Thursday, November 26, 2015

The Terrible Angel

They kill innocents
in the markets and cafes of Paris
and Baghdad.
Poison pollutes their minds.
Famished they subsist on the blood
and bones of their own kind.

They rape women and children
and cut off
the heads of men.
Moses stood before a mountain
and crumbled beneath the blazing radiance of God.
He praised the light.

They worship the darkness.
The prophets warned us about them.
Their angels have all fallen.
They wear black masks
and wave black flags.
They are possessed.


Monday, November 16, 2015

Paris (The Carousel)

click to hear blues version
for Louise Cowan

The carousel goes round and round.
It goes up and down.
It goes up and down.

Children ride on white ponies.
They go up and down.
Airplanes could carry them higher
but they stay close to the ground.

Refugees gather on the border.
The lines are long.
The children freeze in the camps.
They say their prayers by kerosene lamps.

The carousel goes round and round.
It goes up and down.
It goes up and down.

Out in the desert, rockets flare.
They go up and they go down.
The go round and round.
They go up and down.

Along the canal, blue lights flash.
The carousel goes round and round
where children once rode white ponies
and stayed close to the ground.

The carousel goes round and round
where children once rode white ponies
and stayed close to the ground.




Saturday, November 7, 2015

At Midnight, the World Turned To Stone


 *The Old Guitarist (Pablo Picasso) public domain 




"The strings are cold on the blue guitar" Wallace Stevens


1

A boy blew out a tune on a toy whistle.
The moon heard it echo. The wind heard it cry.

The clouds changed its sound.
In another country, it fell from the sky.

Unnoticed, it fell to the ground.
There are words only heard in the dark.

There are stories only told to strangers.
We dance to radio signals warbling

in the air. We change our faces daily.
We turn the world over. We sleep when we can.

2

They wear masks of tin; they glitter in the sun.
Their rockets blaze; they build warheads by the ton.

They talk of peace but it never comes.
A cloud descends, the lies resume.

Their minds are empty; their hearts are blank.
We walk and stumble along a darkened wall.

We hear a whistle. We hear a call.
But we can't be sure. There are so many before us,

so many bodies pushing and shoving,
hordes of them. We become confused. We fall.


3

The boy adored the blue guitar.
He made a kind of shrine.

He bathed in the light of that star.
The world glistened and shined.

He was born again when he heard the blue guitar.
They are flying drones way up high

(UFOs whiz around in the dark).
A robot pushes a button and lives vanish.

Out here in the white sands of the desert,
after the blast, the dead disembark.


4

At midnight, the world turned to stone;
and with it, the human head was reduced to bone.

The mountains turned purple, the sky turned gray.
Rivers and oceans froze, the land filled with snow.

The world went to sleep; the world turned to stone.
Architects silently put their tools away.

The shape of things had become an empty hole.
The boy feared his dreams might stop, his vision fade.

The boy feared he would turn to stone.
The boy feared he would be reduced to bone.


5

In his mind, the boy made a shadow box
of all the things he had known and seen.

He made a shadow box of violet, blue and green.
He remembered oceans, clouds and ponds.

He remembered all the things he had known and seen.
An X marked the houses of the dead.

Bloated bodies floated down Canal Street.
The Superdome was in total darkness.

The lights were out; there was no turning back.
The boy painted his fingernails black.


6

Folks waved white flags from rooftops.
The president did a flyover.

He kept his distance, his view was blurred.
Only Kafka could invent something so absurd.

A man went up into the clouds.
The man traversed an ocean for love.

He could have been an astronaut, he was so far gone.
He was lost in the air.

He whirled and tumbled and when he came down,
his wife was not there.


7

The man examined the clues.
The man had a bad case of the blues.

The man made a trip to the Pale Horse Tattoo
parlor. He wanted to commemorate 

his years of clandestine service 
in the company of shadows,

when Peter Lorre was his avatar and guide,
when the world was dark and blue.

The man heard the thunder roar.
The man was weary of war.


8

Children are gathering in the dark.
An idea forms and we begin to bloom,

almost invisibly but not quite.
Think of the resurrection as a kind

of second chance, as a kind of blossoming.
Some died by fire, some died in a blast.

Some vanished like a vapor, some died in a crash.
We let go of our secrets

but our voices seem strange.
We must move beyond this phantom feeling.


9

History has abandoned us.
The old world fades but the ruins remain.

We breathe in its dust and it changes us.
We have no need of sleep.

We bloom like flowers in the night.
We know what it is like to shiver in the cold.

We know what it is like to stumble and fall.
But our eyes were opened. We heard the call.

We followed the light of a distant star.
We heard the sound of the blue guitar.


10

A boy blew out a tune on a toy whistle.
The moon heard it echo. Constellations heard it cry.

On another planet, it fell from the sky.
The clouds changed its sound.

Unnoticed, it fell to the ground.
There are words only heard in the dark.

There are stories only told to strangers.
We dance to radio signals warbling in the air.

We fly by the light of a nameless star.
We dance to the sound of the blue guitar.