I’m puzzled
by the weird confluence of deflating
factors in my so-called being something
Befuddled:
Beloved like carpe diem flowers
on alabaster from aural ages
each strand of hair heard like two blank pages
in the crystalline winds of Church hours:
I was a docent of a language dead
babbled in the bubbling brook near towers
haughty, faulty, gaudy, godly showers
of verbal manna for our daily bread:
Bamboozled
by the too usual to consume life.
Turn your cheek in the absence of feeling
you know, the way you do when you cannot
cope with the fact that you spend days stealing
now empty words that were but now are not:
Your speech is spent, there’re no words left to give
away, the sea is closer than you think –
bury your thoughts and drown your will to live
and return salty, unburdened, from the brink:
Hide your face, your tongue, the time has come to slip
into looser garments of earthliness
and flood your language in the planet’s hip:
Here stalactites torture with unending drip
and the taste of mineral emptiness
a heavy metal on your toxic lip.
What times we shared beneath this gloaming skin
splashed and treated with Florida water,
hushed and prayed over to free us from sin
–though Alcolado Glacial is better:
Like a freestyle beat tense and firm we light
out in the cold drawing smoke from our chests
while the night sky shies from the back porch light
paving cracked asphalt with our blank guesses:
There’s no point to moments like this but grace
and permanence in the So Flo evening,
puddles greased with third-rate G-funk and bass,
trunk stereos dripping as rainbows ring:
The grass itches if you sit down too long,
so loiter on the green box for one more song.
Literary people don’t like sonnets
I’m like, fuck that, this is motherfucking
music, this shit is deeper than poems,
but it’s poetry too, ***************
They say its reminiscent of high school
well, my *****, I went to a high school
that smelled like Black & Milds and asbestos,
there were shootings like every other year
But I learned sonnets in my magnet class
I didn’t learn anything else, so this
is what I write. I don’t write to be hip
I write because my students break my heart
Not to be read, I write to be heard, *****
This is ***** verse, I’m fire and you Milton.
*Ghostface Killah, or something along those lines**
**Or Masta Killa, who’s mad underrated
I like sonnets because they’re musical
A student gave me a bogus hall pass
I function as a muse and/or a fool
There is no rhyme or reason in a class
Social or Spanish, space shrinks in this school
Students speak up or shrink away with sass
I like sonnets because they’re musical
The light hits my pupils like broken glass
To teach reason is to be complicit
In expecting excellence examine
Contours of love exiting the closet
Leaks like snitches in luxurious famine
Verse by the pound spoken in measured rhyme
Sweet self-defense from the passage of time.
I really almost die inside my sleep
where the whiteness of squall and sea prevail
as a gust of gulls swooped down and wassail
in the salty air through which my thoughts leap.
I crash in waves escorted by seaweed,
each lurch of surf provides an algal veil
to engulf me just as the bestial whale
imbibed Jonah in its attempt to feed.
But I wake up as the long weekend ends,
salt sweat pours down across my frantic front,
catching my breath, I swear to make amends
For my sins have forced me to bear the brunt
of failures forged by men. The ocean sends
me back to life to do what the tides want.
Q: What does a king do on a snow day?
A: Reign, beloved! What’s today’s mathematics?
Understanding. Days with no dramatics
but plenty of flair as our fears allay.
I place more importance in the new day
than in a new calendar’s chromatics,
color-coded mess that aids dogmatics’
attempt to make the red and black obey.
So with that being said, happy new year
to those who follow time by papal bull
promulgated, I guess, to allay fear
amongst the most serious lambs with white wool
with hallowed cycles from year to year:
a pastoral cure in a time capsule.
I saw a man caress his father’s fate
in a bar last week where raccoons did roam
freely on fences while my wife did gloam
about how men consume before they sate.
I don’t know, I saw him almost fall down,
a glass pint in hand with too much beer foam,
clearly poured in haste, the celestial dome
overhead like palms, humid and brown.
The pool table clicked out measured time passed.
In concentrated bursts geometers
tabled day jobs, reset odometers,
relaxed and recharged and fully half-assed.
The dread chased the joy as whiskey chased fear,
and for three dollars, he chased that with beer.
Over him there sits a pall, resting dense
despite the sun and sand of the tropics.
He looks at the sea through clouded optics
despite his tan skin, his body is tense.
Kids throwing footballs near the wooden fence
that divides nature from man-made tropics,
high-priced urban life: steak tips and stock tips,
high-rises and lowlifes, the tourist lens.
He is plural, somehow from and above.
And as the seagull cleanses its palate
with a drink of salt water at high tide
he starts to remember those he should love.
But the late afternoon sky’s suave palette
wipes away all thought as waves do abide.
Why spend all your time laboring over
labor? Slaving away in your dark mind
you forget you were once like the plover,
spanning continents in patterns undefined.
What happened to that flight? You took cover
in a warm, sticky place, you left behind
your motive for living, the prime mover
of your unconscious impulse, that orange rind.
Why spend all this time working and working?
For survival, even though it kills me.
I hear Death’s jagged cough lurking, lurking
in my asthmatic heart when Spirit fills me
and my lips get chapped from too much smirking
since I don’t respond and the pain chills me.
urbansonnets 