YES

Proletarian daughters kiss the earth
And I’d take them any time over those castle mistresses
From towers, from North and West,
I protect them with my arm’s umbrella
That forms neatly over their bodies
Those quiet moments when we are most alive
Tenderly tucking arms between the folds
Lifting the covers up yurt-like, we play
For hours and sometimes days
Lost in the folds; I sing your song:

A girl who practices her
Pirouette by night
Without instructors
Against a broken mirror
For the circus beneath our feet.

At the Periphery (Fragments)

A Gypsy band of oranges cross the street
And my friends and I watch them
Move to the periphery where the night disintegrates into the horizon
We talk about it for a moment
About the sound of poverty and the sound of theft
Then forget what we’re talking about
Like blank drips out of your forehead; reverse Chinese water torture.
More music comes from a yogurt shop of European flavors
Flavors not for a fat American pallet
But for the anorexic and dying
Decaying tastes of the periphery that will be crowded out
Soon
The sound is three middle aged women who play middle aged music
Old feely folk from 60’s south or southern green as Keats would say
Or Southern desert draught of skeletons and Mexican kids
As someone else would say
I open my mouth with something about youth
My friends nod about youth
We grab some free samples of yogurt and swallow without tasting
Red velvet
We take a wrong turn, or the right turn, and people dissipate into groups
Each with its own tagline and music that rages against particulars
A movement of bodies and minds and body-minds of kids
With their special pens to write special thoughts for their friends
That no smart publisher will publish
Although this is the greatest poetry of the twenty-first century
And further down the wrong or right street the kids of the publishers
Of the editors and the policy makers
These kids paint on apathetic stares ghosts of their realism
But underneath life lies a current that life derives from:
Plates break against the jagged earth creating sea shells resemble faces
They talk and break into smaller pieces until the void becomes vastness
There is a fire in them, I know it, well
I hope
We hear another song come from a peripheral alley:
Babies teeth and masticating dentures
Lick the same foods, milkshakes;
That’s when we see her face and blue dress
She runs from the third world with her voice
Calling to take me and take me underneath
Not to elevate onto some inhuman heaven
But underneath with the workers and the spit
I say I love her
My friends and I leave
On our return down the same lost street we spot her putting away her guitar
And she looks sad but no one cries in the city streets
We save that for French movies
Where we cry for those lost poets
She leaves the black hole that sucked her up for the night
Now the alley is just an alley of no metaphor;
Nothing is serious and everything matters.

Upon a Palanquin

Long ago when violence was muted in black
And loneliness was crippled crawlies under beds
And fires were only in stoves with gray coals
Closer and closer into the harsh pillow fumes
They all went
He was brought in with mother upon a palanquin
From which she sang songs of love and birth
With soft lips creaking soft whispers through curtains
Drawn back in dawn as time creates cracks in fabric
But He has been torn up since he first heard
And it tears with time until the light comes
Rushing in
Father Time fought against the room receding
Into the brink with other men who work, then
A burnt house with timbered love,
Timbered sensations, whisked with cracks
Creasing across her forehead that melts
In Inferno
In days long ago when songs were heard
In misty light, in fading bright kites floating
In fabric red gliding into the sky until wind
Let’s go.

Rocky Asterisms

A Song for the Astronaut

I
By the river where the little child wept
She skipped stones across the surface of the water
Half-way across the old country it dropped into eternity.
At night the rippled water seems so hard to remove
From the gravel of the shore, gray and black in moonlight.

II
The meteorite ripped the sky in fire
It tumbled into the ocean with a black crater
That quickly dissipated in smaller swells
And this is all that we see
As the marvel falls under the shroud
The mass of the earth is slightly heavier

III
Slowly turning and spinning into decay
Slight hiccups break the white and blue
In the vast oceanic abyss dividing by zero.
The sand speckle floating in the water and drifting like seaweed
All lonely, not healthy, but determined to continue rowing
With an untold number of rowers
Tilling space with hooks and hairs sweeping up the colors in their cloaks.
Skipping across the universe pollen disseminating into giant clouds
Surrounding, all surrounding, so distant and lonely.

A Dream When I Was a Child

There was a trailer, kind of like the one auntie lives in. Everything was orange and hot. I went in and the carpet was green, or blue, and there was a TV and an oval coffee table, and a mirror, a big round mirror where I looked at myself and I see me although it don’t feel like me, like I was somewhere else with and my eyes, I can’t remember them, but there was a glass on a counter on the side and I tried to pick it up, I don’t know why I did, but it slipped from my hands and shattered on the ground sounding a shrill go up my back, while just then I hear footsteps to turn and find this big man with no hair showing this cone-shaped head and he was up to me and I couldn’t move because he was close to me in an instant like I never knowed it, I just remember he was chocking me with his hands, so it must have been his water and his glass, I broke it and now he was mad at me, and he lifts me up chocking, and I turn to the mirror, I broke his glass, and see myself dying, the water spilled on the carpet, and then I wake up.
I keep having this dream every night. I always try to take the glass of water. I always drop it. The man always chokes me. And I always wake up.