So I've been thinking a lot about my future. I can't say this is definite, but it's the best I have got: the top three things I want to do before I die: go to "midget night" at a strip club; do jail time; ride an airbus for more than an hour.
The honorable mention? Pay off my credit card debt and my student loans.
I think I owe this world that much.
Temporal Sundown
Last night the clock struck again,
for I was a man of cast iron
and single slices of skin tissue
knocking about the roof of my head.
These things were
perfect in their pink-
ness, neckties aside,
strangling the other who
gallopped and broke-back-mount-
ain-ed, I just a little boy
then, in that splintering mind's
eye, that goo-goo-gew-gah forgetful-
ness--
You see, last night
the drums were loud,
really loud.
Last night, there were girls
crying and mothers laughing
and Camery dancings going
on, the goings-on just a thick,
white carnivale smoke-tide--
we watched the Good the Bad the Ugly
and Sam Cooke singing in the backdrop,
no we, just... yes, we: the ghosts and I
the veils and I
the dancing and I
the spacing and I no tide no spacing
just I just I just fear-flickering-fish-eye
Pores draped in dirt
it's been a long day at work
smoke-skin jacket with
undoable pockets
and the putrid flesh a-rotting
has got us all talking
like we did back in the day
what day the day what day
the day the whole world came back
"went away"
imagining pinks and fours
and fives and blues
the coastal rising coming through
the joking and the mything the busting
of lies, the tables crossed the eyes
flashes nothing gold will last dies
Little girl speaks with afro
on her head
and the man at the counter
didn't hear what she said
This house changes people
this house this mad old house
questions like wormholes,
nothing asked will stay
no quest will last
no quest as gold
as the one before last
no quest just a chuckle
just a movement to the right
we turn our eyes
we check our blinds
and fall down inside
Making three wax pieces
out of candlelit destruction
the muse under the dust
is the same one as above
(we think in tongues)
(we think in rhythm)
(we think in signs))(we think
And turn on all those closet door lights
with their woodworking finish targets the
same way our eyeballs are the real
targets of the lights
but we will never displace ourselves
and we will never think in rosebuds or
rosehicks or cherry garlands under-
neath the porchdeck there's a diamond.
It's a body, they say
in the newspapers for weeks
an unfolding case
We are not alone,
no, we
are not alone.
The same glass that be shiverin'
is the same glass back home, and
time will jump forward
just as rain leaps down, displacement passage
quest journey sequence
this is time this is time this is time
I heard the lace lumping next door
the portly-promise of the flesh
and I despise it as the dreams
you left me in soiled mesh,
a dream of cheesybread
and underwater layers
(Oh please God don't let them
slay us)
Black man white man, how is it mixed to?
can grey ever be attractive in a world of
stone and dynamite?
Last night the clock struck
and I noticed after a gaze
a black man tying his shoe
his eye relentless in that haze.
