Tears
I have seen the last solar eclipse of this century.
I hear a silence at night which whispers arms around legs around hair.
Never mind the never ending with its absorbing efficiency,
I am religiously adherent to my emotions.
I lapse with financial security ambivalence,
Looking at the classified will never end.
Circles become less and less, returns are never balanced,
Days are started in the late afternoon sun,
Sweating in a suit, my white collar cries my blood,
A signature corrupts, a name misleads.
My name is written on a million sheets of paper.
I cry because my books were childhood and now they are gone.
I see a man his testament is a chessboard.
A table of concrete bears his years of labor and marks his moves.
The night inches away from him, hammering into his soul loneliness.
He heats a bowl of soup, he splits the crackers in silence,
The shades close out the night.
A wooden box will never hold these pages.
I am a man just as he is a painter,
His chalk marks sweep across red brick.
My eyes watch them stealing the color from her hair,
Dragging it into streets with the passing cars.
There is a picture resembling you on so many faces.
I see the red of the sidewalk mix with the pale lips of the unsatisfied.
I speak from lips which will be buried.
I refuse to. I demand to. I ought to.
I see a man reading an Israeli newspaper.
I am embittered. I love my brother
in Lebanon he dies.
So it is written. So it shall be done.
Blessed art thou destroyers of the universe.
The dead have no shepherd. They want not the presence of the Lord.
They look at the bodies.
I walk with them through green pastures that are piled with stones.
I throw holy sand on their coffins.
There is a place better than the Valley of the Shadow of Death,
And God can hear me.
I understand 5000 more than I could understand Love.
My name is a song.
The song is caught inside buildings, buses, business men.
My suit, my white collar.
The stain is from lipstick past over from kinfolk
Smudged with blood, covered by death,
Always invincible.
Brother there is war every day.
Look it is in the streets of that town,
You will pave it over with concrete it cannot breathe.
You will suffocate the trees.
The sun will shine on your weapons.
The hand of time will hurt us.
The destruction carries over.
A child sleeps in your hands
You have broken his limbs
And pinched his heart.
He is sick — he dies.
I am of your Western world which destroys everything and feeds on the soul.
I try to find the end point of my fixed stares.
And I insist with some idea of perfection.
I add direction and change, and a space dissolves.
I want to offer this as food, and in an absolutely defining instance
My cries resemble ambivalence.
I will inherit from the words of the past,
And I will bestow the future a million sheets of paper
Which won’t cover your blank stares.
You are eyeless, you stare with a contaminated intelligence.
The heat pushes through,
I see trash cans they are museums.
An alien nation turns its head,
Your hands are broken and still you are not satisfied.
Your machines work destruction better than your hands.
Waste is piled on waste and you say,
“Civilization,”
“Progress.”
The sores fester, the trees die,
The sky disappears, it is black,
Your limbs sprout fangs,
You eat our children.
The meals are finite now.
We count the last one hundred thousand
Your ashes burn, your metal dies.
Your hands can be seen in the sun’s final explosion.
My heart cries without mercy.
