Sometimes I can fall asleep floating on my back, you know,
If I really try. And if the sun and the coolness of the water balance just right,
I might even be with my brother.
On the nights when I feel most awake, I dance with Deborah
Down at the city square.
She saved a boy who almost drowned in Lake Wananaca last spring.
She told me that he couldn’t lift his head up off of the pillow
Until she finished wiping away his tears,
And made sure that he didn’t come down with pneumonia.
We would dance in our plaids like near-colliding, mating birds
And forget about some things on the more popular nights,
But reminisce about others when there were only a few other
Sweethearts on the dance floor.
First Sergeant in Vietnam told me my kid brother had died back home –
Didn’t look where he was diving and broke himself.
Said that he lost a lot of blood, near dyed the shore red, in a comical voice
I couldn’t do anything where I was, in that heavy jungle,
I couldn’t get him back to the surface.
I rent out canoes and kayaks for $5.50 an hour,
If you’re a student I’ll give you a discount, but you must provide a valid ID.
No one’s going to come to the lake today.
Anything too strenuous on a day like this, what with the fog and the kind cold,
Is best left undone.
I get aboard my favorite canoe: a rich green one with a violet border.
The name Josephine Sprints in light blue paint flaking at the stern.
If someone could see me, maybe I wouldn’t be so odd,
Floating on what should be water to the eye, but I can only see my fog,
I see my brother again.
He never got beyond the doggy paddle when he was alive,
But he now knows how to float on his back, like me.
Our fingers almost touch, the wind pushing us in a race with itself,
But we never get too close, which is fine.
The thought of me getting back into my boat and leaving him alone,
It makes me stay.
Plenty of people, lined like mushrooms
along the booths, learning about Africa’s poor
and the dwindling seriousness of live comedy
from young faces like their own, like my own.
I want to get involved, and need to spend my day
Doing these things that make a night worthwhile.
So I stand and rotate in the parking lot where booths are parked
And make a day out of planning to make more of my days.
I run into someone I remember from yesterday,
a kind woman with buried, trilobite pupils
and she notices how I stand among peers,
and shake with every breeze from incoming Fall,
like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree –
sloped and with a big, red ornament branching from
the tiniest of frames. I try to smile for real, she walks away.
But as I look to my left I notice a group of three men
dressed in the traditional Islamic garb, no beards but one,
on the face of someone that I remember from four years ago.
He dressed up in a tight red dress and high heels one high school day,
saying hello to me near the dark-red lockers with a giggle and wave.
He beat-boxed, a white dude in a mostly black, public, inner-city school.
With a minute in the shade I could discern a hard life outlook on life,
But not too glaringly one-sided like a capsizing ship.
He plans his day around prayer, something I can’t guess at,
And the clothes and customs are buried under a youth
That is likened to the Dark Ages.
He is not of the Homecoming spirit week.
Now, still with a few crumbs of crust between my teeth from lunch,
I try to smile for real, but the new, Islamic version of the guy I knew
is serious now, even though he points at me,
as if I were a joke.
A Greek god that makes non-harp music
And wings the dust, breaks the electricity
Of the day into cement bits
Like a prehistoric firework.
With an animal’s speed, this god is
Wrapped in antique tufts of flight.
Let the message be delivered,
Held dearly like a clay cuneiform or a stiffened parchment tube,
Because this god does not warrant a saga
Or a history of his own.
Put to the test, against a new age of wires and illuminated threads,
Thrust from the egg and mythology against a silicon backdrop,
This well-winged god does not make himself seen as inferior.
He grips the air,
Making a message concerning death seem light
And the life of a God seem so deathly routine.
This messenger is quicker than the processing wires;
The wires that often fray and split at the flick of an antediluvian wing.
From “Carrier pigeon beats South Africa’s Telkom in data transfer race” Earth Times September 2009
In rainbow robes, stained wife-beaters, and the Western pale shirt and tie,
Spindly Ghanaian salesmen of all sorts.
Fuzzy shaved heads coming into contact with my bony shoulders
If I happen to make one ill-laid step.
Mothers with children hanging like howlers on their backs,
Secured by a mile of cloth, lined in golden, flattened grapes,
They walk assuredly, necks craned, balancing ridiculous bowls
Atop their small, magpie-black heads.
