The walking blues

Come with me on
a trip to bountiful
where the trees hide
little mysteries.
We can move our hips
on liberty’s highway
a red winged blackbird
will shout and up above
the owlets gaze
while we dance on
venom’s grave. Yes!
Democracy must ring
true while we sway
in nature’s view.

Our shoes are made
for marching long
miles and steps to go –
we’ve come this way
before. Freedom for
the two alas that
won’t mean me and you.
With the shadow of the chain
old white men in Philadelphia could
not keep it from
the necks of browner skin.
The bittersweet measure of
each forward step meets
a swastika pushing back.

The pushback turns
to dancing steps
let us jiggle on steady
ground and leave those
graves behind us
as we stick our
turtle necks out.
There is no history of
shout here, I want
to crawl back inside,
hide yourself, Anne,
just hide.

But the music
hidden in mysteries
of the tallest and
widest of trees –
It beckons and the
craziness echoes
if we cease to speak.
So un-think this voice
that quivers and dance
along with me.

I cannot offer justice
for human history,
all I have to give
is a prayer
and this poem.

Frio y caliente and all that is between

What is this virus
that stalks – it hunts, it preys,
then it sells us
an image of coyotes pacing
upon the desert’s floor where
the prickly cactus is gurgling,
and the snake bends to the earth
while footsteps wind beyond
rivers marking a line that
is unremarkable –
an arbitrary thing,
useless to the living,
the migrating seed.

The children live as moons
orbiting every whim,
you do not see the suffering
when you look right through
the ghosts they have become.
Felipe Gomez Alonzo –
his breath is dormant now
and Jakelin Caal has
left this earthly realm
like so many other enfermos
their suffering is reined in
through shortness of breath –
just a moon’s journey the
orbiting rests on whims,
on whims.

In my youth it was the curtain
of iron so harsh and metallic
it seethed of the coldness
a brutal wall carried so
many to their graves.
Now the division is hot
under a desert sun,
I push words
through barricades
up onto the wall, oh the wall,
down, down they go like humpty –
shot to a living hell.

the age of extinction

the fretting over
every living thing
begins
with the clone of
a clone of a clone
the scent of ivory
washing out
souls that make us
whole
birds of paradise
turn into fossils
the gap of feathers
reside
in mud and sand
from hill and cave
they document lacunas
that are only evident
when tides recede
and eyes are
wise
diversity is the
hand of god
the pleasure of
hummingbird on the
wing
the tadpole turning
into toad
all is lost
when the word of
man clings to a uniform
wall

Emergency

The brown babies are threatening
grownup men and please,
the sorrow that hangs like tinsel
upon a Christmas tree
weaves into the branches
never breaking free – no
baby should ever threaten
when dementia has taken hold
and clings like a cocklebur
upon my well-worn clothes.

Sing Sweet Honey sing the
songs of conscience –
hang on.

Children are always dying
from grownup lack of care,
in war zone of the tropics,
or back alley in my hood,
or even in the classroom-
the gun, the gun will rule
and yes, the terns may dive
for food in their wetland
home, endangered though
they be, our children
shouldn’t have to dive
to merely hang on –

sing Sweet Honey sing
the songs of conscience-
hang on.

They always have an
ace in the hole,
explaining every wrong,
they know how to curve
a word, a sentence
spitting with rigorous
might, oh the
alchemy of the trite.

A muse should sing
like Sweet Honey in the Rock-
those songs of conscience
hang on, alas
mine is sadly gone-
all that is left
is this unsung song.

Dancing monarchs

This expanse of watery green
will deceive by
throwing off eagles
and egrets at random.
On these banks where a
city is built upon
common ground the
wind can bring strangers in.
This is where
even an ivory gull
can meet its fate.

The oceans reek of plastic
when Easter Island is foretold
by the lines a seer reads.
The heat lingers on
from dusk to dawn.
And ballast water brings
the foreign to spawn in
the freshwater ocean
of my home.

They are a marvel to
watch, these gems of
black and orange, brushing
the Rudbeckia with just a
slip and then on and on
to the other plants in the
garden I tend. I watch them,
and truly this is orange,
undyed and beckoning.
Yes, we are likely your bane
and yes, the milkweed sprouts
everywhere around me
and is left to stand.
Perhaps it helps, perhaps
it is too late. But while the
sun is beckoning me out the door
and when the wind brushes
my shoulder with a shiver
I will stop and listen
to every living thing.
Dancing monarch of the orange
this color is yours.

Making mischief

There are reasons for doing this,
Like a squirrel’s nest,
raised high and leafy or
a river otter
bobbing in mirth,
up and down,
begging you to join.

Or perhaps a cudgel will
level spontaneity –
ensuring stability or
perhaps weariness.

Friendship deemed
good advice onto a
timid brain – don’t
let anyone steal your joy.
When the cudgel comes,
duck, and dance, dance
away from it.

For they will, you know,
steal your joy, sour
your grapes, kill the
very essence of you.
Don’t let it happen!
Dance anyways!
Bobble up and down
the way an otter expresses
happiness,
gather your nuts and store them
but bobble, laugh, and
keep your joy!
Come on now, bobble with me!
and let’s dance like the
hawks we truly are!

Valentine singing on an open sleeve

“Water, water, every where
Nor any drop to drink” –Coleridge

It is her touch I remember
as soft and willowy
as a drop of dew.
The fingerprint that claims
a part of my soul,
her touch so soft
is what she eats now
slipping down without
the choke.
The vee of geese upon
the wing, the perching
hawk in highway tree –
words that draw
a mosaic do not
capture the love
my mother has
rained down on me.
The tear that wets her eye
I dry it with my sleeve
and hold her hand
while that tear
traverses to my cheek.
I can comfort, I can give
the dripping of ink
from the pen I hold,
but I find the will of
boastful men a mountain
treacherous to scale.

It is the place within
where madness lurks, the
turn of knife, a calypso
eye, half open, half shut
and a smile, or a smirk
brings forth avarice-
the manly sin, as it shot
the albatross down,
this water all around us –
just a mother’s salty tears.
For this winter, watery
paradise is turning
to slime by Midas men
with a wink and a sigh
and a rolling eye
as I watch my mother’s
demise. The heart that
drips upon my sleeve
is the legacy my mother
has bequeathed to me.

The poet sang of concrete

The poet sang of concrete
and paradise destroyed,
the dollar stores are ringing
up landfill fodder
for the gulls. And when
the bittern finds his
habitat banned
from our state,
we know the
ducklings roaming
Lansing with their crutches
have deemed to
legislate away all the
living – a person tries
not to hate
but honestly! Praying
for persecutors is
getting harder to do.
If someone knocked your
house down, wouldn’t
you despise him too?