Dream #2: Verses After A Nightmare

They finger you with those nose shards

rape your ears with eagle claws

nibble at your nape with raven beaks

They begin wars in blind moonlight

They bleed patiently into reading eyes

They fall like spider raindrops, legs flailing and wet

And seeking shelters in the wind

Flinging webs that find no black branch or bug

They dress like children in autumn,

All too aware of dry bones and rotten,

Their body is their shawl

Their black body is their shawl

They can taste you they can taste you all

Their broken black body is their shawl

Invitation

“We are Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians, Judeans, Cappadocians, Pontians, Asians, Phrygians, Pamphylians, Egyptians, Lybians from Cyrene, Romans, Jews and Jewish converts, Cretans, Arabs, yet we hear them, these Galileans, speaking in our own tongues...” Acts 2: 11 (adapted)

We’re horny Corinthians whispering sweaty moonlit Amens,

men from Venus crying in rainy hideaways,

Puerto Ricans choosing between pride and obedience,

Disgruntled Filipinos with a post-colonial aftertaste,

Sunny rosey white girls with a lotta things to say,

Wounded flowers blooming down the streets of the Arab spring,

Sparrows crashing down into glassy ceilings,

Children’s hands in the sand building the new stonehenge,

Melancholy fetuses biting into your nape,

Hating you for every tax dollar that’s at stake,

We’re the row of flashing red lights chasing the pestilence,

We’re the phony people with funny accents

filtering the patterns of our thought trends,

we’re the corner of the closet where you’ve kept your costy secrets,

behind the rack with the coats for special occassions

We’re Catholics cast in a wide net of wisdom,

transcending the distinction between pedophiles and Christendom,

we’re Protestants who break up with our spouses or our churches,

we’re Buddhists into Jesus and Jesus Loving You for Ten Cents,

we’re porcupines, penguins, and every animal our hand shadows can make,

we’re every single frost of snow that has ever been named,

we’re enchanted, delighted,

to have a feast of lights where brightness is expected,

we’re dejected, ejected,

from our homes when our mommies found behind the rack with the coats

the secrets of our trespasses, the pictures with the stitched faces

We’re joggers by the streetcar,

Shirtless glorious white men,

women with tank tops and track legs,

(baby can you show me the minutae of your mileage?)

—hehehehehehe—

we’re vietnamese ladies with their squinty burdens

men with black suitcases on their carrot-heads,

eleven hundred people dying from hunger for sabbath

black men and trombones, white men in misery,

women of every color showing fifty shades of beauty,

homeless peddlers looking for daily bread,

all I got is my hand, wanna shake it instead?

All I got is my hand, wanna shake it instread?

I see you’ve got no money, I see you’ve lost your pride,

But at least you’ve got your tongue and so you can tell me

Your side of the story, the miles of your narrative,

Or else I’m apathetic and I don’t even offer you my friendship—

Cause I’m a bachelor with a bachelor’s in English,

With porn and Virgin Mary rosaries hidden under my bed

We’ve come in peace, we’ve come to rest, we come to feast,

Even with the pests,

To bring you colors and metaphors and tough skins,

Come to a place where there aren’t muggers or blood-spatterers,

Scene-stealing gun-triggers,

We’ve come to rattle some shit out to dry,

We’ve come to squeeze the love out of hugs and to try

To show you the fruits of our listening,

This is our breathing, this is our song, this is our singing,

Do you speak with our tongues?

The Drifting! (A Recent Song)

Oh, the drifting! How that water swayed!

Those bubbles like rubber bands breaking!
You drifted with your mouth,
and I with my room, my windows, my curtains,
my days of black rain, my prolonged silence
among butterflies and imagination and panic.
In other words we popped our bubbles
but we kept blowing!
We kept blowing!

That is, you embodied woman and child,

Drifting somewhere between them.

That is we were the drifting.

And that time that the sun with the stars

from the same dark dome hung, I ask you now,

Throwing to the wind this

bottle broken and blessed,

which one of your souls wetted

the lips of our first kiss?

At times you were mouth and others frail bone,

And I myself was both sparrow and glass—

Tell me now, when we clashed and broke,

Which one of us shattered, which one of us

Was the stone?

You took me there, Golden Lady mine,

You said we had miles to travel;

Notwithstanding the chasing ravens,

Or the dead lovers paving the road,

Just bring me, you said, your rice and beans

We’ll have a sad picnic with the dead,

And for the living we’ll break the bread.

The Dying Game (Revised)

The bowl fell and broke into three thousand pebbles of glass, pebbles so small you could call them sand, and the water spread all over the floor like eight octopus tentacles.

The fish lay alone on the floor, its waterless gills gasping for their watery oxygen. I could hear it. It was very similar to the sound of a helpless man gasping for breath. Like a creaking door, that inward scream of one who tries to swallow oxygen from nothing. And every time the fish opened up its gills, finding no water, I heard it: those desperate creaks. Its glassy eyes stared at nothing, but I could feel them pleading to me. It could form no facial expression to tell me it was dying, but it was telling me anyway.

I lurched to the floor and tried to reassemble the pieces of glass-sand. I formed a mound of pebbles that looked like a translucent Everest. The water was flat on the floor and I could not tell it to stand up and go to the nearest bowl. My hands scrambled. I went for the fish and cupped it in my hands.

I ran to the kitchen sink and then I flipped the fish over to my left hand, wrapped that hand’s fingers around it (you will not fall from my hand, fish), and then used my right hand to turn the C handle on the kitchen sink: WHEEAK WHEEAK, it creaked, the sound of metal turning on metal. No water tunneled through the tube’s hollow brass-blackness. So I turned the H handle (it’s better to be hot than to be dead, fish, don’t worry, you won’t die), to no effect.

My right hand went back to my left hand and I went back to cupping the fish and I ran or scrambled or rather my legs were like the awkward legs of scissors jumping across the house; this is what saving a life does to me. I ran to the bathroom and tried the H and C handles on the shaving-hair-coated sink, the H and C handles on the shower, and then I, yes, I opened the toilet and it was as dry as my throat and the fish’s throat.

I ran back to the kitchen and took my right hand out of my left hand to get a cup from the counter and put the cup’s lip under my eye and started to squint and to wince and to think of dead babies or dead fish in order to get the tears out, but the tear ducts inside my eyes were as hollow as the brass tubes of all the sinks in my house.

Two doors swing open and a splash of sunlight: I am outside, running, and where is the damn river? All cities have rivers, but I see only houses, and all these houses are empty, and the only blue thing around here is the sky, and there aren't even any white clouds—so I run, and then the sound of a blocked lung, an inward burp, the open mouth of the fish being the open arms of a mother, the lack of water being the lack of a son, the lack of a daughter, the lack of a father, all at the same time, because H2O is like that: it is everything you need to be alive, fish.

I run to houses, knock on doors, but either they don’t answer or they don’t care. Everything is dry.

Now the night is about to fall, and the fish is still dying in my hands. I sit down on the curb and look down at the fish, see its body bobbing up and down, still half-breathing. This is no way to live, fish, I say, to be always dying.

“And I wondered then,” he said, “if the fish is to live in this permanent semi-death outside the water, will water only kill the fish? If so, should I throw it in the water? Can you see my position? I couldn’t just let go of the fish and throw it on the ground, because then the fish would never die. But I couldn’t take it to the water either, because then it would certainly die. If I even found water.”

And then I said, “Wouldn’t it be worse to be not the one holding the fish but the fish itself, at the mercy of one who runs when running doesn’t help?”