In-Sight

Call it what you will—
The clairvoyant:
who, with sleight of hand,
lays the cards of the future on the table.
Then, whispers a date beyond
all the tomorrows you have ever considered –
Shoots you a sight
like Halley’s Comet—
streaming by
then, out into orbit…
As you think to yourself –
Will I live to see such things?

The Living Elegy for Gaza

“But just because we are breathing, that doesn’t mean we are alive.”
Yasmine (a Palestinian in Gaza)

The crime:
Being born other.
The verdict:
Control.
The gavel turns spade—
Digging graves.

Treatment or Cure

And treatment, of course, isn’t the same as cure.
—Richard Rapport—

Poetry—
Treatment or cure?

The comfort of rolled r’s…
The tongue’s stab –
As thoughts leap
Through the teeth.
The way lips and pallet
Provide a cave to shelter
Annunciation.

As treatment:
Where better to sleep
During our final days
Then in the hallowed
Hall of poetry.

As cure:
One might speak of cured words –
Preserving the isness of things.

Chuck-will’s-widow

Incessant bird of the swamp –
Mottled brown with buff throat:
The color of your endless pleas.
Reddish-brown flight lined with black:
Nocturnal kite against the moon,
Tethered to the reeds.
Capped with brown and white:
Jester of the nightjars—
Playing the willful fool
Who stirs the stagnant pool –
And so we notice:
Every society has its mosquitoes
As well as the one who devours them.

Child, remember that you in your lifetime…

after Luke 16:19-31

Listen.
Do you hear that sound of crackling:
The flame, like a whip, snapping at soul,
bound to a spit of regret,
all richness has been burned off –

Why will this fire not consume my mind:
Thoughts as an endless fuel –
I spin in anguish.

Pleas. Pleas. Pleas.

What horror:
My life was the rehearsal
of this tragedy put forth –
How I used to feast,
now a feast for demons.
Would that a cool drop of liquid love touch me,
I might be freed to reach a dream of my brother’s –

No, they have forgotten how to dream
as visions pass unseen.