Rube Goldberg Striations (JJ 87. 09)

Crumbled stations growing with swirls of dust
and marked by superstructures exposed as if they were splints
of some old army hospital, jagged and cruel in the summer wind.
A building for you and a room for you,
here, a warehouse there a dry school
and inside the common lack of art.

Choose a profession and you have chosen your character.
An actress there and a writer here,
a broken office manager warbling thin musics in the form
of business letters. A CEO, a restaurant owner. You
have seen everybody. Now you have to live, and
you must change your life.

Humble experience informs scribes lesser than me.
A once exalted position poisoned by fame and the
industry of immortality, where they freeze token folks
into bronze statues and shove black gold words into their
ever-frozen mouths. Too late for a lack of fame, too soon
to blossom with the summer winds. MLK said that,
only no one knew.

We reposed in old fortunes of a decadent labor camp.
Our room, built on stilts above the starving mad lusts
of people who wanted a simple kind of life found in a coin
or a friendly smile. Love-mad, the world you refuse to see
turns in the motions of time-locked whorls. A moon on my
birthday once mirrored in succinct metaphor
the photograph of our spiritual cities.

A bed of ancient dust called the Sea of Tranquility.
A cemetary without a name, tombstones jammed in like old
office files thrown in the basement. Nobody could speak
about the unspeakable. They had to learn. Concentric
barbed wires running with electricity and a world that
has as its reflection a barren moon.

Tell me lover, where does the earth find you today?
In sequins gathered by family crimes or in the beds
of lust unsated by all he offered you, a joy that
had never been unearthed but by his plying bone
and a contentment fettered by the statues the others
dared to touch? The only people who forget
are the ones who have nothing to remember.

A quiet flute in the shifting wastelands of cities.
Honest harmonicas and a can of soup, a tarp tent set
with clothes and hummings of the ancient humanity
soiled by new wardens who forget that they are the prisoners
to marked men.

I, oh mysterious letter, cannot forgive
the motions of the gift of Alcatraz
your free citzenry would bestow upon
my unborn daughter. I, oh mysterious sound,
cannot forgive the gift of flowers
placed on unmarked roadside graves
as salve for the living that leads them
to believe in their own virtue. I, oh mysterious word,
cannot forgive the piles of printing presses
tuned up to lie to the face of my unborn son.

I cannot forgive any longer. I began with myself.

The sea wind capturing dandelion seeds. The dried love of summer
like a preserved apricot in her ear. A drunken fight. Some bronze
keys. A golden apple. A virtue locked inside the furnace of the
only sun. Tell me that you love the winds beneath the pale willow
sweeping up the dew of spring lakes. Tell me that you love the rays
of a smiling face in love. I cannot say with words the sadness that
has echoed inside the cavern of my breast. You will have to tell me
with words that aren't there.