The open sewers are waiting to devour a reckless tire,
One or two that happen to wander too close to the paved, red clay edge of the street.
I must keep walking, I feel strangers breathe on my neck, brush my shoulder,
Grab my arm because of my white skin, which means money, and I know that
The mother in front of me must feel her child’s face being pelted by my Bruni breath,
which must smell of palm-oil fried plantains and yams – last night’s dinner.
A pastor shouts sermons from a loudspeaker on a sidewalk.
He’s advertising himself.
I block out his voice with my fingers.
From one of my Summer 2009 experiences in Kumasi, Ghana
A world heavyweight and his deadpan
Jowls limp and unheightened by the tears
That now stain the waistline hem of his shirt
The old faces that he does not remember
From a time and country that was meant to remain as home
But is not as profitable to him now
It is not where he will lace his boots
And walk comfortably during the night
When the quick, artificial head-bobs of the lizards
Can been seen upon the shower curtained sidewalks
He, a teenager, likens the reunion to an aged and dust-bunnied photo album,
Quietly certain that the moments and awkward stances in the photos
Took place at a time of relevance,
But not sure at all as to the circumstance of the photo
or if he wanted to smile or not
but still smiling, even when he knew that he would be standing
among familiar strangers
CNN 08/30/09 “A child’s reunion in China”
The zombie menace
The extinction of the human race not by winged battalions
But by the salivating, dim-witted, brain-hungry who
But know nothing of their whereabouts,
With their outstretched arms searching for goose pimpled flesh to gnaw upon
With their marbled teeth
I can sense the danger, but I’m not an epidemiologist
I enjoy a theory, but my comfort lies in facts
And the heart within me beats with red blood
And not coagulate, like the lump who stared at me
Through my window last night before smashing his head
Through it, severing my desk lamp’s neck with his body
They’ve got more interesting things to do in Canada, these epidemiologists,
They’ve got ice hockey, and Alex Trebek, and several other exports
And they’ve got the zombie menace down to the last worm in the last eye socket
And they know where to look when the moans of the apocalypse begin
Doctors? They have viruses on call, no,
Doctors would be the obvious people to blame
Vincent Price was the last man on earth
Vincent Lombardi ruminated over the staleness of the mind
We have sat through horror flicks and the Super Bowl and
We have just now noticed their unifying message:
To survive, to win – the only thing that we’ve got to do is
To hit ‘em hard, and hit ‘em again and again
BBC World News 08/18/09 “Science ponders ‘zombie attack’”
From: “Last Titanic Survivor Dies at 97″(Los Angeles Times, June 2009)
You hold your head like a dead flower
or dying, not yet dead, because you aren’t done dying
and your death toll is not at all finished.
You think it is,
but it’s not.
The desert is still your responsibility, and you are not
keeping it clean
You laugh like a God, watching your ants spill from their
homes never to return
Because they don’t want to return to the hills that you have
sprayed with weed killer and dish soap
A poison that doesn’t hold any remnants of their ancestry
or their childhood – their games of Whee and Anashel
their sweet mother’s sweet cooking and the happy tears
that were shared – these are obliterated by your RPGs
and the Janjaweed welcomes you with open arms
and safety-stilled friendly firearms and they want you to embrace them
because you and they are one in the new goal
in which the best doesn’t matter
From: “Sudan’s President Omar Al-Bashir denies war crimes allegations“ (The Australian, May 2009)
If I could only touch you in some way
And the ways in which you would feel
Would make me there
At your side in the make of completely uncommon particles
I would not be made of the cells which pulse and reproduce
But of the photons which emit from your safety light at night
Or your reading light that provides you with just the right amount of aid
And I want to see your face as you smile
That the light triggers your smile, I am provoked to smile as well
And the light will continue to envelop you
Not too bright, not too dim, suiting your mood
My particular blanket will not warm you, I’m afraid
Nor will it keep out the monsters
Well, maybe it will scare those who are like children
And most adults, who are afraid of the dark
And return their hides to the closet floor
The light that we will be emitting together will remain
For as long as you want to keep me on
For as long as the two of us need to be together
Until I can be made of more than the photons which we always see
Lit staunchly in the dark
Until I can feel you with my hands, and not with my rays and beams
I’ll be sure to light up your bedded life
From: “Couples to test ‘intimacy’ device” (BBC News, April 2009)
