No one is ready to leave,
Ice cream in the lobby, milling around, thinking about things.
Broad shoulders, a donkey, a boat in the canal with lines
Spreading as she moves the water outward from the bow,
As the craft is weighted with cargo of the cult.
Smear us red, make us yellow.
The green flag flies like an intact jungle harboring the insects of the biomass,
Breathing the junk of our veins.

Lined up at the corner store for a street scene where guns too big are in the waist bands of
People too small – how can they carry such awkward pieces and still walk upright.
Now is the time of dogs, hungry and eager for anything.
Bush meat flies on the pavement under a colorful umbrella, black and green.
Fast food marquis,
Our woman of interiority and prospect both works, squatted at a board and
Maneuvers the scene of rampant desires.

The inner prospect and the outer world have a kind of meeting at her lips,
Soft as the whispering breeze,
Her tongue moistening speech
With timeless teeth in staccato with drum and hoof beat,
Foot beat on the path,
The red dirt path, ashen with yesterday’s fire still a smolder.
To meet in the lap with lips and longing,
The reassurance of breakfast on a crowded street.

People misunderstand the rich for the truly poor and so
A kind of envy provides a negative freedom for a few
Who appear to have nothing anyone would want.
Free to wander as the scrap heap takes what is given and grows.
She grows as the left alone grass,
The margins of stickers and bugs that thrive on the river bank
In the sunset with the water turtling and swallows skimming.
On this the sky reflects as it has been for a very long time.

Desiccated nomenclature – dry mud of the stubbly field,
We have been to this harvest before and see
The blown wrappers stuck on barbed wire, shirt scraps, one shoe,
One refugee who left it dead,
Stuck in the mud like a note that says, “I am keeping track. I lose nothing” as
Everything in a flood is carried away and put someplace else.

The Gods of someplace else
As the woman elder,
The barefoot girl pregnant,
Her suitors still mumbling like a smoke screen on a distant hill.
Clearing the land, seeking compensation, she comes to the court, our elder,
Bedazzled in color, red, yellow.
Emblazoned as she heard it said,
Felt it sung as a hidden tattoo on the base of her tongue-
Still sore from talking, still waiting as the line forms.

This is more than money,
More than the number of stars and their ages.
Who is serious?
Show the soles of your shoes and your naked feet.
The raspy tumult builds but it might just be the hubbub of the land,
The humming of the muzzled crowd, but the call to prayer is real.

The muezzin spreads the lung of voice as a great bird might lift
From a minaret and cast shadows
As an eclipse might recover its past due from the fear of the people.
Dark in the daytime, the Spring portends the Winter.
The wheel of time suggests her suffering.
The words are the playing children, the now.
Take us up in your aeroplane.
Take us to the sea (see).
Be your guitar with wings of silver flying by the watery moon.
You tell. You too.

We believe all are free and on the wheel all must meet the path,
The road, the shelter the oblivion of portents in still standing trees that shudder.
In the stupid winds of matter,
In the gales of further shores,
In the dropping dust of her blinking eye and
All the sky filled with water of her deep seat and tears.

Sit by the waterfall
At the feet of the meeting rivers,
Blessed be they,
Fortunate in ways beyond the measures of barrel and drum
To know this shadow world is the night’s true call
To reckon with full extent, like a good sleep.

Like a good sleep.
To wake refreshed, green as early Spring with few shoots yet ruined and
The weeds still in their cavern as the earthworm loosens the soil.
To over come death, someone has to die.
Some ark full of twos and threes on the water sloshed.
The pontiff in yellow for the Holy day.
Our stage in red as the heart of one who died and
All of the singing mourners hold his invisible pendant close and
Clutch at losses like the lost keys and
The darkened box of the theater and stage- shuttered today for the holiday,
Ironically letting everyone off the hook.

The naked pope is an old man.
Jesus is in his thin loin above all,
Crucified like the sun, almost naked as a man,
As twilight before the day and
The cart of history comes
To change the scene and
Take us all away to today.
Our birth and those to come.

The straw left in the field.
The mice in the barn and the stubble on my chin
Is as to be let in to the mystery of death and her pale kingdoms of sin
Written in ink on a body so fair
That mother earth knew her cousin to be out walking at large –
Big as another earth to feed the manifold creatures of sea and air and land.

The humblest among us, as bacteria and fresh lava to cover up
As Venus with her radiant hair finds the cup of sea
At her lip and at her breast the falling cover of all nakedness proclaimed,
Nurtured, fed as the suckling pig led to slaughter
As the goat sacrificed by blood and his smoky roasted flesh
Making all simplistic psychology mute in the myth of her eternal, shared nature
And we feast.

Such is the dying breed.
So goes the hand out as fortunate and less fortunate trade places
So the richness and hard won gain
Can be sent into the sky like fire works or out to the streets
As the itinerant with her bowl
And the householder signal of virtue reassures her children who see
Mother going door to door for their virtue and like a stick,
They feel that they have to believe in salvation,
In virtue, in goodness as the abstract of their hungry bellies and
The harm done.

Cast not about for stones as the temple thins in the wind and as mere paper
When we are through, thin and translucent as the original,
Able to die and become nothing.