming out your name.
When the wind blows at you from side-on
And press you up against a wall
Saying:
Yow, Fam'ly. Which paat yuh think yuh gwein?
Then yuh know the rainy season come.
And yuh know seh it come just for you.

The Second Rescue

As the car came to a stop all six feet of my mother unfolded from the driver side door and headed to the front door of the house.  Even in her regal glory, she was outmatched by my grandmother who was a little under five feet but made up for it with a throbbing fury and determined march.

Oh, and a baseball bat.  I do remember a bat that day.

It was already growing late when we left, and I'd wafted through an undulating sleep, one of the effects of August heat in a city where the buildings were too tall and too crowded together to allow any significant breeze to pass.  To a five year old confined to the back seat the journey seemed to take days, but I did drift into consciousness often enough to notice what I considered to be a series of unique landmarks.  There was the clover shaped freeway that pressed me against the driver side door just before tossing me toward the passenger side, the overpass with the grafiti that I could just barely read, but even then made no sense, and of course there were the rows upon rows of cookie-cutter houses that said we were most definitely not in the Bronx anymore.  No, we were going to Aunty Morgen's.

The curtains were drawn in the window and I could spot them inside.  Aunty Morgen's boyfriend was yelling so hard his white face had gone red.  Aunty Morgen herself moved by like a ghost in front of the window.  She had a frazzled red 80's coif, great big hoop earrings, and a near lethal application of mascara that had run most of the full distance down her cheeks.  Craig, her boyfriend, tried to cut her off from opening the door but the crack of space was all the two woman cavalry on the other side needed to push their way through.  Like a trained swat team they both forced their way in and while one secured the hostage, the other subdued the target.

And by subdued, I mean she pinned him against the wall with a baseball bat pressed firmly under his chin.  What Grandma was saying to Craig was the only thing I think I didn't hear that evening.  Whatever it was though, it was intimidating enough to keep Craig at Bay even after Aunty Morgen had been placed in the back seat with me and we all waited while Grandma backed out slowly.  Craig regained his confidence, along with his anger when the car was started and we began driving away.  He was beet red and came out screaming for Aunty Morgen, and calling the others names that I wouldn't understand until years later.  For a moment, Aunty Morgen seemed to hesitate, and she turned toward him as he ran along side the car.

"Ey!  Look at me!"  Grandma had turned her intensity toward her youngest daughter.  "Aint shit back there for you." She informed her sternly, then turned back to face forward as we drove on. 

I hugged Aunty Morgen almost all the way back, hugged her just like I hugged my own mother when she cried.  I remember thinking how menacing they were, and remember seeing the same bat in the trunk of the car that took me to school, and to museums, and to the beach.  I remember thinking how strong and determined they were in that moment, and how much I looked to them for nurturing every other.  And as I sorted through what I once thought were conflicting attributes, I remember how proud I was, and still am, that they were on my side.

Once upon a Time

Once

Once upon a time the world was flat.

Unicorns lived in magical glades, tended by winged sprites and tiny elves.

And there was a vast difference between being dead and staying dead.  And that difference was a simple matter of choice.

Yeah.  Simple as that.  A man (or woman) could simply say 'I'm tired of this life business'  And give up on breathing.  And later, once sufficiently dead, he could decide that he'd like to go pay cousin Eustace a visit in the country and he'd be there, quick as a thought, rattling chains or moaning through keyholes.

Then, something happened.  It was gradual of course - time being relative and 'sudden' simply meaning 'details lost to human memory.' - but irrevocable.

So, before this 'something' - which we will call 'the sundering' since that's what everyone else calls it- happened people had a pretty good grip on things.  Flour spoiled in the jars or bread molded over because the piskies got to it, or fires would erupt in forests unannounced because will-o-whisps were angry, and people died just because, and they came back for the very same reason.  And for the most part they were spot on.
:
But things changed around the sundering.  Men wanted to understand things.  They invented enzymes and bacteria that were invisible to the eye, and they invented refraction that could focus light and create fire, and they invented disease, sickness, infirmary, and they invented death, and the dead, and the insurmountable barrier between them.

Science killed the unicorns.

(besides, unicorns - the female ones at least - are actually vile, mean-spirited creatures.  Many an Elf had been trampled and gored in the course of tending the glades.  This leads some to believe that they had a hand in the sundering, selling out the secrets of the universe in order to make a place for themselves in the new world.  And who can blame them.  It was an inevitability.  And it was either them, or the unicorns.)

Right, so science killed the unicorns.  But it wasn't all astrolabes and microscopes, oh no.  Philosophy was as much a part of the physical sciences as experimentation was.  Great thinkers would sit for hours on end and sort of guess stuff, as they had done since the beginning of time.  And it would lead them to some really nutso ideas.  And in that time, just around the middle of the sundering, there were four schools of thought that managed to siphon off the last of the worlds magic.
The first were the Algrins.  Pronounced All-greens.  They were botanists and apothecaries, healers and biologists.  Their interest was in living things, plant, animals, and otherwise, and what it was that made them tick.

They came up with all sorts of kooky ideas, like humors - viscous liquids in the body that controlled mood and behaviour - and a blood tide that ebbed and flowed within all living things.  There was even a common belief among them, highlighted in the Flora Angelicus Tract, that Plants were the purest and most pious of gods creations, and that even though plants were alive and possessing of a mind, their entire being was dedicated to constant prayer.

