You table up as if no culture speaks your air but truth
And truth always implies suffering of someone,
But it isn’t so.

The blood flows in the veins and settles with gravity
Like the low spots that pool in the blotches of your emotional life,
Coloring the skin like irrigation patterns seen from an airplane on the land.

Your precious dream of arrival and destiny, still virginal,
Parents of smut though we are,
Corn smut, fungus hunger spread below the ground
Decomposing all manner of filth we might feel,
Liberated from guilt,
Separated from mother earth on her hands and knees,
A pail of grey water by her bed,
Too many brought forth at once to feed.
This is no apocalypse but the daily life,
The banality in the end of the world.

She oiled her hopes just like me.
Took the necessary steps and practiced with the math and scales and music of it all.
The right word, the perfect note in time of need
For lamb and lion talking long distance of their mutual interests and a way forward,
Given a sense of urgency.

A mirror is not what the prophets promised.
A long road in the sand,
Blowing over all that wander but do not stray.
Craft work of a humble and saintly heart, holding out.
Of course in the desert, some starve.
The ones we most need are dying.
Take the salt from your seas,
Stop up eyes reigning with the sympathy and tears,
Ruling the guns with the scepter of love.
It is not quite that way and
Your feeling better is not food and water,
Not even the deeper fast of stars and dreams.

To stage the harmony of tragedy, one needs a company.
All souls round about the fire.
The seraphim and angels on the horns of the air.
The ship bellow in the Suez Canal, in its hold a half a million barrels.
In its gold, all the desert could ever wish for,
In its lines, your personal liberation,
A manifesto for new ages that line up like ships at anchor
Waiting for the port that can lift their load.

Share your neighbor, your greasy rhetoric of lingua franca,
The ideology of me hiding in everyone,
For everyone a promissory note,
A half clean ticket stub for no re-entry,
For us each to be done with each other
In high hosanna and efficient street crews.

It is in the planning where parts can be prepared and memorized.
In the offing, that my feeling can be yours,
Your feeling mine – in mutuality of never actually touching each other.

The meeting of the minds pays a discreet currency
As the twirling skirts of Spanish dancers
Loving the dark contrast of Sufi mystics all fit white
Spinning with God herself mumbling the ancient kabala
Of songs that bring rain and resolution
Like children who grow from our worries into something else,
Something better that they can make with their friends.