Twenty first century headlines
This story like many stories
starts with a bullet
and ends with tears
and justice deferred
I’ll leave the names
to the date,
to the wound
freshest to you
let them tumble
from your lips
like a waterfall
because we’ve heard it
but must drink again,
because it leaks from
our ears
before we register
the most recent,
because no vessel
holds enough volume
to speak as loud as grief.
Summoning the Trampled Gods
With the lights and bodies and the sweat on your lips and the sweat of your neighbor
and sultry heat throbbing from shoulders and bellies and wide-open mouths,
when the fluid dynamics of a crowd, when we are water and skin and pulp
at a doorway in a concert hall fire or surging for a back alley
to escape gunshots in a plaza, when we move as liquid
and compress just as little without breaking
something vital, something pours
from the container
of self,
ashes
through
cloth,
elusive,
dry
in mouths
Iike
trampled
prayers
This life was stolen
From someone perhaps more deserving,
someone who had less
who never knew what they could be
who faced more locked doors than open
windows whose fists close around bars
or who perched stools at bars
who spent years of piano lessons trying to learn bars
or who just couldn’t pass the bar
whose parents didn’t set the bar
high enough who couldn’t find the drug
to get them high enough who was never taught
to set their eyes high enough or couldn’t find
the time off work to get their grades high
enough who couldn’t get their savings
high enough
An Hour in Techno Hedonia
You don’t need to go an hour
without drinking tragic glass,
liquid headlines in plasma
that light midnight bedsides
like a second star joined
the dance of Sol.
The numbers dead,
Shots fired, stillborn
Heart disease tooth ache
Cancer shower elephant
March to the burial ground
Like manna of psyche
heart beats techno-hedonism
with hands free Hallelujah
to the touchdown Jesus
and the fist down on table
edge when we celebrate
how we’ve mocked the soil.
A gasp
Have you’ve stopped
to consider
how many stand
breathless
at windows
like vigil candles,
not knowing
for what they hope,
perhaps for love,
or resurrection,
their daily bread
or good catch,
the condensation
of breath or
hope itself,
and that by the odds
of probability
if you stand at your
own glass
and press spread fingers
to the pane,
you touch
with the exact
configuration
of someone
in desperation
unknowing