urbansonnets

Left to live in a garden of polished
herbs, I wondered how to find the instant
where shade and meaning conjoined and nourished
the deepest wisdom of the sagest plant:
There was no shade left, only light and green,
no violent shadow to rupture my mind
and make it grow back, more supple and lean,
only fixed beauty, from outside defined:
The tulips stood in pageants of colors,
the yellows ‘gainst reds, ‘gainst purples, ‘gainst blues;
nice scene, no magic, since order covers
divine chaos in its well-meaning hues:
Without darkness, there was no place to dream;
the cultured grass howled like an empty scream.

Hello there! This is a new beginning,
and the sprinklers just sizzled a bit,
like pressure cookers on electric stoves –
the red spirals like paths away from sin:
The air is mildly dense like springtime jails
from which all the prisoners have escaped,
leaving only the violet-blue flowers
of unmowed Florida grass on the gray grounds:
I am happy because I must create;
this duty was given, like mind to flesh
or heart to mind, as a gift I accept –
A cycle of expression must begin:
Lock by lock and strand by strand unravels
the mind in awe of our Nature’s marvels.

In a world of black republicans, I
stand perpendicular to the earth as
the stars glow over the collective eye
of dreamtime consciousness, life as pure flash:
Crashing shards of light, golden and prickly
cascades of deep bass – rippling and riding
on the currents of dark thought – flow swiftly
like saltwater ripples' sweet high tidings:
Careening through veins, burning out essence,
corroding white china with red windmills
as the fork and knife spill out the life; sense
the meaningless entente between waves and hills:
They're gravely ill to adopt those beliefs;
it's like spilling blood upon coral reefs.

Accost the man with a fragrant dancer
at his side, and you will pay the price, man
You will writhe and be banished to France or
some other time and some other homeland:
Beat on the eggs in the basement until
the pulp is golden like a sunny seal,
or like the hair on a fresh born cracked heel,
with the red fissures like rivers on the peel:
Whenever you go to the market for fish,
make sure to take me with you in a basket
so I can jump out like a Petri dish
cracked in half by over eager bastards:
Seeping out though the cracks in the wallpaint,
a man spears his own dream, drenched in warpaint.

I turned from the road of the faithless mind
and walked onto the dense path of thickets
that grow bright and green (or brown) and unwind
my mental engagements in white pickets:
Wolf tickets were sold, and I bought the punch –
or my head was born in it from the start –
either way I was drunk – the vomit stench
of my false words putrefying my heart:
False thoughts, false dreams, false self all in the swirl
of the machine of this culture and time,
until I tripped myself and fell to hurl,
breathless on the fake grass, I spit this rhyme:
Tough thorns and spines they scrape my ashen skin,
but the roses' open blossoms clear wave me in.
 

For eight years, I followed unbecoming
paths, rows pre-furrowed to make a living;
while my insides burned with mighty roaming,
my flesh stayed still, convinced I was giving:
I've killed that shade, that shadow of my truth –
like a mighty warrior's soul that  bled
itself into oneness with endless youth,
the immortality of being dead:
Bright arms were clashed, the heavy swords did clang;
one self in bright bronze, the true one in gold –
weary arms and legs, then suddenly sang
a well hewn dart zipping in from the cold:
And the craving self fell into instant
death by the arrow my destiny sent.

I have lost the reckoning of myself,
too engaged in survival to really
live and die; my favorite books on the shelf,
and the dreams of my chest faded, silly:
The call was flowing, like a summer spring,
but a winter of wanting chilled the flow;
the fall was a harvest of everything
I’d lived for before; I stored it below:
The surface was stored, I guess, for future
moments when clarity was not a block
to worldly success – a split no suture
could fuse between life and death, sea and dock:
The sundered self, following others’ tracks
for the golden words on the deathstone plaque.

Back on the scene with ambition and a
mission to undo all the wrongs I did
with a swift pen stroke, a steady hand, a
mind creaking with a vision unblinded:
The past was like a windy beach's sand:
blindingly cloying, clogging up organs
and meridians un-primed by the hand
of colonial cartographers – poor men!
They sliced up the earth with adhesive darts,
annexing and dividing man from man,
and man from earth, and heaven from the hearts
of darker types tinged with equatorial tan:
The vengeance is ours, though it lies in wait
of  true understandings of life and fate.

I look like a total maniac, right?
Do I look like a total maniac?
If I do, well my values are upright,
and that makes up for any looks I lack.
Right? I mean, I'm still alluring to them.
And by "them," I mean men. I feel girly
even though I have four lovely children
with picturesque eyes and hair so curly.
Curly but straight, like curlicues under
stage names placed in between quotation marks
on posters for troupes named "Liquid Thunder"
that dance in shoes until the angel harks:
I am perfect between the cracks of age,
and this grassy lawn is my barefoot stage.
 

Against the backdrop of a shiny night,
she walks the steps that mark her destiny;
her cheeks are glowing and warm, her eyes bright;
the wind in her hair is a symphony:
Blue light – the night is liquid confusion
whose sadness is checked by the stars' shrill dance;
she lays a hex with a sweet infusion
of sky and word, of precision and trance:
She is cloaked in blue like an azure ghost,
with fervent eyes and a dazzling mouthpiece;
the moon exhales, clear, from its monthly post,
waxing off from full to release the seas:
The time is right, so she opens the door
and meets the soul she was put on Earth for.