Eventually the Algrins sort of went collectively insane.  In a sudden fit of practicality - what alcoholics often call a moment of clarity - Florida Algrin, the schools founder, rounded up and dissected the his three brightest students.  Finding no Humors and no blood tide he retired to his bed and made his surviving students swear to continue the explorations he'd begun that day.  Then, Florida Algrin promptly died, convinced that there was absolutely nothing that was keeping his 138 year old body going.

The school continued, and flourished, and their most learned students became known as the geomancers.  You've probably never heard of them.

And then there was Ignacio Giovanni.  He was an apothecary, though not a very good one, and he was obsessed with Florida Algrin's teachings.  The geomancers, however, would not accept him.  They saw him as a bumbler, and an ignoble butcher.  Ignacio was just as interested in the workings of the human body as any other Geomancer, but unlike them he wasn't so much interested in the healing arts.  In fact, Ignacio killed more test subjects than any single geomancer in his time.  And when he was done he would find ways to re-animate the corpses and receive second hand accounts of the land of the dead.  Later, Ignacio would meet Guido Romero, a self proclaimed medium and half hearted undertaker, and they would use Algrin's teachings as a springboard into their own endless ocean of crackpot ideas.

Their school was completely unique.  One had to be naturally gifted to become a necromancer - a term they gave themselves as a form of bitten thumb at their geomancers who spurned them - And as they became the last few people who still trafficked with the now alienated and often lonely dead, their school grew where others all but perished.

They built their headquarters in the open in Rome and in the Catacombs in Venice, the city of bones that kept the gilded city above safe and try, in more ways than one.  When the plague struck, they moved to Paris and found it teeming and most fruitful.  And when most were afraid of possessed warriors and cannibals, they found helpful friends in Zimbabwe, friends who even taught the now ancient pair a thing or two.  Their school was the second most helpful in history.  Though you've probably never heard of them either.

The story of the elementalists is a sad one.  They are, if I may use a school analogy without reproach, that kid that always gets picked on because they're too smart for their own good.  No one took the elementalists seriously, you see.  There was very little space for their sciences in a world ruled by faith.  So when they said things like 'Everything is made up of spinning particles' everyone laughed.  When they said 'said particles get hot when they spin faster, and cold when they spin slower' they were scoffed at, and when they said 'everything in the universe spins: The particles, planets, the stars, even god spins' they were run out of town, usually by the geomancers.  They were the least loved of all the schools, the smallest, the frailest, the last picked in any sports.  If anyone had taken the time to actually look at things the way they looked at things, they might have learned that they were the closest to the truth.

The final school was founded by a man known only as 'Greyface'.  He was a merchant by some accounts, a Duke by others,  but most usually - and most believably in my mind - he was a priest and advisor to a certain line of kings.  Whatever he was he had the funding needed to organize his school without anyone knowing, until it had grown to match the size of the geomancers, and spread to rival the reach of the necromancers.  They were hermetics, they were gnostics, they were alchemists.  They did not know The Truth, but they knew A Truth and it was the most important truth of all.  "There is no god." says the preamble to the principia hermetica.  "There is only the faith in one.  And faith, being a product of man, can be turned with the slightest of gestures.  It is not a god who makes the sky stay up and the ground stay down, it is not a phantom hand or the devil that plucks the breath from mens chests and leaves their rotting husks.  It is faith, belief, concentrated from every living being that makes this things happen.  And with the faith in our hands, we are the gods."

A grim truth to be sure, especially when a certain greyface - as their most learned members take on their founder's dour persona as a mark of prestige - caught wind of the other lingering schools.  Radicals that were an affront to their paradigm.  How could they control the masses, and as a a result the universe, if there were these other wackos out there filling people with ideas like praying petunias and communicative corpses and spinning.  And so, Greyface waged war on the other schools, silently but effectively.  There were witch hunts and crusades in those times.  Churches that had once told stories of spirits impregnating virgins and men reviving their best friends from the dead because they were REALLY looking forward to that dinner party, suddenly spoke of loathsome tales of defilers and commune with evil spirits.  Kings that had once been mostly concerned with counting their coffers and mounting the prettiest virgins in the land became suddenly transfixed with the ways of the universe and had scientists, real scientists, on their pay-rolls.

The other schools were slowly having their last bit of power torn from them.  The necromancers sounded the horn.  The geomancers said 'leave us heathens' and slowly died out.  The Elementalists; they'd switched sides, sold out, became hired geeks for the goon squad.  And the remainders went into hiding.  The alchemists called that time, and the time just before it - the time when all the schools had formed - the sundering.  And as a result, so does everyone else.

The Things We Could Do

We could make love, you and I.
We've already become intimate friends
and at no loss to virtue or distance
between Me lips
and She lips.
Already we know what the other
needs, wants, hopes for.
Already I've stolen grasps
at the slender bone at your waist
and the softer flesh of a thigh.
Already we know too little
not to want to know more.
Not to want to know how the rest
of one's skin feels under the other's
fingers.  Or lips.  Or appreciative eyes.
Already, I've thought about it
enough times to see it all.
Already I've seen so much
That I want to see more.

We could do all that.
We could consume one another.
Savor flesh like fruit
Until every ounce of juice
splashes brightly on our tongues
Or drips languorously
down our chins,
staining our favorite shirts.
We could giggle when anyone asked.
We could smile into the morning sun
walk straight, but slow.  Be there, but not now.
As if to say: What stain?

I could hold you in my mouth,
carry the taste of you with me
like hard candy.
And no one would have to know.
You could dance on my tongue.
You could dance.  Just for me.

Oh, the things we could do.