elephant

the words are brightly colored elephants
remembering the characters we've kept in our head
and on the savannah they are traveling with tents,
parcels of spice, ornate women, and a caravan offering
prizes to the willow wisps of the ancient dead.

there were tortures that didn't touch us in there
where the airplanes hunkered like griffons amid the
florid smell of aviation oil swathed in the underground
hanger, and the engines stopped only when the aviators
failed, when the pilots locked their lips with bottles
of pain-relief called liquour rain that seeded the
soul's earth with desire's demand...

and the caravan scorched with napalm parades in between
its ribbon of flames with the priests kneeling beside
the heads of the long gone workers brought from Mexico,
touching their cold lips with blessed water that serves
as the salve of a notable archipelago where the secrets
of luscious cups had spilled across the meeting ground
until they were evaporated by the bonfire of community,

and the airplanes cut the sky into smears of engine gears
that fly machines through life towards the auspices of
the dead, they pushed their bombs into the earth and billowed
out scalps and little fingernails, the caravan wrapped
with ribbons of flames, the priests all touched with something
dark that had grown there below the catacombs inside the
coiffiture's of their aristocratic hairs, sometimes a sequence
is more than lost, like our caravan flaming before the airplanes
took off, and the airplane bombs returning to wing pylons,
carrying explosives from the Earth back to the underground
bunker where time travelers fulfilled peace's demand.

we seem to be caught in between the disasters that were unraveling
when the elephants pondered upon memory while traveling in the
savannah of snow, their eyes like glass orbs seeing what goes unsaid
as their tusks could only grow in curvatures made for defense of the
young from the insane old, and our lives are brewing inside the cups
of what the caravan brings with its enflamed and fiery tune that
could teach us how we long forgot about what was softly said
inside the nomad's room, so now we come back to drink the pilot's
liquour painted red.