Musicians in the House

/ Salvatore Ala / Leave a comment

Fill the air with music and talk,
A little wine and later, Bach.

Lulls punctuated by counterpoint
Are their own musical midpoint.

It is like love at prima vista,
Music my first and ever lingua.

I listen to their close voicing
Without myself at all digressing

Into the old man, the angry man,
The bitter and forgotten sideman.

Listening cries angels in my ears
And piano runs melt my fears

And the trumpet my daughter plays
Distills the light with moon rays

And the changes they are blowing
Are the real future we are sowing.

Ode to the Sun

/ Salvatore Ala / Leave a comment

What doubles our existence
But your solar entanglement.
What is awash with astonishment,
What cages the minutes
But your solar entanglement.

What seeds snow with light,
Where are the shores of distance,
What sounds out the silence of blue,
What pours unrecompensed
But your solar entanglement.

What sows stardust into bone,
What is the source of an endless hour,
What swims in amethyst,
What is the origin of all origins
But your solar entanglement.

What sculpts mountain shadows,
What writes with the ink of night,
What shines on our beds,
What opens all windows on the sea
But your solar entanglement.

What bleeds fire on mist,
What dies ensanguining the sky.
What is the light in the grave,
What buries poetry in the earth
But your solar entanglement.

When I see my love is hurt…

/ Salvatore Ala / Leave a comment

When I see my love is hurt
I want to blame myself for everything.
I want to tear down a jail
And build one that might hold me.
I want to set fire to the air
And drag bureaucrats by the hair.
I want to castrate misogynists
And feed their bits to hypocrites.
I want to hammer nails into water
And keep the current of my rage in place.
I want to hold that rage
In my hands like volcanic lava,
Like venomous snakes
I could hurl in their faces,
Like bombs of enlightenment
That explode at indictment.
When I see my love is hurt
I want to blame myself for everything.
I want to tear down a jail
And build one that might hold me.
I want to kiss her pain until I bleed.
I want to bring down the envious
With a gun made from a powerful book
And the curses of my most hateful look,
When I see my love is hurt.

Let the Slow Boy Speak

/ Salvatore Ala / Leave a comment

Let the slow boy speak
Said the teachers who hadn’t caught up to me.
Let him read his slow poems
That have already passed by us unheard.
Let the left-handed boy try
The nuns said, who struggled to correct me.
Let the immigrant boy sing between languages,
Teaching the shared meanings
Of his third language.
Burn up your degrees, you academic poets,
The slow boy with a barber’s razor
Cuts you with a single pass.
Throw out your papers, city intellects,
The boy from provincial Sicily
Sings like a stab wound to the sun,
The boy from a foreign place
Sings with native grace.

Climate Change Zoology & Cryptozoology

/ Salvatore Ala / 2 Comments

Climate Change Zoology

Dead elephants crumble like cubist mud.
Staghorn coral or antlers of a massive cull.
The last albatrosses rime like ancient mariners.
Tigers pace back and forth in cages of extinction.
Acoustic fossils croak, wetlands grow silent.
Mountain gorillas roar out our expiry
But we lack primal understanding.
Sea turtles bury eggs in books of quicksand.
Salmon suffocate in homeless waters.
Polar bears leap into the abyss like idiot men.
Whales breach from their blood with a groan.
Never have so many animals boarded
The ark of the sun with all their riches
Of honey and manna lost to the world.
Nature’s lease on capital is insolvent.

Cryptozoology

Our research points to terrifying conclusions,
Cryptids don’t exist, but we believe in them.
We spawn marine reptiles in our minds.
We descend like Andean wolves, into lower forests.
It might as well be that skunk-ape migrants
Of global warming indicate degrees in theology.
It might as well be that being is bizarre,
Monsters of the lector unsolved in the sermon.
It might as well be that Chupacabra
Are devil dogs stirring the furnace of souls.
Perhaps a pharmaceutical apocalypse
Creates the condition for a mutant menagerie.
All we can say beyond a reasonable doubt:
They are the varmint of the malcontent
Who have peopled else and are on the move.

Ambassador Bridge

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Spectral bridge over untroubled waters,
Another river under mirrors of light.
Rain floods the banks with shadows
And the bridge suspends the night.
A few hours longer into summer now
I walk along the Canadian shore–
America a thousand miles away.
Freedom doesn’t cross the bridge.
It is a causeway into economies
And politics polluted from the start.
Spectral bridge over untroubled waters.
It’s those untroubled waters–
That bridge-less flowing of unknowing–
That river of apathy and death
All cross like those without a country.

Musical Ruins

/ Salvatore Ala / Leave a comment

Listen, you can hear the walls
Collapse base lines of brick and mortar.
You can hear electric wires
Playing last solos of Woodstock light.
Piano keys compose dust into rows
Of musical crescendo and demolition.
Cellos moan like shuddering lumber,
Violins cry panes of splintering glass,
The acoustics rebound into emptiness,
Hours upon hours of practice
Keep tempo now with wind and space
And the young singer I once heard
In full voice behind a closed door,
Shakes like a tree and won’t give way.