In seer's gnarled hands
our bones like knuckles
and marked with lore of chance,
the gestures of robes gathering dust
below the masks of banners.

In the church,
we waited. In the urban church,
we hunted for a lust that could not
be sated, the rapturous secrecy of
divine guidance that would burn
our lives with grace.

But it was up to men to make of themselves
the angels inscribed in stained glass.
It was up to women to make of themselves
the goddesses they desired, in elongated
curls of free will's unadulterated choice.

The priest claimed that not everyone
has a soul until it is built like castle walls
around the garden of the spirit. The priests,
let it be known, talked backwards into radio
recievers and burned effigies of better books
than the mason's lore wrapped in the lie of
sacred bindings. Striken with horrible fumes
of tattered beliefs, the cardinals and bishops
brought down the faith of their churches with
their own words, with their minor gestures,
with their rot bound in the decay of the past.

We fought them off with gleaming stance,
with steps of flawed chance written in
the armor of our bones. We knew a simple
life, where food and love were more important
than the idle proclamations of costumed letches.

In the transom level of our sight,
do the rosebushes below our stained glass
memory invoke the scents of lower loves
than the sweeping glaze of a sun-jeweled
oak made full in the afternoon,
or is it our distance from gardens
that clear our hearts of bitter beauty
and make us amnesiac with the furrows of
a dew-crusted soil where beginnings choose
to unfurl in lucent green sprig of clover,
where the light of space reaches even the
lowest sprout?

Fecundity could be our rule.
But the neighbors have no gardens
and our supervisors wear no petals in their suits.
For once, we could see a sportscoat sewn with
the edges of maple leaf tallow and patched
together by the sinew of tensile branch.
We drive monsters to work at morgues
and wonder why our mouths ossify the wings of our words.

In giddy perfume of fermented glass
we whirl with new velocities where
our experience may have poisoned
where our love may had been frozen
where our fluidity dried in frost dust
on the panes of our winter glass.

We thought the arrows of love
would guide our wars to peace
in the fields where our old fathers fought
with tempered blades across the helms
and banners of dark armors. What we
didn't consider involved a dream
of gentle fingertips withstanding
a blacksmith's ax, of the song of lorn
minstrels marching battilions with the
strength of cherished loves across
the glens of elderberries and bramble roses.

A warhorse chortling in snorts of steam
across the ancient steads, rider emblazoned
with the crenelation of sculpted artifice,
the true banners kept inside within the
butterfly of his lungs that breathe for
one wind, where his lost kinsmen had
scarcely felt movement. A broken breastplate
caked in rust splattered fine as sand
by the sea wind, yet the real armor kept
beneath in ancient future of divinities
wrapped in leather harness and buckled with
angel knots. His lance-banner, tattered yet
loose, snapping the color red through the horizon.

We felt the after-war in echoes of king edicts
in the time before fame produced its siren face.
A maiden wandering in woolen rags within a shawl
of frost could scarcely lay claim to a bouquet
of swords. The bear-baiters losing hands and fingertips
to the gamble of their amusement. A castle sitting
heavy with acrid lime and marbled granite. Arrow louves
that eye travelers as warnings. And it seemed
to sing nothing of our cherry-stained lips that licked
the pollen air after the clearing of death's dust about
the diminished thrashing of green calvary.

In the somnolent goblets of red wine
our laughs seemed made for this earth
as the halls unfurled their banquets
and the alchemists spoke their beautiful curse
of wealth upon our heavy-lidded helms.
Wenches stayed with men, the perfume of wreaths
woven from rosehips rubbed upon their slender wrists.
Soldiers marked by war, we laughed and smiled
at the witch's cry of arms raised, though no
man held his blade.

Our knight in worn armaments wandered through the magician's ring
and as he did our banquet seemed to sing of the halls where the wizard
worked to bless our humble sacred town.

Revisiting Histories of the Soil

I was here before
in the whipping of rifle bullets across the meadow
where my cards spilled out on tree stumps and the
archaic language spoke in oak and shaded leaves.

Forlorn pleasures, say the apathetic-critical,
as they watched the leather soldiers slide
the cartridge into the bolt-chamber of older weapons.

Madness, say the high-flung literati
ensconced in comforts stolen from the rooms of children.

Fire, say the poets, pure and simply cascading sheets of flame
called the imagination in working whirls through out the
cryptograms of the world's languages, bedecked in ambiances
of lore's lust that speaks in glowing heat's edges with
smoke and light.

But I just wanted to be
a thousand thoughts of childhood
running like rivers over the small stones
of buried memories.

A million questions
more questions than their bullets
and bombs, words that lingered
on wind's notebook spirals
long after MLK was shot on
the hotel balcony,
long after prison bars stripped
Debs of his politics,
long after love had made hard writers
soft with death and brittle with impossible
standards of survival.

Was there love in Dachau?
Daring intelligence in a Black Maria?
Punctuations of truth underlying the
machinegun-typewriter staccato of
the world at war with itself?
Did the gods of questions
billow in the throats of man
like rivers of wine as their
blood splattered in rivulets
as dark as Roman sentences,
formed for the machineries of war
and not mere literacy?

Of course, but you rarely hear
such stories. Forlorn and in solitude
it is possible to contemplate
the great gaps of history.
Rifle shots make life appear as a battle,
and few accounts of World War II
will mention cherry-stains or
cabbage fields, or the simplicity
of a family in an old farm house untouched
by conflict who carry out their small kindnesses
without bearing the tragedies of the world.

