28.07.07

just around your ankles, can you feel the starpricks of
cold cold beautiful water and the glassdrops from the
blades of grass trickle onto you?
--
those eyes, swept around with cat-brown liner-
too young for what they bear? well, they're old enough,
old enough for dragon-taming and looking back to Egypt.
the neat cool rows of metal-and-glass that we enter and
animate. see life, see life walking up and down the keysof
the green accordion, resting on bundled herbs and bakery bread.
those hands, comforting and grey-brown holding up
small empires and letting fall pretty gestures, describing,
circumscribing. persistant and the snap of a camera like
teeth closing around a captured image. that's not my face
you just sunk your teeth into, camera, but I can look it
in the eye and see laughter in it, anyways. see life crawling
with ants in the grass- will we pull our legs away, brush it
aside? you remember opression and harmony and life sits
contentedly on the stairs as we talk in the sun.
that head, gleaming like wood against my jawbone,
that head (that head I half-hold inside my own) circles like an eye.
we are very brave and
we are very glad.
--
look you, look you, look well the oddessy,
look well we are not who they decided we would be.
look you, I am not a surrendered vase, you are not
a thoughtless beauty. yours is not a thoughtless beauty.
I have not mustered so little passion as that, to wake up
and look 'round and recall music and cinema in my beating
soul like a bracelet on the ankle of a walking girl,
like beads of water on the tired ankles of walking girls.

--

i would dedicate this, but i think you'll all clue in. consider this the voice of doom.

photo credit to mrs. strauss.

The Mad Days

Guitar strings broke, spiraled up and needled into eyes. The wild chorus of feedback fed like lightning into our ears. Vibrations shook the room, the empty bleachers, the stage. Monitors skittered across the wood. Lightbulbs shattered, sparked above us, a premature light show, and cords wound black smooth sides around our feet as we hung breathlessly onto the curtains that hung on with half their rings. The stage spilt into two jagged islands and we slid toward the center, tangled in the curtains that we had hoped to be held up by. Amps, guitars, drums, went sliding towards the rift, bruising us as they ran by. We caught our hands in a groove of wood and hung there as the world slid everywhere. Then, the lights went and the sound died into nothing. Shakily we crawled out of the wreckage and into the stairwell. All was quiet, but nothing was still.

All was changed.

So began the mad days.



Alone, with no audience, with no stage, with no instruments, we dragged ourselves up to the fire escape. Our splintered hands left blood marks on the walls, our bruises swelled and grew like mushroom clouds, purpling our skin like fruit. Broken water pipelines dripped echoing dark water down in the blacked-out halls, forming pools on the cracked linoleum. The silence from the city so quickly broken breathed on our necks, crackling down our spines.

All was fallen, but he was coming.

lorem ipsum inquisitat

Have you noticed the ground, so steady and callous beneath your feet?
And have you bothered to be thankful for it?
Did you listen as the green blades like little knives exchanged parries and ripostes?
And did you translate it into your own tongue?

Do you believe in love at first sight, the power of God, or forests at night?
And have you bothered to step onto the swaying bridge of action (around which hangs the strange air of faith; under which runs the unkind river of failure)?

Was there something you wanted to say? (or am I misreading that semi-illegible scrawl of your eyes?)
And did you think of opening your mouth before your eyes?
Aren't you forgetting your first love when you walk so carelessly on the holy grounds?
And have you bothered to retrace your steps into a well-watered curtain of repentance?
And have you bothered to desire a change, a flight of birds, a renewed reason?

Weren't you achingly glad of rest when you first found it?
And are you going to go on forgetting what it's worth as you hold it casually by the throat?
Weren't you achingly glad to rest when you first were laid down?

What less could you do before the face of justice, falling into lines of open-armed pleasure as you walk in in gladness of rest?
And have you bothered to remember there was nothing less? (have you bothered to fall with laughter into open arms that ask nothing of you?)

Can you ask nothing more of the broad-shouldered days of summer than brown skin and a piece of laughter?
And do you mean to ignore me, so peacefully disabled, so tortuously controlled, until fall stumbles onto us?
Do you recall where you meant to go, before the path grew over around you?
And have you bothered to lie on the ground, listening for something to guide you?
And have you bothered to listen for the echoes of guiding feet, pounding feet, righteous feet?

What if the ground sways? (what if it sways when he walks by?)
Will that ingratiate uncomprehension, grinning, disappearing slowly, to your unconsciousness?
What if the last remaining route is over a chasm like losing yourself to an enemy?
And have you bothered to lace your 14i black boots? (have you bothered to wonder what good they'll do you?)

Will you hear me repeat one last liturgy between gentle coughs?
And will you think to rearrange your face into a half-smile over the saintly words and called-up memories?
Will you let me try one last experiment over your tattered, stubborn body? (will you neglect to remind me that no experiments are necessary?)
And have you bothered to challenge me on this, to pull at my scalpel with the insistence of a hungry child?
And have you bothered to open your eyes in my direction so I can see them as hungry as they are?

What if the ground sways? (what if it sways when he walks by?)

Will that move you to move with it?

the velocity of souls in green fields of water under the hands of barren iron people

eyes on the sky between
Mars and Saturn,
eyes on the ground,
.....black dirt,
.........grey stone,

rice paddy
..rice paddy
....rice paddy

baby, you're going home.

fingertips, razors of grass, broadeaf
hands up, waiting on:
..time
....time
......time..

time doesn't leave you alone.

high on the ramparts of guardrails
............ (and views)
under the arches of skies and your muse

money
..cigars
....chalk
......and dreams

rice paddy;
baby, come home.

vigilante girl remembers summer 1998

here comes the vigilante summer, 1998-

talking in theives' cant and building the emerald

city. formal shepherds of thought, double-breasted

replace the homespun canvas boys who used to

carry the staffs. the country laid out like a story-

book with eyes like owls. shoes as vital as life

and bread holding our feet together. this is

'98.

hereitcomes.

straw and wheatpaste and black paint

making a scarecrow man to lead us where

the shepherds couldn't take us. a voice ten

thousand times bigger than its owner, and

of course we thought him the guru. highwaymen

know better than we do. our purses were slit,

leaving us only the bundles of our pasts, uneven

gaits like lamed horses, treading water like a yellow

brick road. trying to make our own justice like

vigilantes, waiting for 1998.

hereitcomesfallingdown.

looking back to berlin, nine years past, bowing

and chasing each other like children back to israel.

tripping over a river with no ford. stealing back

into oz. we lay for twenty seconds in feigned sleep,

and then got up to eat. we were lost in the forest

until we grew up; and then we came back to the

world, and could not stop thinking of emerald arches

and overexposure.

hereitcomes nineteenninetyeight

starlings hopping through blackcurrant bushes

mockingbirds reading mood verse and laughing

mods and hippies in intersecting venns with jews

I on a six-winged horsethatcannotfly

intersecting over a patch of fields, built around

the emerald city and the lost forest, giving up

on homemade and store-bought shepherds and

hereitcomes lionofjudah nineteenninetyeight