How swiftly came the killing season
swept in from hinterlands
just when we had remarked upon
the sameness of it all.
How soon the must-not-be-named
became quotidian.
Weren’t we standing there,
thinking how sensible
not to raise a ruckus,
how preferable to simply
turn our backs to the foul wind?
How did we come to this?
Didn’t we say how better we were?
What comfort are platitudes
now?
Overheard: “Religion is fashionable these days.”
I’m going Hassidic, man,
Black hat, long curls
Slip-sliding down my ears,
Prayer thing, all fringy,
Hanging out my waistcoat
Or maybe Mormon,
White shirt, black tie
In the high summer heat
Bike oil staining my cuffs
If that don’t work,
I might go Amish
Dress like I just busted
A long term sentence
Begun in 1850,
Drag my plow horse to work
Every God-given day
Or Catholic?
They got nothing except
For priests, and I’m no priest
Got no taste for boys
Got up in cassocks
Nor desert stuff for me
Got no taste for heads
Wrapped or unwrapped
Attached or unattached
I’d consider voodoo
But my juju
Is lame and those
Blazing beads radiate
Way too much heat
Or, on second thought, no.
I got no style for this kind of stuff
He declines to be interviewed.
A glimpse, only,
a side-long breath, let out
too late, swallowed in haste,
not to appear too gullible,
too eager.
He craves the immediate,
catches the last hint of eternity
blazing past, unholy, oblivious,
his heart as blank
as his head.
Above the dingo wind,
a scaffold of melodies,
of harmonious disconsequence.
And here I am, left only with
questions, suggestions, repetitions,
cast a-breeze with no concealment.
The oceans within, the foaming main,
who can sail these dark seas?
Every day, as a poet,
I live with the shame
that my life has not been miserable
No poetic lineage could be complete without Shakespeare, could it?
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
BONUS: Click here for a marvelous musical setting of this poem.
exiles child 