We touched, during stereotypical Christmas,
when the essence of home reanimated us from
the gravel trenches and pulled us from square
dugouts, singing canticles loud enough to drown
out artillery. No-mans land quit vomiting Earth,
spirals of barbed wire became ribbons curling
in the morning mists. Our dead kinsmen rested
in the peace of meadows, letters from home
nestled in field jackets and the gaze of the
eternal nestled in their eyes. "We were
the happiest men alive in our day."

I remember a way-back when
through the golden gate of our childhood
where the warm grass faded in the pulsations
of our summer-dew toes touched with a light
thought of joy, an innocence some may say
but yet an innocence that may be reclaimed
in words like cardinals flitting redness
in the shades of some elder elm whose branches
are tensile and frail against the season of tallow leaves.

I remember a way-back when we ordered our lives with play
without becoming too furious or hurt, a little bit of star-dust
in our cardboard moon-suits and a breath of happiness after
a supple rolling down a blustery knoll one day in ancient autumn.

School was incidental. No kid would ever talk about fractions in games,
no middle-schooler longed for the dreary drudge of idiot lessons coupled
only by the dubious authority of some goof eager to impress young minds
with the textbook religions of some corporate publisher. And how the
blossomings were, when the girls took on the pantomimes of young women,
remember your first love? The one the adults told you was a crush at best,
but how you pined for her and even drew a pink heart around her black and white
yearbook picture to lend color to what you saw beyond official photographs?
The boys were comrades in arms, the girls mysterious scents on the edges of
some exotically foreign wind, and your serious old relative had to drive miles
out of his way to pick you up from the baseball field as the sun became a bonfire
in the auburn sky.

I hope this was you.

Not some cigarette-pawning letch dressed in grunge rags, seconds from the drug scene, who tortured voluptuous women with bra-strap snaps and murdered small animals with safety pins and purloined lighters.

Regardless,
what became of us? I don't mean
who's job is what and who's wife
does how many sexual positions
after returning from an office morgue
with the stink of dead lives shrouded
about her rubber hands. I mean,
as in the question of a simple child's sky,
'why?' Why the massive insurance coverage
for lives that have lost their glow,
why the massive work week for an economy
that fucked itself with its own greed,
why the planned diminishing of human value
in the spirit of oneupsmanship that leads
to only more and more oneupsmanship?
Why hold children against their parents
in the workplace, why hold parents against
their children in the social scene of shuttled
conformity, why design a rich world in order
to become miserably chained to material?

Other questions arise, ones that are perhaps cryptic to the novice non-writer.
Indeed, these questions are not meant for the non-writer.

There is always an answer to any of humanity's problems:
childhood.

With tired mouth I approached the question of mercy.
No, said the woman in pallid robes, no said the man
with a computer stare in the train station, no said
the laughing maniac who had just been freed from the
prison of his sorrow. And though I understand,
people think of me as a fool, people in their half-knowledges
emblazoned in their minds like half burnt quilts are without
the eyes of the wisest child.

With travels before and behind, all of us move in the rectitude of
experience, and it should be said that the horrible thoughtless acts
of children scarcely change in the horrible thoughtless acts of adults.
The beauties, it is true, are few sometimes
like a self-conscious awkward woman who donates baked goods to the blind
at church on sundays, or the tired old man who writes to dying schoolchildren
in hospitals in order to tell them kindly of great stories of the brave sick
that have gone untold in this culture of soul-murderers and thieves of the spirit.

Brilliant phosphenes traveled without our knowledge through the dark diminished halls of man's petulant constructions. A snowflake here, a snowflake there, where aisles of mansion walls flaked paint as old as histories and no more.

Let us rest in each other
on the broken back of rooftops cracked with gothic lore.
The enflamed moon is light enough
to embarrass the town with its misdeeds.
You and I here,
sick with survival;
the only trick of power's poor manipulation
that cannot outwit the stars strange glories
as we grapple with softness on the bed of our
embrace.

I searched the faces of enemies for an answer
out in the prison world
but all I found were the old childishness
of poor actors dismantling their fears
by showing stupid hatreds instead.
As for the rest of it,
I could call it madness
but that raging ocean is not large
enough to encompass the condemnation
of humanity's horror.

We could be simple with a pint of beer,
telling old stories of by and bys gone
to the roadside in the manner of cliche
musings, we could be lovers on the stretch
of shore where no ship has lain anchor.
We could be anything.

But instead,
the ones you've known have suffered through false choices
regarding us. Expired checkbooks, red rose petals,
cars that drive around in circles, and a downtown
desolate of the curious and choked by the mundane.
Who said that sparks had to be condemned to exile
from the human face, who was it that claimed that
all imagination and flux should remain outside the common
man and woman's grasp, who was it that sent legal orders
across the polished desk in order to dismiss an elegant truth
for the purpose of fear and shame?

All of the truth is conspiring against lies
every moment you breathe words as sharp as arrows,
all of the writers you knew left America
all of the great minds and insightful personalities
left this godforsaken continent for the sake of life.
Let me tell you:

Talk to any stranger and the first thing you will notice
is a paucity of conversation. No metaphors, no poetry, nothing
but flat simple words uttered as quickly as possible showing a lack
of pathos and a complete transparency of motive. Friends and family
varnish over this with the veneer of caring, lovers poise ornate daggers
with the thread of their lips above each others eyes and call that fear
and pain love. Who have you known who has worked to escape this
prison brothel? The monstrosities with cowcatchers shoving masses of people
into sealed pits, the office manager insinuating despair and hatred in his
thinly veiled innuendos and jokes, or the Horatio Algers of the nation, concealing
the generational theft of their families?

What I mean to say
is that there is no need
for masters, there is no
need for any of this.