Love Is Madness

This piece was commissioned for a wedding.

Love is madness

Bright sun entering my every pore
Must be your heat invading my senses
A cool tree shadow across my face .
As you look a question my way

Love is madness

Strange voices speak and I turn
Hearing echoes of you singing .
Any silhouette etched against the sun
I see your passing shadow .

Love is madness

Windows jumbled with exotic rubies .
I will throw them at your feet .
To moons above and seas green with longing .
We will ride paths of discovery

Love is madness

The blood red taste of new perfected wine .
It is naught a trifle to your briefest kiss
The shadow caress of floating silk
A hammer blow to your every touch .

Love is madness .

But here are we together now .
Fantasy at last wanting time
All my mad and fallow dreams .
Come bursting into bloom .

Fever

In the middle of my fever I see you play at understanding
My aching head repeats, “Mankind needs understanding”
Insects and elephants

And I hear Mr. Shah’s deep English inflections saying,
You need understanding in both ways, to be understood and to understand
Insects and elephants

I know you want to be understood, now desire to understand
My fever-racing thought of slaughtered terrorized millions
Insects and elephants

Recall this planet, the earth, The Earth, is an ark, The Ark
Not just to carry pairs of beasts of every kind, but you too, all
Insects and elephants

Of us, strange dark bushman strange pale American , them
Strange homo sapiens strut abilities for terror and empathy
Insects and elephants

But your capacity for them versus us fills you with pride
You understand who are the innocent and what is real and what is just
Insects and elephants

You know the who of we the why of them and the because of that
Our destinies never seem to intertwine our fate never to see
Insects and elephants

My fever speaks to consider shipmates, arkmates, them is us
Every strange I is you is we is us and to them we is us
Insects and elephants

Lost and Found

A chirping green light banner
Proclaim the caller searching
Our mislaid treasure, glass, steel, gold
So politely do I answer, surely will I seek?

Once upon a time in a seat
Still warm of transmitted body heat
I learn the seeing, learn the feeling,
Learn knowing the how of knowing.

Thwarted fingers, searching,
Climb through knots of hair
Seeking to loosen curled thoughts
Disturbed from a stream beneath.

The caller the seeker the search
Moving to a strange design
Breathing together across space
On the way to a weird objective.

Traveling tile to culmination
Our dance passes distractions
Reward for an unconscious
To bid a tender submission.

Gated together we succeed
To see a feeling of knowing
From under the shadow throne
To realize time under the sun.

Treasure

Looking for poetic feet in electric lit darkness and noisy silence
You hear one thousand cacaphonic sounds in rattling rooms
And you announce, “This is treasure!”

Holding your plunder aloft and shouting of its value
“This is gold!” and childlike your cupped hands
Loose the dust within to float onto the breeze

What answer shall I give? To you the wind is ink
And desert sand a place to write your history
The sea an endless fountain of wine

How Many Did You Say?

How many did you say?
There are the hundreds in Grand Central Station’s living room
And thousands more like rugs in store front doorways

Unwelcome welcome mats. San Diego treats them as rubbish
To be carted away out of sight out of mind and, always walking,
They look so out of place in LA.

How many did you say?
DC has them and they must be Detroit’s largest natural resource
If only Motor City could learn how to use them.

They’ve been seen in Minneapolis in the dead of winter
And Phoenix at high noon in midsummer’s heat
They seem to thrive anywhere.

How many did you say?
In Des Moines and Sacramento the bourgeois walk by
Comforting themselves with platitudes

Like “There but for the grace of God” and telling each other
In restrained voices how badly “those poor things smell.” Then
Laughs when bourgeois ears hear them ask for money.

How many did you say?
Tiny Hangtown has dozens hidden among the trees and along
It’s polluted creek they stride one way then another.

Travel Google Earth and see them laying quietly in Kansas City
Or Wells, Nevada or wandering the highways of the southwest
Talking to themselves and gesturing at the sky.

Bureaus full of Census is trying to count them.
Will they herd them through counting gates livestock like?
How many will you find Mr. Republicrat?

How many did you say?
How many did you estimate?
How many will you forget after counting?

Pursuit

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2009

My search for you begins anew
In futures between silver linings

That veil’s razor-bright edges
Slicing through my armor

Sending my bloodfall surging over
The distant rim on a far horizon

First blood of agon is yours
Triumph is eternally yours

The coup infuriating my slow pulse
Waking all my meteoric pursuits

In early days my chases
Crafted an impatient make off

I hear soft laughter
Behind your fingers

Now you hide because
I so willingly bleed

Past seasons remain like your
Garments thrown in the mud

Your watery footprint
No signature of return

I know you return to prove
Devotion is irresistible

Yesterday

Photo: Diego Fernandes

Yesterday, a last vestige of summer lingered
Like warm arms and a farewell kiss

The trees were green still hardly a tint
Of autumn color stirring under bird trills

California still golden under a gentle sun
Just taking in a final passionate breath

Today October’s wind blew from the west
Knocking red and yellow leaves to ground

Chasing birds into flight toward Mexico
The cool breeze tendrils chill late grapes

Cold weather friends are smiling again
Jeering summer’s hasty departure

They will be gleeful and grateful for frost
After winter rains transmute dust to mud

I will be grateful for rain to hide my tears
My heart never tires of flying in the sun